Why Hitler and Stalin Hated Esperanto, the 135-Year-Old Language of Peace

I do not know Esparanto but that does not matter.  What is good is that it is easy to learn and can be used to introduce language training itself if we ever get that right.

At present, for sound historical reasons our universal second language is English not least because of its massive legacy for scholarship.  Before that it was German by the by, then french and before all that it was Latin for centuries.

Universal education is now upon us.  All children are given foreign language training.  Perhaps all such training needs to be integrated with Esparato.  Then all pick up exparanto..

Thyis has the metrit of been external to ethnic baggage.

Why Hitler and Stalin Hated Esperanto, the 135-Year-Old Language of Peace

Jewish doctor L.L. Zamenhof created Esperanto as a way for diverse groups to easily communicate

Joshua Holzer, The ConversationJuly 26, 2022 7:00 a.m.

A meeting of the Soviet Republics’ Esperanto Union, held in Moscow in 1931 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-hitler-and-stalin-hated-esperanto-the-135-year-old-language-of-peace-180980472/

In the late 1800s, the city of Białystok—which was once Polish, then Prussian, then Russian and is today again part of Poland—was a hub of diversity, with large numbers of Poles, Germans, Russians and Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews. Each group spoke a different language and viewed members of the other communities with suspicion.

For years, L.L. Zamenhof—a Jewish man from Białystok who had trained as a doctor in Moscow—dreamed of a way for diverse groups of people to communicate easily and peacefully.

Report an ad

On July 26, 1887, he published what is now referred to as Unua Libro, or First Book, which introduced and described Esperanto, a language Zamenhof had spent years designing in hopes of promoting peace among the people of the world.

L.L. Zamenhof Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Esperanto’s vocabulary is mostly drawn from English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Polish, Russian and Yiddish, as these were the languages that Zamenhof was most familiar with. Grammatically, Esperanto was primarily influenced by European languages, but interestingly, some of Esperanto’s innovations bear a striking resemblance to features found in some Asian languages, such as Chinese.

Now, 135 years later, Europe is again riven by violence and tension, most notably the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is at least partially driven by a political debate about language differences. Unfortunately, conflicts over language are common around the world.

The promise of peace through a shared language has not yet caught on widely, but there are perhaps as many as two million Esperanto speakers worldwide. And the language is still spreading, if slowly.

A language for all

Having grown up in the multicultural but distrusting environment of Białystok, Zamenhof dedicated his life to constructing a language that he hoped could help foster harmony between groups. The goal wasn’t to replace anyone’s first language. Rather, Esperanto would serve as a universal second language that would help promote international understanding—and hopefully peace.

Esperanto is easy to learn. Nouns do not have a grammatical gender, so you never have to wonder whether a table is masculine or feminine. There are no irregular verbs, so you don’t have to memorize complex conjugation tables. Also, the spelling is entirely phonetic, so you’ll never be confused by silent letters or letters that make different sounds in different contexts.

In Unua Libro, Zamenhof outlined Esperanto’s 16 basic rules and provided a dictionary. This book was translated into more than a dozen languages; at the beginning of each edition, Zamenhof permanently renounced all personal rights to his creation and declared Esperanto to be “the property of society.”

Soon, Esperanto spread to Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Starting in 1905, Esperanto speakers from around the world began gathering once a year to participate in the World Esperanto Congress, where they celebrated—and used—the language.

Between 1907 and his death in 1917, Zamenhof received 14 nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, though he never won the award.

Continuing Zamenhof’s work, the Universal Esperanto Association, an organization that seeks to encourage relations among people through the use of Esperanto, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize more than 100 times in recognition of its “contribution to world peace by permitting people in different countries to enter direct relations without linguistic barriers.” So far, it has never won the award.

Struggles and successes

After World War I, the League of Nations—the predecessor to the United Nations—was founded in hopes of preventing future conflict. Shortly thereafter, the Iranian delegate to the League of Nations proposed that Esperanto be adopted as the language of international relations.

This proposal was vetoed by the French delegate, who feared that the French language would lose its position of prestige in diplomacy. In 1922, the French government went a step further and banned the teaching of Esperanto at all French universities for supposedly being a tool to spread communist propaganda.

Ironically, life behind the Iron Curtain wasn’t much easier for Esperanto speakers. In the Soviet Union, Esperantists were alleged to be part of an “international espionage organization.” Many were persecuted and later perished during dictator Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge.

\

Lidia Zamenhof (left) was murdered during the Holocaust. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

According to Nazi Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, Esperanto was evidence of a Jewish plot to take over the world. Under the Third Reich, the Gestapo received specific orders to search for the descendants of Zamenhof. All three of his children died in the Holocaust, as did many Esperanto speakers.

Despite such events, in 1954, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (better known as Unesco) passed a resolution recognizing—and entering into a relationship with—the Universal Esperanto Association. The resolution opened the door for the Esperanto movement to be represented at Unesco events pertaining to language.

In 1985, Unesco passed a resolution encouraging countries to add Esperanto to their school curricula. For years, China has offered Esperanto as a foreign language option at several of its universities, one of which houses an Esperanto museum. A program in interlinguistics offered at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland is actually taught in Esperanto.

More recently, Unesco declared 2017 the year of Zamenhof, and since then, its flagship journal, the Unesco Courier, has had an Esperanto-language edition published quarterly.

Give peace a chance

Today, Esperanto is spoken by pockets of enthusiasts all around the world, including on Antarctica. A wide array of free Esperanto resources are available online, including Duolingo, lernu!, the Complete Illustrated Dictionary of Esperanto, the Complete Manual of Esperanto Grammar and Google Translate.

Esperanto also has its own edition of Wikipedia, which, at present, contains more entries than the Danish, Greek and Welsh editions of Wikipedia.

In Esperanto, the word “Esperanto” means “one who hopes.” Some may argue that it is idealistic to believe that Esperanto could unite humanity, especially in the midst of another major war.

But even the most violent wars don’t end without peace talks, which often require translators to interpret the languages of the opposing parties. Zamenhof wondered whether violence itself might be less common if a neutral language could help people bridge their divides.

Joshua Holzer has a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, an M.A. from the University of Southern California, another M.A. from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and a B.A. from the University of Denver. He is a five-year veteran of the U.S. Army.

