Five Slices #9: Time Games

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

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You can find the complete list of posts here. If you like longer stories, check out my other blog.

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Can we speed up the brain?

I have a confession: I was an Elon Musk fanboy at one point. I was especially vulnerable to cartoon-filled articles like this one which explained in great detail how Neuralink would be a reality 15 years from now. Neuralink is a Brain Machine Interface that could directly connect brains to computers. With it, I’d be able to talk to my friends telepathically, download libraries into my brain, and learn Kung Fu instantaneously.

Me in 15 years

After Elon took over Twitter and turned it into an ad-filled wasteland, my dreams have mellowed. If Neuralink becomes a reality, I’ll probably be watching unskippable YouTube ads in my brain before moving on to some brainrot content.

But I found this paper that says machines can’t really speed up our brains, even if Neuralink works. Titled “The unbearable slowness of being,” the premise is very simple – Our brains take in information at the rate that is in the order of Gigabits per second (10-100 times your internet speed) but the actual processing is slowed down to just 10-20 bits per second (100 million times slower).

The problem isn’t in how much information we can consume: the bottleneck is between parts of our own brain, and we don’t really know why. Unless we take apart our brain and re-engineer it, I don’t think we’re solving that problem. But I wouldn’t put anything past Elon Musk.

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Knowing the moment of death

In “Appointment in Samarra,” Somerset Maugham retells an ancient Arabic tale. A man in Baghdad meets a lady in the market and realizes she is Death herself. Fearing her threatening gaze, he begs his master to borrow his horse. He rides away to faraway Samarra intending to hide there for the night. Later, the master comes across the same woman and asks her why she threatened his servant. “Oh, I wasn’t threatening him,” she says. “I was merely surprised to see him in Baghdad, because I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”¹

How would knowing the moment of death in advance change your perception of life?If getting a movie spoiled ruins your day, I’m guessing this one would be a little bit more depressing. Information like this which can change your quality of life just because you know it is called a knowledge hazard. Unsolicited secrets are knowledge hazards, and so are rumors.

Knowing the struggles or odds of failure before you start a very difficult task can be a knowledge hazard too (for example, when Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang was asked what he would do differently knowing what he knew now, he said he wouldn’t start a company, because it’s so difficult).

Knowledge hazards belong to a bigger class called “Information Hazards.” While knowledge hazards just harm the psyche of the knower, other types of infohazards (like the blueprint of a nuclear bomb or even the idea that something like a nuclear bomb can exist) can harm a wide range of people. (I might write a longer piece on Information Hazards and how to navigate them, on my other blog that I mentioned)

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A long long time

There are clocks that tell the time. Then there are clocks which serve other purposes.

The clock of the long now is a clock that’s being built in the Sierra Diablo Mountains in Texas, and its goal is to keep time for the next 10,000 years. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is funding the project. We won’t be around to see whether its warranty will ever kick in, but the clock has plans up to its 10,000th anniversary.

The first prototype of the 10,000 year clock

If you aren’t Jeff Bezos, you could spend your life savings on a cheaper substitute – an Atmos Clock that can run for a long time without any manual intervention.

This isn’t the only project of its kind: There’s a song called Longplayer that is designed to play continuously for 1,000 years. Then there’s something called the Future Library project which handpicks one book every year from 2014 to 2114 from outstanding writers as a collection for future generations. None of these books will be read by anybody till the project ends. Sigh.

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Half hundred years of servitude

Bob Dunning is a journalist who worked for The Davis Enterprise in California. He wrote over 14,000 columns over 55 years and was even considered the “face of the newspaper.” The administration had promised him that he had a place at the paper as long as it was alive. Then one day, without warning, Bob was let go over a phone call from lower management – no farewell party, no severance, no thanks for his service, and no healthcare. His access to his mailing list was also taken away and he had no way to contact the thousands of loyal readers who followed his writing.

A hurt Bob wrote a post on Facebook that was later reprinted here on the Substack newsletter that he started. It’s a great, sentimental article that captures the experience of someone who was an integral part of a smalltown community:

A sad ending, but a tremendous new beginning

Apart from the callousness of the decision to kick out a part of the newspaper so unceremoniously, I can’t help marveling at the stupidity of the newspaper’s decision because it’s just bad business. Subscriptions to the paper dropped, sponsors pulled their ads, and six other writers resigned in solidarity including Wendy Weitzel who was the most popular columnist on the paper. At least, the story has a happy ending. Bob used to make $26 an hour at the Enterprise – barely $54,000 a year. His new Substack brings in more than $100,000 a year, and this time, he can’t be kicked out because he owns it.

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Your place in history

It’s easy to forget that humans are such a recent blip on the Earth’s timeline. Here are some facts that will mess with your perception of time.

• Imagine the Earth’s history as a 24 hour clock. If the Earth was formed at midnight, life started around 4 am in the morning. But the first animals would have showed up only after 7 pm. Dinosaurs showed up around 11 pm, and mammals around 11.39 pm. Humans showed up just 1 minute before midnight.
  
  The earth has been around for 4.5 Billion years, and humans showed up only 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.

  

• Vincent Van Gogh died in 1890. Coca Cola was founded in 1889. Van Gogh could have enjoyed a Coca Cola if he wanted to. He could have also made a trip to the headquarters of Nintendo, the video game company founded in 1889 which went on to make Mario and Pokemon.

• If people give birth to children around the age of 25-30 on average, there have been just about 81 generations of people since the birth of Christ.

• Greenland sharks can live for 250 to 500 years. A Greenland shark caught in 2016 could have been around during the time of Shakespeare.

If you have some time, listen to Time by Pink Floyd. It’s one of my favorite songs.

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If you want to read another post, try this one about a guy who quit his software job and built supersonic jets. Or try this one about my experience cloning a 9 billion dollar company.

If you enjoyed reading today’s issue, like and share this with a friend to support my writing:

1. Ted Chiang takes this story and gives it an amazing twist in the short story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s gate.” If you like sci-fi movies like Arrival and Predestination, be sure to check this one out.