modernized maxim

There is no sustainably free lunch, i.e. all net surprisal extracts a cost in thermodynamic availability.

What's new here is that:

• we've added sustainably, since in the short run free lunches can be obtained from time to time but not in a steady-state fashion,

• thermodynamic availability (e.g. in bits) and net surprisal (KL-divergence) are used to restate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in way which applies nicely to complex non-equilibrium systems,

• and what else?

starsmoke droplets

Tiny interstellar-onion spaceships were filled with unlayered sheets of fresh-baked carbon atoms & delivered to our corner of the Milky Way.

This tasty tweet refers to recent laboratory study of micron-sized starsmoke spheres whose carbon atoms were cooked up in red giant stars across the early galaxy, condensed in those cool star atmospheres, and delivered to earth by primitive meteorites to be extracted by cosmochemists at U. Chicago and studied in labs of the midwest.

Many of your carbon atoms also arrived here in spaceships like this. Recent developments suggest a role for supercooled liquid carbon droplets in their process of formation.

closing the loop

Charity like first-aid can meet short-term needs, but strategic no-profit loans may be key to sustainability at home and abroad.

it's easy for cats

Most metazoans buffer correlations directed in/out from skin and gene-pool boundaries. Worrying about idea-pool boundaries too is not easy, even for organisms as talented as us!

expensive sci-fi

The "jump to lightspeed" might empty your gas tank quick, given that >40 Olympic pools of powder are needed to make a 45 slug relativistic.

survival symmetry

Ice floats so that aqueous life on our planet survives freezing water, thanks to the quantum preference of H2O molecules for 4 neighbors.

scientific cool

Is there objective value to the vernacular assertion that human communities are somehow "more cool" than communities of non-sentient metazoans, which are themselves somehow "spiffier" than communities of microbes alone? If so, a more scientific definition of the assertion's meaning might be needed for a start.

Imagine that "cool" in the vernacular applies to things that in some positive way show evidence of unexpectedness i.e. KL-divergence from ambient or correlation-surprisal in bits. These might include:

• a blank or low-noise canvas (e.g. provided by that new carpet or that freshly painted fence),
• smart engineering (e.g. found in that Mercedes-Benz or that new i-phone),
• informed/evolved connections (e.g. discovered at a school reunion or in a new job),
• and what else?

Other synonyms for cool which might be considered in this same context include:

• keen, nifty, rad, amazing,
• appealing, spiffy, neat,
• just right, fashionable, in sync,
• correlated, together, unflustered,
• less random, chilly, heat sink,
• and what else?

The simplest quantitative measure of coolness as unexpected harmony may be the surprisal of throwing N heads on the first toss of N coins. This is guess what: N bits! Other more familiar practical quantities that also show this quality of unexpectedness include:

• available work e.g. in the form of food and gasoline,
• the variety of species and number of niche-layers in a community,
• and what else?

This might be a good place to expand futher on what these important quantities have in common.