Laser PB11 Fusion Yield Increased 40 Fold

​We are getting more data on hydrgen boron fusi0on reactions while we wait for Focu fusion to make the transition.  I really want to see seriously big attempted here.  The real problem will likely be casting the size required to hopefully make it much easier.

\

however converting the present config to hydrogen boron also looks logical.  Yet i would like to see the budgets for those large anodes.  Perhaps we can have both.

Understand that Focus Fusion gives us direct power takeoff and is not a heat engine.  That is huge in order to power a Star Ship.

Laser PB11 Fusion Yield Increased 40 Fold

Laser PB11 Fusion Yield Increased 40 Fold

July 25, 2022 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/07/laser-pb11-fusion-yield-increased-40-fold.html#more-176697

There are three main types of nuclear fusion and PB11 (hydrogen-boron) is the most desired. PB11 nuclear fusion would have almost no neutron radiation but it takes 1 billion degree temperatures instead of 100 million for deuterium tritium or about 500 million for deuteriurm-deuterium.

The PALS laser facility in Prague has reported a major advance in hydrogen-boron (pB11) fusion. January, 2022 in Physical Review E article reported a 40-fold increase in fusion yield over previous experiments at the same facility in 2014. Researchers hit a target of boron nitride with some embedded hydrogen with a 2 TW burst of infrared laser radiation, focused down to an 80-micron spot. The 40-fold increase in fusion yield was simply by making the target thicker. The advance is both a step forward for hydrogen-boron fusion, which has the potential to provide cheap, totally clean energy, and an example of the sort of leaps that can occur in fusion research.

High-current stream of energetic α particles from laser-driven proton-boron fusion ABSTRACT

The nuclear reaction known as proton-boron fusion has been triggered by a subnanosecond laser system focused onto a thick boron nitride target at modest laser intensity (∼10^16 watts per square centimeter), resulting in a record yield of generated α particles. The estimated value of α particles emitted per laser pulse is around 100 billion thus orders of magnitude higher than any other experimental result previously reported. The accelerated α-particle stream shows unique features in terms of kinetic energy (up to 10 MeV), pulse duration (∼10 ns), and peak current (∼2 Amps) at 1 meter from the source, promising potential applications of such neutronless nuclear fusion reactions. They have used a beam-driven fusion scheme to explain the total number of α particles generated in the nuclear reaction. In this model, protons accelerated inside the plasma, moving forward into the bulk of the target, can interact with 11B atoms, thus efficiently triggering fusion reactions. An overview of literature results obtained with different laser parameters, experimental setups, and target compositions is reported and discussed.

The iodine laser at PALS needs 1.2 MJ input to produce a 600 J laser pulse. The fusion output from the latest experiment was 0.06 J, so the critical ratio of output energy to input energy is still about 80 times less than that achieved by LPPFusion’s FF-1, using a much less reactive fuel, deuterium. To reach net energy, HB11 Energy, Marvel Energy, Focused Energy and Innoven will need larger fusion generators Focus Fusion LPP Fusion. However, all the fusion companies and fusion researchers are working to overcome these challenges.

Non-Perishable ‘Miracle’ Apples Grown by Elderly Man Reveals the Secret to Health

yikes.  It takes eight years to fully naturalize an orchard.  We needed to know this.  I really want to see broad hedge rows and the full abandonment of pesticides and chemical fertilizers.  And yes, it will be tough to justify for several years.

Yet we produce healthy cattle, fat seed grains and robust fruit.  Yet better, all the fruit and veggies do not need to be refrigerated and can be allowed to simply dry out slowly. wow.  Understand that we are not slicing them to do this.

I would far sooner have a sack of dried green beans or even carrots to work with as rehydration is simple;.

Non-Perishable ‘Miracle’ Apples Grown by Elderly Man Reveals the Secret to Health

JUNE 30, 2022 PRINT

Japanese nutritionist Tomoko Wakasugi doesn’t only enjoy longevity, but also has never seen a doctor.

Now in her 80, she has a full head of healthy hair and strong teeth, and she is able to give lectures all over Japan. Wakasugi grows her own vegetables year-round and is against eating inorganic produce grown with chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

She told her audience that if they don’t put organic fruits and vegetables into the refrigerator, even after they become dry and turn yellow, they will not easily decay. However, even if they put produce grown with chemical fertilizers into the refrigerator, it will take only a few days for them to start rotting. These fruits and vegetables not only have extremely weak vitality, but they also have extremely low nutrients. Furthermore, they may also contain pesticide toxins. Thus, even if you think you’re eating a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables, your food may be putting you at risk of cancer and other diseases.

A Japanese Grandfather Who Grows Non-Perishable Apples

Akinori Kimura has grown a special type of miracle apple, which doesn’t decay.

Since 1978, he has been experimenting with the natural apple cultivation method, with “no pesticides or chemical fertilizers.” It was not until eight years later that he saw the first results.

The apples he grew would not rot even two years after they were cut open, regardless where they were stored. These apples’ amazing vitality and deliciousness caused a sensation around the world. The United Nations even named his farming method after him.

From his story, we can see that organic food is a heavenly treasure, which signifies health and strong vitality.

People may not be able to imagine that apples generally need more than ten rounds of pesticide sprays in order to ripen.

Without the use of fertilizers or pesticides, it’s impossible for them to survive, let alone blossoming and yielding fruits. Eating such apples, who can imagine what changes will happen to our body? If we eat only vegetables grown with pesticides and chemical fertilizers without any precautions for a decade or several decades, will they cause cancer?

Then, why do we still plant apples this way? It is said that once we switch farming methods to incorporate chemical fertilizers and pesticides, it is difficult to go back to the original methods of farming.

Without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, it now becomes difficult for these crops to continue to survive, as they have lost their original immunity and vitality.

Since mother nature’s ecological food chain is broken, there are no more birds or insects to eat certain pests, which will now gnaw away vegetables and leaves. As people have destroyed our very orderly natural environment, we can rely on only pesticides to kill the pests nowadays.

In fact, many people have tried to grow apples naturally. Nevertheless, usually after four or five years, they all quit, because no one could persist with no income or no foreseeable hope.

