nathanielmrouth

[nathanielmrouth]

An Unpleasant Truth

Human bodies don’t exist to be healthy. Human bodies exist to create more human bodies. Human bodies keep themselves alive only for the purpose to creating more human bodies, and that grudgingly. It often seems as though human bodies would just as soon collapse and die rather than stay alive for another heartbeat. I’ve spent a lot of time around sick old people the last few years, so perhaps that…

[nathanielmrouth]

Apes, Angels, and Apocalypses

Arthur C. Clarke once argued that if we find intelligent aliens, they will be (comparable to) apes or angels, but not humans. What he means by this is that alien intelligences are likely to be either pre-technological or far beyond us in technology; the odds of meeting a civilization that is roughly peer-level to us is extremely low. The logic behind this is undeniable. Anatomically modern…

[nathanielmrouth]

Scattered Thoughts on Individualism in the Future

This is going to be a wholly inadequate post for the topic, but I want to get at least some of my thoughts written down before my attention fully moves on. I anticipate returning to this topic and expanding upon it properly at a later date. I suspect some of the tension around communitarianism versus atomized individualism stems from these modes of social organization being more adaptive to…

[nathanielmrouth]

Planetary Defense Update: Nothing Ever Happens Edition

Last month, I wrote briefly about the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4. At that time, astronomers estimated that there was a 1.6% chance the asteroid would hit Earth in 2032. In the four weeks since, the odds rose to 3.1%, before sharply falling off. The impact probability is now estimated at 0.00076%. This is essentially what we expected, because it’s happened with other potentially-hazardous…

[nathanielmrouth]

Planetary Defense Update: Here's How SMOD Can Still Win

Astronomers recently discovered a small asteroid which is currently estimated to have a 1-in-63 chance of hitting Earth on 22 December 2032. International Asteroid Warning Network, a UN-sanctioned collaboration coordinated by NASA, issued an official warning yesterday due to this object exceeding its 1% threshold for objects greater than 10 meters. The asteroid, which currently sports only the…

[nathanielmrouth]

A Year's End Exhortation

President Carter’s death over the weekend was just the latest in a long string of bad news, both personal and global, for me this year. Carter became an unusually popular ex-President during his long retirement, and I developed a sentimental affinity for him after the Presidential biography book report back in elementary school. I suppose his death wasn’t particularly bad, as death go, but I…

[nathanielmrouth]

Checked Out

I finally bucked my addiction to the Website Formerly Known As Twitter a couple of months ago. I got into an argument with one of the only friends still using the site right before a couple days of travel, and just never bothered to pick up the thread again. I’ve checked a couple of specific accounts, especially in the immediate aftermath of the election, but scrolling my feed daily isn’t…

[nathanielmrouth]

Once again, by the time ze little grey cells had come up with something interesting to discuss, life events intervened. I believe things are finally calming down and I may be able to resume more regular writing before the end of the year, but my choice of theme remains remarkably apt.

[nathanielmrouth]

Nothing To Write (That I Can Write Right)

I could write something somewhere else, but not something for here, because my standards are different. I’ve been dying for a vacation for well over a year and I’m no closer to getting one, so if the parts of my brain that can put words together aren’t working right now, then I don’t have capacity in reserve to force them to work. That’s not to say I have nothing to say. My brain is positively…

[nathanielmrouth]

Introversion and Third Spaces

I was originally planning to do a larger post around some of the structural factors contributing to the loneliness epidemic and the decline of third spaces in America, but I’m realizing that that’s a bit too ambitious. Let’s look instead at one particular aspect of the problem that I don’t see discussed a whole lot, and maybe we can revisit some of the other factors in the future. This thought…

[nathanielmrouth]

A Few Ways Housing Costs May Impact Fertility

Last month I argued that Housing Costs Probably Impact Fertility. I didn’t really get into the probably mechanisms behind such a relationship, but one of my friends expressed some curiosity around the subject. This post attempts to explore some of the ways these phenomena are probably related. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone of the economic concept of marginalism. When discussing…

[nathanielmrouth]

Housing Costs Probably Impact Fertility

This post was going around the Website Formerly Known As Twitter a few months ago: The patterns of states for housing costs and fertility rates are strong enough to be noticeable, which is why it got shared around. Looking at a map wasn’t quite good enough for me, though, so I downloaded the CDC’s Fertility Rate by State data and plotted it against National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2020…

[nathanielmrouth]

Trying

I was going to write a post about the idea of trying, because I remember when I learned how to try, and have been wondering if I’m really trying now. I’ve also looked at various events, both public and private, that prompted me to wonder if people were really trying, or just making a show of trying. I remembered there were some posts about the idea of trying in the Sequences, and decided to look…

[nathanielmrouth]

There are many things I’ve been thinking about, but I think I’ve overextended myself since returning to Houston and don’t feel up to adequately writing about any of them. Right now, I don’t really have much capacity to spare.

[nathanielmrouth]

Fine, I guess I'm an Air Quality Guy™ now

I had a lot of predispositions to become an Air Quality Guy™, so it was likely just a matter of time till I ended up here. The main driver, as for most of us, was trying to figure out how to avoid spreading COVID-19 virions, but you could trace it all the way back to doing research for the CO2/VOC sensor in Instrumentation Lab senior year. I wasn’t in any of the cities that got truly blanketed in…

[nathanielmrouth]

The Time We Have Is Rarely Ever Enough

Not quite two years ago, I wrote Cautiously In Favor Local Optima and The Time We Have to discuss the question of how we live our lives. Well, a life very dear to me has just ended, a long time before I would have remotely guessed when I wrote those posts. I thought I’d have decades, but instead I got a few difficult months. We have to chose what to do with the time we have, and it’s very…

[nathanielmrouth]

The Theme Is That There Isn't One

For the past several years, I’ve been trying to do annual themes. In principle, this a good concept, but in practice the results have been less than impressive. The idea of an annual theme is to illuminate choices, to help you make decisions on the margin or to notice options you otherwise might have overlooked. Stated this way, it becomes clear that themes are about exercising agency. No…