Astral Codex Ten

Alaska

20 min read

Alaska

Article

Alaska is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 13 times across 13 issues between March 16, 2021 and November 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “spend six months in a cabin in Alaska trying to understand it in full”; “I travel to Alaska this year”; “the same way the US controls the contiguous 48 states, Hawaii, and Alaska”. It most often appears alongside China, Georgia, New York.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 13
  • Issue count: 13
  • First seen: March 16, 2021
  • Last seen: November 07, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Sleep Is The Mate Of Death
March 16, 2021 · Original source
Is this Rantamäki and Kohtala's theory? I think their real theory is much more complicated than this and involves a bunch of different types of sleep, differential synapse density in various brain regions, and 24 pages of speculation about whether the effects of ketamine might change depending on what time of day you take it. One day I would like to quit my job, abandon all my friends, and spend six months in a cabin in Alaska trying to understand it in full. But I think this post is a decent first stab at an oversimplification. Here are a few subtopics I hope to eventually learn more about:
Inline links: 24 pages of speculation about whether the effects of ketamine might change depending on what time of day you take it
2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
April 05, 2021 · Original source
PERSONAL: 76. [redacted]: 70% 77. [redacted]: 70% 78. [redacted]: 95% 79. I travel to Alaska this year: 60% 80. [redacted]: 40% 81. [redacted]: 20% 82. I go on at least three dates with someone I haven’t met yet: 20% 83. [redacted]: 10% 84. [redacted]: 30% 85. [redacted]: 10% 86. I try one biohacking project per month x at least 5 of the last 6 months of 2020: 30% 87. I find at least one new supplement I take or expect to take regularly x 3 months: 20% 88. Not eating meat at home: 40% 89. Weight below 200: 50% 90. Weight below 190: 10% 91. [redacted]: 90% 92. [redacted]: 30% 93. [redacted]: 5% 94. I travel outside the country at least once: 10% 95. I get back into meditating seriously (at least ten minutes a day, five days a week) for at least a month: 10% 96. At least ten tweets in 2020: 80% 97. I eat at/from Sliver more than any other restaurant in Q4 2020: 50% 98. [redacted]: 30% 99. I do pushups and situps at least 3 days/week in average week of Q4 2020: 60% 100. I write the post scoring these predictions before 2/1/21: 70%
Inline links: 79. I travel to Alaska this year: 60%
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
The Prósperans use the metaphor of a string of pearls. They expect to eventually control several noncontiguous enclaves within Honduras, the same way the US controls the contiguous 48 states, Hawaii, and Alaska, separated by ocean and foreign territory but still part of the same structure.
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
We didn’t just get tremendous economic growth though – we got “magical” results, but they were based on a one-time confluence of factors that “overwhelmed the normal rule that lots of twenty-and thirty-somethings make for an expensive-capital environment.” What were these one-time accelerants? He identifies the peace dividend – cuts in military spending that allowed capital to be put to more productive uses – as one such change, along with the emergent dominance of the US dollar, particularly boosted by Russian demand thanks to the collapse of their currency, and a later boost in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. With the Europeans’ decision to eliminate national currencies (agreed upon in a 1992 treaty, with the Euro to be introduced in 1999), they became relatively unattractive, and the Euro itself (an “unprecedented experiment in pan-government planning”) was too risky. Many holders of European currencies switched to the US dollar, such that between 1994 and 2002 (“when the euro finally got some traction and the surge dialed back”) there was a $2 trillion increase in the money supply. Zeihan also points to a collapse in commodities prices influenced by the elimination of Russian demand, but continued Russian production of oil and other commodities, followed by a collapse in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. This story of capital coming to the West (“allowing consumption-driven growth not simply to soar, but to explode”) is one of chance world events. However, the story of capital coming from the Boomer cohort is one of demographics. By the 2000s, they’re the mature workers of Zeihan’s four stages described above – and as the bulge in the demographic pyramid, they started flooding the world with capital. Accordingly, “The cost of credit plummeted to levels never before experienced.” Zeihan suggests that developed-world demographics are the cause of booms in places that haven’t been well-developed, from Southern Europe to Brazil, Russia, and India. But he says it’s quickly coming to an end; Boomer savings into stocks and bonds will be moving to low-risk instruments and then turning into withdrawals rather than savings, and the cohort behind them is too small to replace all of that capital. And it’s a worldwide phenomenon: In every single developed country there is currently an American-style population inversion between the about-to-retire and the about-to-be-mature-workers age groups. Japan’s Boomers bulge is a decade older than the American equivalent, while Spain’s is roughly fifteen years younger. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It dictates a period of chronically low growth and high credit costs, just not on precisely the same time frame. The undeveloped world is that way because it can’t self-fund, so without foreign capital, their growth will come to an end. In sum, the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital was a historical anomaly; “the post-Cold War financial flight was a once-in-a-generation event” and the demographic bulge that coincided with it won’t come around again for decades, if ever. 4 2: America’s incredible advantages As noted above, Zeihan really likes America’s position in the world. He likes its demographics (relative to other developed countries) and loves its geography. Taking the population question first, in America, “the demographic inversion is only a temporary development.” America is younger than the rest of the developed world, as it urbanized later and its enormous size made having kids easier despite that urbanization (i.e., the suburbs exist). This makes the demographic crunch a single-generation issue, as the Millennials are a huge cohort. And even if they weren’t, America assimilates immigrants more easily than other places – Zeihan attributes this to it being a “settler society” – which can help with demographic problems. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have similar cohorts following their massive Boomer and Gen-X analogues. Accordingly: While the American financial world will be past its period of maximum stress by 2030, for the rest of the world 2030 will simply be another year of an ever-deepening imbalance between retirees and taxpayers, with smaller and smaller generations coming up the ranks generating less and less growth. For the developed world beyond the United States—and even large portions of the developing world—chronic capital poverty and permanent recession will be the new normal from which there is no return. Together with America’s Millennial-led growth and abundant energy (there’s a chapter explaining how shale is a done deal that, as of the mid-2014 writing, already made America the world’s largest energy producer 5), by 2030 Zeihan sees it as practically the only country with an economy worth noting. Anyone who is familiar with American geography should see the argument that’s coming about that aspect of Zeihan’s model. Isn’t the Mississippi River a pretty big deal? And those oceans on the east and west coasts seem like nice borders. Indeed, while he gives us many reasons why there was always going to be an American superpower, geography is central to his story. He has lots to say about America’s internal river systems, farmland, and other geographic features. What mountain barriers exist are apparently better than in other countries in terms of allowing internal transport; the Rockies have major passes, several of which have large cities within them, and the easiest pass in the Appalachians featured America’s first National Road, 130 miles of buried logs that linked two rivers, and thus the east coast with the best farmland in the world. As we saw with his exposition on the Nile, Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.” He praises US barrier islands that mitigate oceanic destruction and effectively create another river system, as well as the fact that the river system is an actual network. All of this gives America more internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Thus, we get cheap transportation for “Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars,” enabling savings that “can be used for whatever Americans (or their government) want, from iPhones to aircraft carrier battle groups.” America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low. Cheap internal transportation has other benefits. “It’s a recipe for small government and high levels of entrepreneurship,” as small government keeps taxes low, leaving people with plenty of capital. Some people may think of the American consumer with disdain, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Zeihan points out that America has been the world’s largest consumer market “since shortly after the Civil War.” His observation about a robust food supply forming the base of any civilization bodes well for America, which apparently has the largest connected stretch of quality farmland in the world (the Midwest), the value of which is exponentially increased by the fact that it overlaps with so many of these amazing river systems. It isn’t just the Midwest that he gushes over. California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento River, and Washington and Oregon’s farmland with the Columbia and Snake Rivers get praise. The only major farmland more than 150 miles from a navigable waterway is some of the Great Plains near the Rockies. ***** Zeihan provides a reminder that national security is actually a thing, and that at its most basic level, it’s about protection against invasions. It was something of a shock reading about America’s land borders in that context. “As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands.” And, “Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated,” thanks to mountains and thick forests over much of it. The mid-continent lands are much more connected, but Zeihan frames these Canadian areas as basically American; they’re physically separated from Canada’s core eastern provinces, so trade with them is weaker than with the closer American states. Then there are the oceans. As much as Zeihan loves deserts for protection, he loves oceans more (particularly in a post-World War II world; more on that below). We get a story about the War of 1812 nearly splitting America into three when the British attacked Baltimore. America learned about “strategic vulnerability and sea approaches,” as the attack “on Baltimore—indeed, the entire war effort—would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean.” American foreign policy since then can be understood with respect to this lesson. Zeihan cites it as inspiration for America’s steps to make its ocean borders truly impenetrable, such as working to sever Canada from Britain, and the imperial-era acquisitions of Alaska, Hawaii, Midway, Puerto Rico, and de facto control of Cuba (preventing enemies from cutting off Mississippi River-based trade from the rest of the world). There’s more to Zeihan’s being awestruck by America than his analysis of its balance of transport advantages. He argues that America has been the world leader for agriculture, technology, finance, and industry since the Civil War, and runs through a litany of reasons for its preeminence: America is like a continent-sized island (because of its effective land borders), which is always going to be a more natural naval power than a more landlocked country.
Inline links: 4, 5
Diseasonality
December 08, 2021 · Original source
Cold and humidity are definitely important - scientists can make flu spread faster or slower in guinea pigs just by altering the temperature and humidity of their cages. But it can’t just be cold and humidity. If it was just cold, you would expect flu to track temperature instead of seasonality. Alaska is colder in the summer than Florida in the winter, so you might expect more summer flu in Alaska than winter flu in Florida. But Alaska and Florida both have lots of flu in the winter and little flu in the summer.
Inline links: scientists can