Only Kimura, whose family ended up selling all their belongings, would not give up. He insisted on finding natural ecological methods to improve the soil quality, until the eighth year, when seven flowers blossomed.

And in the ninth year, his orchard was full of flowers and fruits, and his apple trees had become capable of healing themselves with a strong immune system.

This is how Kimura’s natural orchard was described in a news report:

“When people come to Kimura’s orchard, they see locusts hopping around, bees dancing, frogs singing at the top of their lungs, and rats and rabbits running around. They have to push away the weeds with their hands to get to the apple trees.

Why is this place in such a state? This is because without the use of pesticides, the ecosystem here has been restored to its original state. Since 1978, Kimura has not used a single drop of pesticide or a pinch of chemical fertilizer in this 8,800-square-meter orchard.”

That’s why he has grown apples that are full of happiness and don’t rot for two years.

“Usually, after an apple is cut open and left for a while, it soon turns brown and starts to rot. However, Kimura’s apples were cut in half and left for two years without rotting, only to shrink and become increasingly small as they withered. And they eventually turned into dried fruits with a light red color and a sweet aroma.”

Many people are shocked when they read this story, to find out that organic food is a wonderful medicine for us to have a long and healthy life, able to give us strong vitality and fundamentally fend off diseases for us. The inorganic vegetables that we eat on a daily basis are actually so harmful that they should not be something that we eat in the first place. It turns out that the ancients did not even need refrigerators.

Today’s Fruits and Vegetables Have Lost Their Original Flavors and Nutrients

People in their 40s and 50s probably all have an indescribable feeling that although their lives have become very convenient due to modern technological advancement, the natural taste of fruits and vegetables can no longer be found.

Many food items have become tasteless, and vegetables are bitter nowadays. Furthermore, people’s immunity is getting increasingly weak, with various modern diseases that require constant medication. Also, no matter how hard they try to prevent and control diseases, to exercise and to eat a lot of vegetables, cancers and other horrible diseases will still come knocking on their door.

Children nowadays also don’t like to eat vegetables. In order to make vegetables delicious, so their children eat more vegetables, mothers need to rack their brains when cooking. However, no matter how diligent they are at learning different recipes, they still cannot fundamentally change their children’s dietary habits. Despite knowing that too much consumption of junk foods is harmful, children love eating processed meat and snacks and drinking soft drinks. When the seasonal flu comes, their immune systems cannot defend against it.

Everyone is at their wits’ end, not realizing that the root cause is related to the inorganic fruits and vegetables that we consume. Children do not know the taste that fruits and vegetables should have, so their intake of nutrients from them is insufficient. As their bodies are not satisfied, they will look for snacks to fill this void. The more unhealthy food they eat, the worse their body gets, and the more snacks they want to eat, thus forming a vicious cycle.

In the modern health scare, no one has ever come to tell us that the taste of fruits and vegetables has changed, which means that they are no longer something that people should eat. They have instead become things that have no nutrients and contain toxins. If it were not for Kimura, who had grown a miracle, people might still be in a state of helplessness.

Eating Organic Vegetables Brought 2 Children Unexpected Changes

Ms. Bai, a lady residing in Japan, once met an 86-year-old grandmother who gave her some organic vegetables grown in her own fields. Although these vegetables were not good-looking, they were very weighty, with thick leaves. Ms. Bai brought them home and simply stir-fried them with oil and salt.

Surprisingly, her son, who had never enjoyed eating vegetables, actually ate them with great pleasure and asked his mom with a puzzled expression why he had never eaten such fresh and delicious vegetables before.

Like many people, Ms. Bai was not aware of the importance of organic fruits and vegetables, which are twice more expensive than inorganic ones. The average family simply does not take this seriously, as they don’t understand how harmful inorganic food is.

Since then, Ms. Bai has switched to organic vegetables, and her children now love eating vegetables. Furthermore, they’re no longer interested in snacks or soft drinks, so the switch to organic vegetables didn’t cause any financial burden to the family.

Both children’s health also improved significantly. In the past, whenever it was the flu season, they would have a fever and rest at home. Nowadays, come flu season, they are as healthy as usual. This signifies that eating organic fruits and vegetables with vitality will give our body a strong immune system.

Diabetes breakthrough restores insulin production using existing drug

This is really good news and hopefully finds its way quickly into clinical use. The usual covenants of course, but this drug is already safe enough and can be applied now just as soon as we see some confirmations.

Eliminating the bulk of type one diabetics would be wonderful.  Type Two is a dietary disease and it takes real work to fix all that.  Though I do think that vitimin therapy can help a lot as well.

I would really like to see all forms of diabetes off because those so trapped did not ever make that choice and they can see all around tghemselves those who are biolgically luckier..

Diabetes breakthrough restores insulin production using existing drug

By Michael Irving

July 24, 2022

A new study could help restore insulin production to the pancreas of patients with type 1 diabetes

https://newatlas.com/medical/diabetes-breakthrough-insulin-production-existing-drug/?

Australian scientists have demonstrated a new way to restore insulin production in pancreatic cells, using a drug that’s already approved for use in humans. The study could mark a major breakthrough towards new treatments for diabetes.

Blood glucose levels are managed by the hormone insulin, which is produced in beta cells in the pancreas. However, these cells begin to die off in patients with type 1 diabetes, resulting in little or no insulin production and a lifelong requirement for supplementary insulin shots to manage the disease.

In a new study, researchers from Monash University have identified a new way to restore insulin production in the pancreas. In lab experiments on pancreatic stem cells from donors with type 1 diabetes, the team was able to activate them to begin expressing insulin by exposing them to a drug compound known as GSK126.

Intriguingly, these progenitor cells don’t normally produce insulin, but the drug let them functionally step into the shoes of the beta cells that had stopped working. In principle, a single course of this kind of drug over a few days could replace the need for regular insulin shots in diabetics.

The team says that the new potential treatment has a few advantages over other techniques currently in use or under development. Pancreas transplants are effective, but subject to organ donor shortages and other complications like rejection. Other teams have converted skin cells into stem cells and used those to produce new beta cells, and although results have been promising in mice, immune-suppressing drugs need to be given to prevent rejection.

