Table of Contents 1 Summary 2 Context 2.1 Why not weak HIA rather than strong HIA? 2.2 Weak vs. strong HIA methods 3 Main statement 4 Why weak HIA attempts don’t seem so promising 4.1 Unpromising properties 4.2 More reasons 4.3 Aside: polygenic embryo selection 5 Caveats 5.1 Caveat: Any specific argument could easily be wrong 5.2 Caveat: Weak HIA would be great! 5.3 Caveat: Weak HIA may have surprising beneficial effects 5.4 Caveat: Flimsy foundations 5.5 Caveat: Scaling a working weak method is a medium priority 6 Conclusion (Note: I was unsatisfied with a draft of this, heavily edited it, and I’m still unsatisfied. The notion of “weak HIA method” here is muddled, maybe conflating multiple things that shouldn’t be conflated here. It may be used a bit inconsistently, and may make some arguments tautological or contradictory depending on local interpretation of the notion. I think most of the reasoning is still useful, so it’s better to p...

A while ago I made some custom MTG cards. I don’t play Magic and I definitely don’t know how to balance a Magic card, so these are just conceptual explorations. In these cards, I was more interested in off-beat mechanics, rather than anything to do with actual MTG play. Purple knocks things out of place, and messes with time a bit, making things disjointed or throwing things out of their usual context. The Eternal Denizen is stuck out of time / stuck in a loop / stuck never quite entering the world. It doesn’t actually use mana, it just hypothetically uses mana. This is maybe still too spiky to be balanced. But it’s constrained by the colors, so it would be weird to build around. I like the idea of the channelmage getting lost in trying to wrangle a bunch of different mana of the wrong colors and getting all mixed up. I think libarary modification is interesting. There could be some unexplored ideas with making two libraries, e.g. splitting your library into eq...

Table of Contents 1 Static pressure gradients?? 2 Spouts and acceleration 3 Height paradox thingy 4 Deducing the equivelocity curve? 5 Sideways pressure? 6 Generalizing I’ve been reading various things about fluid mechanics so that I can think about microfluidics. But I haven’t really been studying it like I used to study a math area (instead just kinda getting various impressions). I’d like to think it through a bit “from scratch”, though it’s very much not actually from scratch of course. This is written as close to real-time thinking as possible (though of course much slower than without writing), over a few hours, with the intent of getting a “thinking trace” because that seems interesting. [In all diagrams, pretend the top is open to the air, and ignore differences in air pressure.] 1 Static pressure gradients?? If I ask myself what I’m intuitively confused about, I’m like, hold on—it makes intuitive sense that pressure gradient would cause the fluid to ...