A silly animation, a sillier music album, & what's probably next

(12 min read total)
(silly animation: 2 min watch)
(what's-next idea-dump: 10 min read)

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HEY FOLKS! AFTER 16(?) MONTHS, I'M FINALLY BACK FROM BURNOUT-HIATUS 🎉

I KNOW I'VE SAID THAT 3 TIMES BEFORE, BUT THIS TIME I MEAN IT

I'M UNPAUSING THE PATREON AND TAKING YOUR MONEY ON APRIL 1ST

OKAY enough caps lock, here's two burnout-hiatus-side-projects I published recently, and ideas for my post-hiatus "main" projects...

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1) A Silly Animation

If you're wondering what side-project I did during hiatus, it is not exactly educational.

🍑 The Femboy Hooters Jingle 🍑 (2 min watch, PG-13 edited version, though I wouldn't recommend showing it to your 13-year-old)

To download the music, and see the NSFW version, here's its website: https://singingcatgirl.github.io/

Why I did this:

1. I was feeling really burnt out over the whole 2020–21 situation, and needed a cute silly side project.
2. I've been tempted to start a lewd furry patreon for 5+ years, and I just... need to know how much money I'm passing up on, not doing a lewd furry patreon.

Lessons learnt:

• Frame-by-frame animation is fun, but very labor intensive and very not worth it for me. The above project took me 5 months, on-and-off.
• Eh, turns out I don't really want to be a professional adult-artist. I just liked the idea of being one.
• If what I most got out of this was stress-relief, it's better if I just keep this as a hobby, not a side-hustle. Side-hustle = side-stress.

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2) A Sillier Music Album

In 2020–21, I tried to learn music-making! Because I already knew how to do everything in game development –– art, code, design, writing –– all except making sweet tunes.

So, I aimed to fill my skillset gap! Here's a free album of all the songs I made in the last few years (including The Femboy Hooters Jingle):

🎵 CUTE GAY NERD 🎵 (a free album of 8 songs)

Lessons Learnt:

• Music-making is fun, and doesn't take too much time! (at least, for the simple songs I want to make)
• Since I no longer make "games", I probably won't get to use this skill a lot... but who knows, maybe I'll make the occasional educational song. For example, I'm very proud of The Special Relativity Song (track #4 in the album), and may [10% chance] make it an animated music video this year! (BUT NOT FRAME-BY-FRAME ANIMATION. NEVER AGAIN.)

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3) What's Probably Next

(this is the 10 min long section)

So!

Back from hiatus!

. . .

what now.

All plans in the air, but here's some thoughts for the near-future:

a)

I'll publicly post the Functional Decision Theory explainer I privately shared with you 3 weeks ago! Thank you so much to everyone who left insightful feedback, comments, and critiques – I'll incorporate them in the final post on my blog.

And, why not, I'll also incorporate Orbit's Spaced Repetition cards into them, so readers can choose to commit decision theory to long-term memory.

b)

Hey remember this dang project I've been teasing since December 2020?

Nutshell, or "Expandable Explanations", will be my next interactive thingy. If you're eager to try it now, reminder that the open beta is still here:

🥜 https://ncase.me/nutshell-beta/ 🥜

c)

My post burnout-hiatus lessons were:

• spend more time with people I care about
• do stuff for the intrinsic joy of learning & creating
• stop thinking about "helping humanity" because that's an extrinsic motivation, a moral super-stimulus, and whenever my mind is in Save-Humanity mode, and I ruminate on all the ways humans inflict needless, cruel, petty harm on each other, I end up hating myself & hating humanity slightly more, and praying the James Webb telescope finds an exoplanet with techno-signatures so I can unilaterally blast radio waves to them yelling "I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW ALIEN OVERLORDS".

So: in 2022, I'll try (to try) to do less work (to make time for relationships & hobbies), on much smaller quick-iteration projects (to maximize intrinsic joy of creation).

For example: The Functional Decision Theory explainer was a fun lil' project! Nutshell will be another lil' project, and once it exists, it'll help me make more fun lil' explainers, since they can all cross-embed each other.

Afterwards? I dunno! Here's a total non-committal dump of project ideas I've been thinking a lot about recently:

• How To Get Causation From Correlation: an intro to causal networks.
  • "Oh, you can't infer causation from observation? Does the moon cause tides? Did we discover this by creating a control Earth with a placebo moon? No? That's what I thought, motherfu––"
  • Causal Networks was the topic that won in my "what should I explain next?" survey. The topic's still cool, but not too mainstream yet. In terms of "neglected ⨉ important ⨉ tractable", an accessible intro to Judea Pearl's causal networks may be fun and helpful!
  • (plus, I have a fun visualization idea involving water and beavers...)
    