The new treatment would work much faster, within a matter of days, and without the need for surgery. But perhaps the biggest advantage is that GSK126 is already approved by the US FDA and elsewhere in the world as a treatment for cancer. Its safety profile is already being assessed in clinical trials, which could reduce hurdles down the road for its use against diabetes.

That said, the scientists caution that it is still very early days. These experiments were conducted on cells in culture – not even in animals yet – so there’s still plenty of work to do. Nevertheless, it remains an intriguing new possible tool.

"Before you get to patients, there are many issues to be resolved," said Dr Keith Al-Hasani, co-lead author of the study. "More work is required to define the properties of these cells and establish protocols to isolate and expand them. I would think therapy is pretty far away. However, this represents an important step along the way to devising a lasting treatment that might be applicable for all types of diabetes.”

The research was published in the journal Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy. The team describes the work in the video below.

Monash Diabetes research accelerates path to cure by pancreatic cell regeneration

Source: Monash University

This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something

Let us address this problem.  It is all because of TIME.  TIME exists one page at a time and our examples are tucking another page in in order to make it unknowable both backwards and forwards.

The whole problem goes away understanding TIME as a unique page.

Again we need to properly transition to a six operator symbolic logic that integrates TIME.

This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something

If knowledge isn’t justified true belief, what is it?

BY BRIAN GALLAGHER

NOVEMBER 17, 2016

https://nautil.us/this-simple-philosophical-puzzle-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-know-something-5470/?

In the 1960s, the American philosopher Edmund Gettier devised a thought experiment that has become known as a “Gettier case.” It shows that something’s “off” about the way we understand knowledge. This ordeal is called the “Gettier problem,” and 50 years later, philosophers are still arguing about it. Jennifer Nagel, a philosopher of mind at the University of Toronto, sums up its appeal. “The resilience of the Gettier problem,” she says, “suggests that it is difficult (if not impossible) to develop any explicit reductive theory of knowledge.”

What is knowledge? Well, thinkers for thousands of years had more or less taken one definition for granted: Knowledge is “justified true belief.” The reasoning seemed solid: Just believing something that happens to be true doesn’t necessarily make it knowledge. If your friend says to you that she knows what you ate last night (say it’s veggie pizza), and happens to be right after guessing, that doesn’t mean she knew. That was just a lucky guess—a mere true belief. Your friend would know, though, if she said veggie pizza because she saw you eat it—that’s the “justification” part. Your friend, in that case, would have good reason to believe you ate it.

The reason the Gettier problem is renowned is because Gettier showed, using little short stories, that this intuitive definition of knowledge was flawed. His 1963 paper, titled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” resembles an undergraduate assignment. It’s just three pages long. But that’s all Gettier needed to revolutionize his field, epistemology, the study of the theory of knowledge.

The “problem” in a Gettier problem emerges in little, unassuming vignettes. Gettier had his, and philosophers have since come up with variations of their own. Try this version, from the University of Birmingham philosopher Scott Sturgeon:

Suppose I burgle your house, find two bottles of Newcastle Brown in the kitchen, drink and replace them. You remember purchasing the ale and come to believe there will be two bottles waiting for you at home. Your belief is justified and true, but you do not know what’s going on.

Does it seem odd to say that you would know that there are two Newcastles in your fridge? Sure, you’re confident they’re there. But the only reason they’re there is because this burglar evidently had a change of heart. You, though, believe two are there because you put them there. You’re right that you’ve got beer in the fridge, and you’ve got good reason to believe they’d be there once you get back—but doesn’t your true and justified belief that you have two Newcastles waiting for you seem lucky somehow? After all, your belief is true only because the burglar replaced the beer. Can lucking into a true and justified belief be considered knowledge?

Consider another case, from the philosopher John Turri:

Mary enters the house and looks into the living room. A familiar appearance greets her from her husband’s chair. She thinks, “My husband is sitting in the living room,” and then walks into the den. But Mary misidentified the man in the chair. It’s not her husband, but his brother, whom she had no reason to think was even in the country. However, her husband was seated along the opposite wall of the living room, out of Mary’s sight, dozing in a different chair.

Again, the element of luck lurks. Does Mary know that her husband’s sitting in the living room? She believes he is, has justification, and is right. Yet the temptation, as with the Newcastles, is to say no. “The Gettier problem challenges us to diagnose why Gettier subjects don’t know,” Turri says. “Many assume surmounting the challenge will lead to the correct theory of knowledge. Some denounce or reject the challenge. But few are fully immune to its allure.”

So if knowledge isn’t justified true belief, what is it? At this point, a couple years after the 50th anniversary of the publication of Gettier’s puzzle, a bunch of philosophers and psychologists think trying to answer this question is silly and always has been. “It is presently fashionable to denigrate early research on the Gettier problem, either as an absurd attempt at something foolish to begin with, or (as though spilled ink were a species of spilled blood) as a tragic loss of philosophical effort,” says Allan Hazlett, a philosopher at the University of New Mexico. But Duncan Pritchard, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, disagrees. “Far from being a lost cause,” he says, it’s “in fact alive and kicking.”

Inspired by the Gettier problem, Pritchard has come up with own definition of knowledge. In a 2012 paper, he explains why you don’t know that there’s beer in the fridge, even though your belief is true and justified—which is what the traditional definition, “justified true belief,” failed to do.

The trick, Pritchard says, is first to notice that there are two distinct “master intuitions” about knowledge that seem to be two “faces” of a single intuition, but are not. These are the “anti-luck intuition” (your true belief, which Pritchard calls a “cognitive success,” can’t be lucky to be considered knowledge) and the “ability intuition” (your true belief has to be in some sense a product of your cognitive ability). (It’s worth noting that some have doubted whether probing intuitions, like Pritchard does, is useful. Nagel thinks it is: “Epistemic intuition is not infallible,” she wrote in a 2013 paper, published in Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, “but at present it looks reliable enough to continuing serving its traditional function of supplying us with valuable evidence about the nature of knowledge.”)

