Thursday, 5 January 2023

Some days I spent a lot of time doing associative reading, where one text leads me to hop laterally to another text, and so on. I find this pleasurable, but often, after a few hours, have little sense of what I have learned.

Today I am going to try to track, at least partially, the path of my attention.

I did not begin here, but a good starting point is Taleb.

Taleb

• In an email with a “Medium Daily Digest” the first article references was “Bitcoin is the Detector of Imbeciles, by Nicholas Taleb.” I’m ambivalent about Taleb: on the one hand, he can be really insightful; on the other hand, his insight is often embedded in a mix of hyperbole and ad hominem rhetoric. But as I was curious to see what his position of crypto was — it appeared to have shifted — I clicked the link. To my surprise, the article was interesting and had a relatively high signal to noise ratio.
• At the end of this article were links to others, and I ended up reading his views on Ukraine and Covid, along with his analyses of political groupings on the web, leavened with copious disparaging references. A bit to my surprise, I found myself largely in agreement with him. His writing about politics also introduced me to some new (to me) concepts:
  • The Westphalia Complex. This refers to the “Peace of Westphalia.” the collective name for two 1648 peace treaties that ended the thirty-years’ war. This is credited by some for the notion of state (or “Westphalian” sovereignty, which basically states that for purposes of international law and interactions between sovereign states, there should be a principal of non-interference in each state’s domestic affairs, including human rights abuse and religious or other forms of persecution.
    • Hannibal ad portas. A phrase denoting imminent danger — Hanibal at the gates. Used in reference to Ukraine.
      • Thalassocracy. A thalassocracy or thalattocracy sometimes also maritime empire, is a state with primarily maritime realms, an empire at sea, or a seaborne empire. Traditional thalassocracies seldom dominate interiors, even in their home territories. Taleb used this in defining ‘the west,’ in opposition to Russia, China and other centralize authoritarian states. Specifically:
      • What we call “the West” is not a spiritual entity, but an administrative system first and last. Is is not an ethno-geographical ensemble, but a legal and institutional system: it includes Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan. It mixes the thalassocratic Phoenician world of network-based trade and that of Adam Smith, based on individual rights and freedom to transact, under the constraint of social progress. 

What we call “the West” is not a spiritual entity, but an administrative system first and last. Is is not an ethno-geographical ensemble, but a legal and institutional system: it includes Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan. It mixes the thalassocratic Phoenician world of network-based trade and that of Adam Smith, based on individual rights and freedom to transact, under the constraint of social progress. 

— Nikolas Taleb, A Clash of Two Systems, 19 April 2022

Perthitic Textures

Prior to Taleb, I now recall, I was learning — or, actually, reminding myself, of the notion of perthic textures from geology.

• The start here was facebook, where there was a post from “Geomorphology Rules,” that showed a closeup of a countertop with an unusual light-colored crystal in it, asking readers what they thought:

It’s a K-feldspar crystal showing perthitic texture. There is also plagioclase, quartz and biotite present.
and
Exsolution lamellae in feldspar metacryst

– Comments on FacebookGeomorphology Rules post.

The intergrowth forms by exsolution due to cooling of a grain of alkali feldspar with a composition intermediate between K-feldspar and albite. There is complete solid solution between albite and K-feldspar at temperatures near 700 °C and pressures like those within the crust of the Earth, but a miscibility gap is present at lower temperatures. If an alkali feldspar grain with an intermediate composition cools slowly enough, K-rich and more Na-rich feldspar domains separate from one another. In the presence of water, the process occurs quickly.

When megascopically developed, the texture may consist of distinct pink and white lamellae representing exsolved white albite (NaAlSi3O8) in pink microcline. The intergrowths in perthite have a great variety of shapes. If cooling is sufficiently slow, the alkali feldspar may exsolve to form separate grains with near-endmember albite and K-feldspar compositions.

–Wikipedia

• Perthite is used to describe a lamaellic intergrowth of two Feldspars caused by exsolution of of different types of Feldspar. Usually this refers to a sodic Feldspar within a host grain of K-Feldspar; antiperthite denotes the opposite, and mesoperthite denotes when the two Feldspars are in more or less equal proportions.

Cadmium in Chocolate

And earlier, before this, I was revisiting what I’d come across a few days ago about Cadmium in chocolate.

• There was a Facebook post by Liz Lawley that I was considering adding to, but after I’d done a bit of research — looking more into sources of Cadmium in chocolate, and trying to figure out whether European standards (expressed in amount of intake per kilogram of body weight) were stricter or taxes than American standards (expressed in micrograms of CD per ounce), I decided not to bother.

Reflections on Meandering…

So, these issues have occupied a couple hours of the morning. Are they worth it? Do they contribute to enriching my life, or are they just random bits of knowledge gathering that will have no appreciable impact on my thought or life?

• I am happy to have reinforced my knowledge of perthic textures, and their subtypes.
• I am unsure about the Taleb path, but it could be that the concepts I was introduced to will prove of long term interest/value.
• I think the exploration re Cadmium is kind of a waste — it doesn’t really connect to any long term interests or areas where I want to extend my knowledge. I’ve already learned the important bit about Cd in chocolate, and have jettisoned my daily chocolate habit.