• Something on Georgism (location value tax + basic income)? A while ago Lars Doucet won a book review contest, with this great explanation [warning: 1+ hour long read!!!] of an economic idea that's simple, yet (in both practice and theory) reduces poverty and rent while also increasing economic development –– in contrast to the dismal science's usual assumption that there's a harsh tradeoff between inequity & inefficiency! No promises, but I have been chatting with Lars (turns out we both used to make Flash games back in the good ol' days) so maybe we'll collab on a Georgism thing. Besides, with an economic crisis just behind (behind?) us, the world is hankerin' for some "neglected ⨉ important ⨉ tractable" alternatives.
  • See: this 89-page paper, "Post-Corona Balanced-Budget Super-Stimulus", co-written by Charles Goodhart of Goodhart's Law fame. (Well, as last author. Maybe that was a "let's quickly get some famous economist to sign off on this" deal. If so, it worked on me.)
    
• Something on preventing the next pandemic? Speaking of "neglected ⨉ important ⨉ tractable"... now that knowledge of Covid's aerosol transmission is finally mainstream, now's the time to spread the word about some extremely-cheap-yet-extremely-effective ways to purify indoor air!
  • This study finds that adding UV-C to a normal HVAC system can "kill" 99.98%(!!!) of coronaviruses. In comparison, Pfizer 2-dose against Covid Classic was 95% effective. This is NOT a surprising result: it's in-line with decades of studies finding the same thing. More details later on this experiment's lamp power, air tunnel exposure length, etc.
  • (Note: UV-C is a specific subset of UV. Not all UV kills pathogens. Another subset of UV, UV-V, creates toxic ozone! Watch out!)
  • A friend told me about this yesterday: a DIY air purifier, made up of a boxfan & filters, altogether costing less than $200... yet by making 2 of 'em, you can give a classroom a better air exchange rate than the requirement for hospital patient rooms. (And with extra 2, you can outdo hospital airborne isolation rooms.)
  • Why not both UV-C and filters? There do exist at-home UV-C + filter air purifiers, but:
    • 1) there are a lot of grifters in the space, so it's unclear how effective the commercial at-home purifiers actually are, and
    • 2) I can't find any DIY design for this... probably for the very good reason that UV-C is dangerous for eyes & skin. But, it's also easily blocked by cheap materials like cardboard. So, I'm thinking one could make a cardboard maze like this (assume we've layered-up the cardboard enough to make it safe for UV-C):

Ooh, drawing this snake-maze gave me another idea –– that as far as I know, is an original design! Since you can trade off "UV-C light intensity" with "exposure time", and since UV-C is the costlier constraint, you can use a snake-maze design to get the most exposure time for the least electrical power (this isn't cardboard or DIY anymore):

(There's an S-shaped "sound maze" design for air vents, but it's a different 2D maze design, and it's for soundproofing, not UV-C. Also, it wouldn't help keep air volume near a single UV-C light source.)

• Note 1: Two notes to patent trolls who would "patent" open-source designs: a) this diagram is a public record of prior art, and b) I will cut you.
  
• Note 2: Will the tunnel be long enough to purify the air? The "99.98% efficacy" result mentioned earlier was for a ~4m (13 ft) tunnel. But even with 1m (3 ft), that'll still be ~90% effective on one circulation cycle, after two cycles it's ~99%, after three it's ~99.9%, and after four cycles it's as if you ran the air through 4m anyway: ~99.99%. (And this isn't even counting the filter!)
  • (also, I think my snake-cube design could get a 4m-long tunnel to fit in a 1m x 1m x 1m cube!)
    
• Note 3: How powerful does the UV-C source need to be? The aforementioned study used three 60-Watt lamps. For comparison, a toaster uses 1200 Watts. So it shouldn't be too energy-intensive.
  
• Note 4: Alternative ways to use germicidal UV-C include: blasting a whole room directly when nobody's in the room (many hospitals do this), or blasting UV-C to just the upper part of a room, out of eye-level (requires tall ceilings). Personally, I think hidden UV-C, whether in HVAC ducts or portable devices, are best for public use, because they can work even with humans in the room, and in rooms that without tall ceilings.
  
• Note 5: Oh hey, looks like there might be a sub-subset of UV-C, called Far-UVC, that kills viruses/microbes but is harmless to human eyes/skin? (Meta-analysis) However, the tech's not widely available yet, and much more research is needed.
  