“What does it take to ensure that one’s cognitive success is not due to luck? Well, intuitively anyway, that it is the product of one’s cognitive ability,” Pritchard says. “Conversely, insofar as one’s cognitive success is the product of one’s cognitive ability, then again, intuitively one would expect it to thereby be immune to knowledge-undermining luck.” But this, he says, is a flawed way to think about it. Consider this Gettier case, about a fellow named “Temp,” to see why:

Temp forms his beliefs about the temperature in the room by consulting a thermometer. His beliefs, so formed, are highly reliable, in that any belief he forms on this basis will always be correct. Moreover, he has no reason for thinking that there is anything amiss with this thermometer. But the thermometer is in fact broken, and is fluctuating randomly within a given range. Unbeknownst to Temp, there is an agent hidden in the room who is in control of the thermostat whose job it is to ensure that every time Temp consults the thermometer the “reading” on the thermometer corresponds to the temperature in the room.

Temp’s true belief in the current temperature isn’t lucky—he’s getting it right because someone is deliberately giving him the right temperature every time he takes a look. As Pritchard puts it, “What is wrong with Temp’s beliefs is that they exhibit the wrong direction of fit with the facts, for while his beliefs formed on this basis are guaranteed to be true, their correctness has nothing to do with Temp’s abilities and everything to do with some feature external to his cognitive agency.” In other words, as he goes on to say, “While [Temp’s] cognitive success is not the product of his cognitive ability, that’s not because it’s simply a matter of luck.”

So the way to have knowledge, Pritchard concludes, is have your relevant cognitive abilities produce a belief that’s not only true and creditable to your agency, but also safe. By “safe,” Pritchard means that your belief couldn’t have easily been false. Temp’s belief, for instance, is safe—there’s a hidden guy guaranteeing he’ll believe the correct temperature each time he checks. (If you’re thinking to yourself, “But the hidden guy could easily decide to give Temp the wrong temperature,” just imagine it’s not a hidden guy but a hidden machine programmed to always make the thermometer show the correct temperature.) But your belief that there’s beer in the fridge, and Mary’s belief that her husband’s sitting in the living room, aren’t safe, because the burglar could’ve easily not replaced the beer, and Mary’s husband could’ve easily been in another room.

To make this easier to picture, Pritchard invites us to think of a cognitive success, like a true belief, in the same way that we think of success in, say, archery. Knowledge is an achievement just like hitting the bull’s-eye all on your own is an achievement: You did it and it wasn’t just luck. Here’s what Pritchard says:

Achievements clearly involve success, but an archer who hits a target while lacking any relevant abilities has not exhibited an achievement even despite her success. Moreover, it is also vital that the archer’s success should be because of the exercise of her relevant abilities. A skillful archer who fires at a target but who is only successful at hitting that target because of a fortuitous series of gusts of wind does not exhibit an achievement, even though she is successful and also possesses the relevant abilities (this would be a kind of Gettier-style case). What is required, then, is a success that is best explained in terms of the exercise of the agent’s abilities—i.e. a success that is because of one’s ability—and this is what is lacking in this case.

Success isn’t an achievement unless you did it on your own, in other words. The same goes for true belief—it’s not knowledge unless you yourself are responsible for getting it right. (That isn’t to say that you have to find out everything yourself firsthand; otherwise the theory would rule out the possibility of gaining knowledge from books, for example).

You might be wondering what Gettier thinks of all this. It turns out, not much—or, if he does have an opinion, he hasn’t cared enough to share it. Indeed, he’s never published any other paper besides “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” and he turned 89 last month. To the question, “Why not?” he said, “I have nothing more to say.”

Earthgrid aims to re-wire the USA using super-cheap tunnel tech

Folks are finally getting serious about popcorning that rock face with heat.  Understand that the Bronze Age miners used air flow and hot burning oil within a form to do just this.  We actually have the pictures.

Clearly a bit of work needed.  The working head is obvious, but popcorn removal is also huge and is best done with strong air flow.  It will be broadly light enough and we can even screen out larger pieces for separate handling.

This is approaching large scale removal and tunnel size can easily go to even one hundred feet across before we are finished with this tech

Earthgrid aims to re-wire the USA using super-cheap tunnel tech

By Loz Blain

July 20, 2022

https://newatlas.com/energy/earthgrid-tunnel-boring-robot/

Earthgrid's plan is to put multiple plasma spallation cutters on rotating contactless boring robots

EarthGrid

VIEW 5 IMAGES

Bay Area startup Earthgrid says it's developing a plasma boring robot that can dig underground tunnels 100x faster and up to 98% cheaper than existing tech, and it plans to use it to start re-wiring America's energy, internet and utilities grids.

Most tunnels dug today are made by massive, mechanical rotary boring machines, which scratch cutting wheels against rock and evacuate the debris behind them, lining the tunnel walls as they go. It's painstakingly slow, hugely expensive, and the cutting heads and drill bits often need changing or maintenance.

But there's another way to get through the toughest rock – as we outlined in our January article about Petra's thermal drilling robot. Blasting rock with high temperatures can fracture and vaporize the stone in a process called spallation, and blasting this damaged rock with high pressures causes it to flake, chip and blow away.

You can do this without touching the rock walls at all, so the equipment can do entire tunnels without stopping if necessary. It can run entirely on electrical power, opening up the possibility of entirely emissions-free drilling, and both Petra and Earthgrid claim it's much, much faster and cheaper than doing things mechanically – to the point where previously unfeasible projects can become economically viable.

The contactless cutting discs have plasma torches mounted in a Fibonacci spiral pattern, such that they cover the entire area of the hole when the discs are rotated

EarthGrid

Earthgrid doesn't seem to be as far along as Petra – indeed, it's operating on pre-seed funding at the moment. But its intellectual property takes a spallation boring robot like Petra's to the next level, placing multiple 27,000 °C (48,600 °F) plasma torches onto large discs held out in front of a "Rapid Burrowing Robot (RBR)." The torches are arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, starting from the center and widening out until they cover the full diameter of the bore.

Where Petra's thermal drilling robot moves its head around to widen its hole, the RBR will fire on all torches at once, and rotate the torch-bearing discs to ensure full coverage, blasting the rock backward and collecting it into small pushcarts, each connected along the cable supplying electricity to the drill rig.

That cable will need to handle some serious juice. In estimations submitted as part of a patent, Earthgrid founder Troy Helming describes a potential embodiment of the concept using 72 plasma torches to drill a 1-meter (3.3-ft) bore. In its low-power state, with each torch consuming 500 kW, Helming estimates a total power draw of 40 megawatts. If you need to get cracking, the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW.

