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Comment Threads

• Trottelreiner commented on 2512
  However, one of the best things for a home survival kit is a bunch of rat traps, because you can get by with eating rats and pigeons, so long as you've already learned how to eat them before the disaster strikes. "Hole food! Hole food! Rat! Rat! Rat-onna-stick! Rat-in-a-bun! Get them while they're dead!" Err, sorry, just got carried away. As for the pigeons, while pigeon pie may not to everyone's taste, at least not to some friends I talked to, they have something of a reputation for being a delicatesse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squab_(food) For the farming/herding, I wholeheartedly agree on...
• Trottelreiner commented on 2512
  Actually, I guess a kind of HG lifestyle might be of interest to our techno-nomadists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technogypsie as a kind of fallback mechanism or point of personal pride, though the Ancient Greek ideas of autonomia makes little economic sense (but then, coming out of the Bronze Age collapse might explain something of a survivalist mindset). Though then, don't get me started on our crusty "you have a (insert local currency here)? my dispo is late..." crowd. Err. BTW, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neotribalism "My use of ancient Sumerian Cuneiform in my photography is to show that prior to current times, ancient and primitive art, was...
• heteromeles commented on 2512
  Another way to think of hunting and gathering is that, once the high tide line of 9 billion people recedes, there's going to be a tremendous amount of crap lying around, waiting to be reused. The kind of bricolage needed to make all this stuff useful very definitely requires hunting and gathering skills. Just not paleolithic ones. As it is, animal hunting has long been the realm of either the wealthy or the outsiders, and I suspect it will remain that way....
• David L commented on 2512
  there's going to be a tremendous amount of crap lying around, waiting to be reused. The kind of bricolage needed to make all this stuff useful very definitely requires hunting and gathering skills. Just not paleolithic ones. And it's going to be very messy. I just discovered that the standard plastic gallon milk cartons around here have recently changed their composition. Used motor oil will eat through the current composition. Says he who collects his used oil and taking is to the oil recycling point periodically and now gets to clear up a patch of concrete. Fortunately it's a slow...
• axel.fosse commented on 2512
  You're wrong about that. The interractions between mathematics and physics have been very fruitful for both fields, and remains so. For instance probability theory grew out of scientific problems in the 19th century (like Maxwell/Gibbs/Boltzman's development of statistical mechanics), but didn't become part of mathematics until Kolmogorov axiomized it in the 30s. Similarly the theory of distributions grew out of efforts by mathematicans to formalize the dirac delta function (and other generalized functions). Feynman's path integral formalism haven't been established mathematically even to this day, however much progress have been made, and it has inspired a great deal of new...