• Best of all, this solution should be way more politically viable than most policy stuff, because:
  • There's no "pro-virus" lobby.
  • Any individual or municipality can do this unilaterally.
  • If we go for the portable design, it's even cheaper than renovating existing HVACs.
  • Since it'll also help cut down influenza –– which in the US alone is estimated to cost $11.2 billion in terms of healthcare, sick days, and deaths –– there's a strong economic case for it just from influenza alone.
  • Not to mention the economic/mental-health/substance-abuse case for alternatives to lockdowns. Near-everyone would prefer "humming air-filtration cubes" over lockdowns the next time a bat makes love to a pangolin or whatever the origin was
  • > 95% efficacy is equivalent to vaccinating everyone against every possible future airborne virus, "natural" or engineered. (And if you look at the most infectious viruses in a post-water-sanitation places – covid, flu, common cold, chickenpox, smallpox, mumps, measles – it's all airborne. So, threat model: if a malicious actor wanted to kill as many people as possible, they'd use airborne transmission. So, stopping that should be our main focus.)
  • There's a strong national security interest: with CRISPR & DNA printing etc, it'll be very easy for small groups or even individuals to build bioweapons. People have already printed polio & poxviruses. Each day I wake up and think, "is today the day some grad student CRISPR's the almond cyanide-producing gene into the common cold, and kills one billion people?"
  • IN SUM: with no "pro-virus" lobby... and healthcare/business/military lobbies who'd care a lot... and it only relying on cheap tried-and-tested tech... and it being possible for individuals/cities to try it unilaterally... and a horrific pandemic fresh in voters' minds... "cheap, widespread UV-C + filters" should be technically, economically, and politically easy.
  • ...
  • ...maybe.
  • At the very least, it's a rock-solid case for doing a lot more in-the-field research on this, pronto.
    
• A sequel to Loopy, with a focus on systems biology/epigenetics? It seems to me that sysbio/epigenetics is the Next Big Thing in both basic research & engineering. I recently read Uri Alon's great textbook on sysbio, but it's heavy on differential equations, and most biologists aren't savvy with differential equations. Or most scientists. Or me. So maybe a friendly-to-use "draw your own epigenetic simulation" tool might help:
  • 1) teach sysbio to students,
  • 2) get sysbio to spread among researchers,
  • 3) one day – pie in the sky, here – be a design tool for biotech itself: think, "AutoCAD for epigenetic engineering"!
  • Yes I know I just rambled for paragraphs on bio-terrorism. And we should worry about "dual-use" tech. For example, I think Gain-of-Function (GoF) research doesn't make the cost-benefit cut. But, here's why I (currently) think epigenetic-engineering research does make the cut:
    • a) Unlike stuff like GoF, sysbio has very direct life-saving applications: understanding gene-regulation diseases (cancer, Alzheimers, diabetes, aging?, etc) and figuring out how to print organs & regrow nerves.
    • b) The worst expected-value bioterrorist threats – printing polio/smallpox, GoF-ing H5N1 ("bird flu"), etc – don't require any epigenetic engineering.
    • c) I'm going to become a genetically engineered catgirl and none of you can stop me.
      
• (...didn't I just say I'm trying to not obsess over how to save humanity? old habits die kicking and screaming i guess)
  
• Narrated videos of my simulations? A problem with my usual "text-simulation-sandwich" format is that it's hard show more complicated interactions. It'd be better if I could just show me playing with a simulation while talking over it. (Also, videos spread better than custom websites. No, I still don't have a TikTok.)
  • Maybe if I was really fancy, I could make a standalone YouTube video of me playing with simulations... but as a bonus: on my website, it can embed the YouTube video, then use the YouTube API to detect the video's timestamp, then at certain times, pauses and gives to you interactive to play with yourself. Maybe even incorporate spaced repetition flashcards, or do-it-yourself exercises and stuff?
    
• How To Explain Stuff: An Explainer. There's a lot of "neglected ⨉ important ⨉ tractable" ideas that'd enrich folks' lives... but I am not "scalable", and most researchers suck at explaining their work even to other researchers, let alone students or the voting public. Remember, scientists: if you don't explain your work to the public, an unpaid intern at BuzzFeed will do it for you. Just a lil' threat to motivate you.
  • P.S: I still want to do an interview series with my science/math-communication friends, and name it, Some People Just Want To Watch The World Learn
    
• Other topics I'm still interested in:
  • (behavioral?) public choice theory
  • foreign policy (i think near-everyone is suddenly very interested in foreign policy recently)
  • virtue ethics
  • habit re-training & how to be less scatter-brained, because i've been failing at this a lot recently
  • teaching high-school algebra with heavy emphasis on pictures, intuition, and real-world use
  • alternative ways to incentivize public goods (e.g. retroactive prizes, dominant assurance contracts). at the very least, insulin shouldn't cost a zillion dollars thanks to patent-trolling rent-seekers.
  • cryo(ge)nics & aging-reversal, because i do not want to die

Let me know what you think of these possible post-hiatus project ideas! And/or of my silly animation, and/or silly music album.

We could all use a little silly cheering up, these days.* 💖

Stay strong,
~ Nicky Case

* well, unless furry lewds and soundclown mashups are anti-cheering for you