The Rapid Burrowing Robot (RBR) places many high-temp plasma torches on rotating discs

EarthGrid

That's for a hole you can barely crawl through; to triple the diameter and create a utility-sized tunnel you can comfortably walk through on a flat floor, you'd need to attach a larger "mother rig" behind the front rig. And if you wanted to move to a 10-m (33-ft) tunnel you could put a couple of lanes of traffic through, you'd need to attach another, even bigger "father rig" behind that.

The total power draw in a "stage 3" system like this could get as high as 1.38 gigawatts – but that's by no means the limit; upgrading the torches to higher power units would get the job done considerably faster, if an even more epic amount of electricity becomes available.

In a high-speed configuration, Earthgrid claims it can tunnel up to 1 km (0.62 miles) per day, which it says is up to 100 times faster than existing borers. For reference, Elon Musk's Boring Company has designed its porpoising Prufrock mechanical tunneling machine to do 0.24 km (0.15 miles) a day – although it says its medium-term goal is to get Prufrock up closer to 1.13 km (0.7 miles) per day. Mind you, on its debut, drilling a 3.2-km (2-mile) tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center, it managed just 15 m (49 ft) per day.

Pushcarts hold excavated material along the power supply line

EarthGrid

As to cost, well, Earthgrid says a low-cost configuration could come in at as little as US$300 per meter (3.3 ft) of tunnel. "We are so much less expensive," reads the company's website, "due to far lower operating costs (no need to change out drill bits & cutter heads multiple times daily, much lower energy consumption, robotics = far fewer workers, no drilling mud and/or drilling chemicals to dispose of, easier spoils removal, sale of our spoils for road & concrete manufacturing, etc.)"

The company says it'll either sell drilling as a service, or build, own, operate and maintain tunnels for customers looking for a long-term lease or toll arrangement. But it also hopes to put enough interlinking customer projects in place to create a subterranean network spanning the entire contiguous USA. If power cables of sufficient capacity were run through this network, renewable energy could potentially be distributed across the country, matching demand surges on the east coast with production surges on the west coast.

EarthGrid...the future of infrastructure

Earthgrid might look like a long-shot startup operating out of a warehouse next to a gym in Richmond, but founder Troy Helming has some form as an entrepreneur – at least, according to his own LinkedIn page. He founded and acted as CEO for Tradewind Energy, turned it into a billion-dollar "unicorn" and sold it – it would later become the #1 wind energy developer in the USA. He was then the founder and CEO of Pristine Sun, which developed small utility-scale and community-scale solar power plants, and he sold that at near-unicorn status as well with some US$750 million in projects.

He's also got some experience with the competition; he spent two years at Arcbyt before it was renamed Petra. And the gym next to the Earthgrid warehouse? He's Chairman of the Board there too, among a number of other projects.

Earthgrid is moving toward a seed funding round, and as such, not a ton of information is available on its current status. But in another LinkedIn post, Helming shared some progress news: the company has been "approved as a utility in New York, Florida, and Washington (state). We now have preferred and streamlined Rights of Way access for our tunnels in 12 states ... equipment is arriving in Richmond CA next month to start building our 1st multi-torch Tunnel Boring Robot ... We hope to be boring tunnels later this year for customer revenue ... We've moved back into our office and industrial R&D/testing/warehouse space in Richmond CA, and we're upgrading the power capacity to have >6,000 amps at 480 volts (lots of power)."

EarthGrid Tunnel Network Development Plan 2021 1080p v4

At this point, we have to acknowledge the bro-tastic tint to some of Earthgrid's current communications. "Imagine a robot with ten lightsabers on the front," says Helming in a promotional video, "kinda vaporizing through the rock and soil, and then a Mandalorian jetpack on the back blowing out little cornflake-sized bits of rock." The company's two business models are called BADASS (Boring and Drilling as a Simple Service) and BOOM (Build, Own, Operate & Maintain). Maybe VCs love this stuff, who knows?

We look forward to learning more about this project as it progresses. Check out a video below.

How Meditating with My Younger Self Changed Me

This is very good.  Recall a special moment from your childhood and make this your focus for meditation and allow yourself to commune with your other self.  All this closes the loop and make it all internal as well.

Keep up the traffic and see where this takes you.  We all need help in meditation and it will be much easier sharing the experience with someone who clearly loves you.

Could not resit that.

How Meditating with My Younger Self Changed Me

https://wakeup-world.com/2016/08/08/how-meditating-with-my-younger-self-changed-me/?

By Danielle Benvenuto

Guest writer for Wake Up World

A couple of years ago I began to dive head first into meditation. I found myself exploring a whole new world of possibilities, brought on by books I was reading and my own intuitive experience.

Of course, there are many ways to meditate and what works for one person will not work always for another. The process of learning how to meditate takes time, and that different experiences we go through will call for different techniques. It’s a game of trial and error. We find our way when we are open to what resonates best for our own unique personality and life experience.

That being said, I want to share with you a meditation technique that had a profound effect on my life: meditating with my younger self.

Inner Child Meditation

One sunny afternoon while meditating in my room, I started to meditate as I normally do. I began to focus on my breath, using it as an anchor to bring me back from the stream of thoughts passing through my mind relentlessly trying to grab my attention. As the seconds turned into minutes and as the minutes passed, I began to feel this desire within me to go back in time. Not to revisit the past and obsess about what happened and why, but to simply pay a visit to my younger self — at a time when I knew she had struggled the most. I felt there was something there to be experienced although I didn’t have the words for it yet.

So off I went. I found her sitting alone in a dark-ish living room with a few plants being the only other sign of another’s presence in the house. I walked over to her to sit next to her, gave her a hug and began to speak to her. I asked her how she was doing, what was wrong and if there was anything I could do to help.

She spoke to me in the best way she knew how and as she did, I began to experience with her the sadness and pain she felt having been left alone — for long periods of time. Too long, for a child at that age to bear without turning the experience into one of self-blame, something all children do when they are being hurt by the ones they love and are dependent on.

I comforted her doing my best to soothe her and told her how much I loved her. As is typical of inner child work, I let her know what was happening in her environment with her parents, that their absence was not about their lack of love for her but about their own limitations. That they were doing the best they could given what they had at the moment. I gave her the love and protection she felt she was lacking and sat with her while she took it all in.

Joining Forces: Meditating with My Younger Self

Instead of stopping there, which is a common place to stop with this type of work, I found myself beginning to experiment. It dawned on me that I could show my younger self how to meditate so I began to do just that. I taught her how to work with thoughts that were entering her mind that made her feel unworthy of love. I showed her how to manage the hurtful words of others and feelings that were not hers so that she could have a way to not internalize them as her own.

If she felt sadness around her, I encouraged her to see the sadness around her — as a fog of energy in the room that she could duck under or walk around so as to not be consumed by it. I gave her a different image to use for when anxiety was the prominent emotion. I showed her how to connect with nature, the trees and the small pond in her backyard, as a way to ground herself.

This meditation had a profound impact on me. Not only because it connected me with some of my feelings I needed to feel but also because I had experienced the healing power of the present moment in a deeply profound way.

Since our unresolved issues of the past are always being lived out in the present and since the future is always being created from the present, we have to take special care of the now. In my meditation, by being in the present moment to take care of this younger version of myself that was still in need of attention, I had gifted the “young me” with new ways of looking at and being with her painful experiences. And because I chose to honor and be with her instead of neglect this part of myself, the “adult me” benefited. With this shift in awareness and presence, a new possibility for my future opened.

This is healing.

It is not linear and while we cannot change events that occurred, we can shift our consciousness by paying a visit to ourselves. We can go wherever we need to go in a mindful way to make our present experiences come more to life and be more peaceful.

When I meditate I don’t always go back in time through visualizations such as these.

However, when I meditate I often invite my younger self in the room to meditate with me. I call her in and she sits next to me and then we begin. I find this extremely helpful especially if I am battling a difficult and overwhelming emotion. I call her in and she sits there beside me or wherever she chooses and she knows that she is being taken care of simply through the invitation.

My younger self and I join forces to find peace and presence together.

About the author:

Danielle Benvenuto is an energy healer and psychotherapist who integrates eastern and western modalities in her individual and group work. She runs meditation and energy work groups as well as workshops for professionals in NYC and internationally. Danielle believes each person has something unique to express and create through their work, relationships, and the small moments of every day life. She is passionate about awakening in others a curiosity for self-expression and expansion in whichever way this naturally unfolds. Tuning into the body, nature, and the healing power of sound and visualization are important elements in her work.

Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered hydrogen

We are talking here about hydrogen because it is amazing if we could do this.  However all separation tech is about distilation, either low temp or high temp.

switching all that out with a ball milling process or a real processing revolution and very welcome.  Understand that it takes one hundred calories just to lift water temp to boiling point and another five hundred to turn to steam in order to cause ease of separation.  At freezing it takes the loss of 32 calories if i got that right.  Both steps absorb a massive amount of energy and are expensive.

Milling is taking advantage of adsorption of a powdered chemical while reducing particle size.  Really good and the trapped product is lightly bound on the increasing surface area.

and yes this  may store hydrogen for tyansport without brittlizing the containment..

Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered hydrogen

By Loz Blain

July 18, 2022

Deakin researchers have described a novel mechanochemical process that can store gases safely in powders, using very little energy, in a repeatable process

Australian scientists say they've made a "eureka moment" breakthrough in gas separation and storage that could radically reduce energy use in the petrochemical industry, while making hydrogen much easier and safer to store and transport in a powder.

Nanotechnology researchers, based at Deakin University's Institute for Frontier Materials, claim to have found a super-efficient way to mechanochemically trap and hold gases in powders, with potentially enormous and wide-ranging industrial implications.

Mechanochemistry is a relatively recently coined term, referring to chemical reactions that are triggered by mechanical forces as opposed to heat, light, or electric potential differences. In this case, the mechanical force is supplied by ball milling – a low-energy grinding process in which a cylinder containing steel balls is rotated such that the balls roll up the side, then drop back down again, crushing and rolling over the material inside.

The team has demonstrated that grinding certain amounts of certain powders with precise pressure levels of certain gases can trigger a mechanochemical reaction that absorbs the gas into the powder and stores it there, giving you what's essentially a solid-state storage medium that can hold the gases safely at room temperature until they're needed. The gases can be released as required, by heating the powder up to a certain point.

Mechanochemical separation of gases using ball milling

Deakin University

The process is repeatable, and Professor Ian Chen, co-author on the new study published in the journal Materials Today, tells us via phone that the boron nitride powder used in the first experiments only loses "about a couple of percent" of its absorption capability each storage and release cycle. "Boron nitride is very stable," he tells us, "and graphene too. We're looking at a restoration treatment that can clean the powders and restore their absorption levels, but we need to prove that it'll work."

A revolutionary overhaul of the massive gas separation industry

The results are absolutely remarkable from a numbers standpoint. This process, for example, could separate hydrocarbon gases out from crude oil using less than 10% of the energy that's needed today. "Currently, the petrol industry uses a cryogenic process," says Chen. "Several gases come up together, so to purify and separate them, they cool everything down to a liquid state at very low temperature, and then heat it all together. Different gases evaporate at different temperatures, and that's how they separate them out."

Cryogenics, of course, is a highly energy-intensive process, and the Deakin team found that its ball milling process could be tuned to separate out gases just as effectively using far less energy. Different gases, they found, are absorbed at different milling intensities, gas pressures and time periods. Once the first gas is absorbed into the powder, it can be removed, and the process can be re-run with a different set of parameters to trap and store the next gas. Likewise, some gases are released from the powders at higher temperatures than others, offering a second way to separate gases if they're stored together.

In the team's experiments, they managed to separate out a combination of alkyne, olefin and paraffin gases using boron nitride powder. The process takes a while – some gases were fully absorbed after two hours, others were still only partially soaked up after 20 hours. But Chen says this should just be a matter of fine-tuning: "We're continuing to work on different gases, using different materials. We hope to have another paper published soon, and we also expect to work with industry on some real practical applications."

Deakin nanotechnology researchers Dr Srikanth Mateti (left) and Professor Ian Chen say their mechanochemical gas separation and storage breakthrough could have huge implications across many industries

Deakin University

Even if it takes a while, the cost savings – and energy savings, and emissions savings – make an extraordinary case for widespread adoption. "The energy consumed by a 20-hour milling process is US$0.32," reads the paper. "The ball-milling gas adsorption process is estimated to consume 76.8 KJ/s to separate 1,000 liters (220 gal) of olefin/paraffin mixture, which is two orders less than that of the cryogenic distillation process."

Even when you take into account the energy needed to heat the powder up to several hundred degrees and release the gas, the process is hugely efficient. And cryogenic distillation is a vital and extremely energy-hungry process – according to one 2016 study published in Nature, cryo-dsitillative separation of just the olefins propene and ethene, which are required for plastics, consumes about as much energy globally as all of Singapore – 0.3% of the entire world's energy consumption. Distillation as a whole is responsible for a massive 10-15% of global energy use. So there's an opportunity here for this technology to make an enormous contribution globally.

Solid-state hydrogen storage: Another area of enormous potential

The gas separation use case would be a pretty huge advance all by itself, but by storing gas securely in powders, the team believes it's also unlocked a compelling way to store and transport hydrogen, which could play a key role in the coming clean energy transition.

Currently, pure hydrogen is either stored as a gas, or as a cryogenic liquid. The gaseous form must be stored at around 700 times the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level, or more than 10,100 psi, which means there's a considerable energy input to compress it, and it requires storage tanks capable of handling large pressure loads safely. The liquid form must be cooled to below the boiling point of hydrogen at atmospheric pressure: just 20.28 K (−252.87 °C, −423.17 °F), and it needs to be kept cold and sometimes pressurized for as long as you store it. This takes even more energy.

Storing compressed hydrogen gas in cylinders is energy-intensive, and requires heavy equipment

Depositphotos

"The scientific community has been trying to find a suitable sponge-type material that can store large amounts of hydrogen for at least half a century," says Chen. "The technique we recently reported is for paraffin, but we can store much more hydrogen. It doesn't require a lot of energy, and it's safe; under normal conditions it's quite stable, and the hydrogen won't be released unless it's heated to a couple of hundred degrees. So there's a real hope for this to become a practical solid-state storage technology – not just for hydrogen, but for ammonia and other fuel gases."

While heating the powder up to several hundred degrees sounds like an energy-intensive process, Chen says the round trip from gas to powder and back to gas uses far less energy than even just compressed gas.

"It's difficult to give exact figures," he says, "because we're currently only conducting small-scale experiments compared with the gas separation study. But we believe it uses maybe one third, or even one quarter of the energy it takes to compress hydrogen gas. And that can be improved at larger scales or by optimizing the grinding conditions and materials. We're working on reducing the energy required to release the gas – and the more gas you're storing, the less energy is required to release it. But there's still a lot of work to do."

With hydrogen safely stored in the powder, it can be moved around and warehoused extremely easily and safely – this could be a very compelling way to move bulk quantities of hydrogen for export or distribution, since it's both cheaper and easier to handle than gas or liquid, and the equipment needed to release the gas for use at the other end will be pretty simple.

Chen says the powder could also have potential as a direct fuel for cars and trucks. "It can also have advantages in mobile applications," he says, "which is currently the most challenging issue in the hydrogen energy community. But if you want to do this in a vehicle, we have to think about a suitable tank or container, how to release it at a controlled rate and speed, what the fueling process will look like ... it'll require more further work."

How does it fare in terms of density by volume and weight? Chen tells us the powder can store a hydrogen weight percentage of around 6.5%. "Every one gram of material will store about 0.065 grams of hydrogen," he says. "That's already above the 5% target set by the US Department of Energy. And in terms of volume, for every one gram of powder, we wish to store around 50 liters (13.2 gal) of hydrogen in there."

Indeed, should the team prove these numbers, they'd represent an instant doubling of the best current solid-state hydrogen storage mass fractions, which, according to Air Liquide, can only manage 2-3%.

Lead researcher Dr Srikanth Mateti (left) and Professor Ian Chen with the steel balls used in the milling process

Deakin University

It's complex to compare these weight and volume densities against gaseous or liquid hydrogen though – a lot of factors come into the equation. Fifty liters (11 gal) per gram sounds like a massive amount, for example, but at atmospheric pressures, hydrogen is 467 times less dense than it is when compressed to 700 bar in a tank. So each gram of powder is really going to store about the same amount of hydrogen as 0.11 liters (3.62 fl. oz) of compressed H2 gas.

Likewise 6.5% sounds like a very small weight fraction – for every kilogram of hydrogen you're carrying, you also need to lug 14.4 kilograms of boron nitride around. That would have to be a killer for any weight-sensitive use case, right? Not quite – as ZeroAvia's Val Miftakhov once told us, current compressed hydrogen tanks are much heavier than the fuel they're carrying too, so you're still carrying at least 9 kg of tank for every 1 kg of hydrogen within. So while the powder would still need its own container and heat-release system added to its system weight, it might not be that far out of the ballpark.

It certainly doesn't look like a solution for aviation, particularly considering the ultra-lightweight GTL cryogenic liquid tanks we looked at in April, which are claimed to boost the mass fraction of hydrogen up over 50% even with all ancillary equipment factored in, allowing hydrogen-fueled airliners to fly four times as far as current jet-fuel planes, for half the fuel cost.

But aviation is a particularly weight-sensitive transport class. Powder-sequestered hydrogen might prove so cheap, convenient and easy to handle that it becomes a no-brainer in long-haul trucking, for example. "We really want to collaborate with some truck companies," says Chen, "because our storage is way above the current best results. We want to work with them to see what challenges there might be to make this technology useful in vehicles. On this, we need industry support."

Boron nitride is easily available in industrial quantities, and relatively cheap, but Chen says the technique should work with other materials as well. "We're not limited to boron nitride," he says, "we're just using it as an example. You could also use graphene, to take another example, and we're continuing to investigate other materials."

Clearly, this advance has some potentially enormous implications, which could contribute greatly to energy use reduction, emissions reduction, the green energy transition and even reducing fuel and chemical prices. The team has submitted provisional patent applications, and we look forward to learning what's possible as the method is refined and tailored to useful applications.

The research is published in the journal Materials Today.