Might it be some combination of these things? Maybe Alaska is cold all year, but gets drier in the winter? Maybe people stay indoors in Arizona in the summer, but it’s not cold enough for flu to spread? If you came up with some multidimensional dryness-coolness-indoorness metric, then maybe places could be high on one or two in the summer, but the combined metric would always be highest in the winter everywhere.
Does this fail by the same argument as cold and humidity? That is, does Florida in winter get more ultraviolet light than Alaska in summer? Here’s what a paper has to say:
Inline links: a paper
Ancient Plagues
December 15, 2021 · Original source
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.
Highlights From The Comments On Diseasonality
December 23, 2021 · Original source
But then we have the same question as before - if it’s wintry all the time in Alaska, what happens there? My guess is - chickenpox spreads faster until there aren’t enough susceptible people left, then waits until new people are born, and then when there are enough of them, there will be an epidemic, and because winter multiplies R it will be in the winter.
In this model, warmer regions should have less flu overall, since a longer interval between incidences corresponds to a long-term average r of 1. Maybe Alaskans get a flu, say, once in 8 years on average, Floridians every 12 years (still seasonally) and Panamans every 15 years (without seasonality).
I think if we're comparing Alaska in the summer (rt<1) vs Florida in the winter (rt>1) the exponential growth/decay in cases should probably swamp the larger number of cases you'd get in Florida averaged over a year
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
April 13, 2022 · Original source
Then he declared himself dictator-for-life and imprisoned half the inhabitants of Alaska.
Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias
April 06, 2023 · Original source
Foulks’ book starts as a survey of Eskimo mental illness, but soon focuses into his investigation into the causes of Arctic hysteria. As a psychiatrist in northern Alaska, he was well-qualified to study this topic. But progress was slow.
He originally thought calcium deficiency might cause Arctic hysteria. The Eskimo diet was calcium-poor, and the long polar night prevented the body from producing Vitamin D. Calcium deficiency sometimes causes weird mental health problems. It all seemed to fit. But it wasn’t calcium. A team of epidemiologists tested Eskimos living a traditional lifestyle in Alaska, and found that their calcium was normal (nobody is sure why; something they’re doing seems to work for them). A psychiatrist in New York, overly invested in the hypothesis, ate a traditional Eskimo diet for one year, but found his calcium levels didn’t change. And Foulks was able to test calcium levels in ten piblokto patients at his psych hospital; they were all normal. It wasn’t calcium! Other biological hypotheses - like hypervitaminosis A - fared equally badly.
Like koro, neurasthenia, and other culture-bound illnesses, piblokto is endangered. Peary saw plenty of piblokto just hanging out in 1910s Greenland, but Foulks had to spend years in an Alaskan psychiatric hospital just to see a handful.
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA, USA Contact: Nate Contact Info: natestrum[at]rocketmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 2nd, 12:00 PM Location: Strange Brew Coffeehouse: 1101 University Blvd, Tuscaloosa, AL 35401. I'll be inside with a blue shirt and a laptop. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865J6C6W+5X Notes: If you can't make the meetup, email me so we can hang out some other time. Alaska ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, USA Contact: Matthew Contact Info: 7o2wzrybd[at]mozmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 29th, 1:00 PM Location: The Writer's Block Bookstore & Cafe, 3956 Spenard Rd, Anchorage, AK 99517. I'll be wearing a green pullover and have a small sign on the table saying ACX MEETUP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/93HG53MF+QG Notes: Please RSVP using my provided email, so that I know what I should prepare for!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865J6C6W+5X, https://plus.codes/93HG53MF+QG
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, USA Contact: Matthew Contact Info: 7o2wzrybd[at]mozmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 29th, 1:00 PM Location: The Writer's Block Bookstore & Cafe, 3956 Spenard Rd, Anchorage, AK 99517. I'll be wearing a green pullover and have a small sign on the table saying ACX MEETUP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/93HG53MF+QG Notes: Please RSVP using my provided email, so that I know what I should prepare for!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/93HG53MF+QG
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
Joseph Caissie, $100,000, to advocate for Georgism. This is a followup to last year’s grant to Lars Doucet and Will Jarvis, who were able to build a land value assessment startup that got funding from Sam Altman and went on to influence local and state government policy. Lars and Will have asked me to help fund the next step in their plan: giving Joseph (currently the State Assessor of Alaska) enough money to quit his job and join the neo-Georgist project full-time.
Inline links: a land value assessment startup, got funding from Sam Altman
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Michael House Contact Info: mjhouse[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 06:00 PM Location: 300 The Bridge St, Huntsville, AL 35806. I'll be in the Starbucks which is located inside of the Barnes and Noble. I'll have a whiteboard with "ACX MEETUP" on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/866MP88H+52 Note: This got moved from the 23rd to the 28th. Alaska ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, USA Contact: Mark Contact Info: FLWAB[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 01:30 PM Location: Kaladi Brothers Coffee, 6861 Jewel Lake Rd, Anchorage, AK, 99502. We’ll be in the community room and I’ll have a sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/93HG525X+7J Notes: Feel free to bring kids.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/866MP88H+52, https://plus.codes/93HG525X+7J
In What Sense Is Life Suffering?
November 07, 2025 · Original source
In this model, the statement “life is suffering” is equivalent to “temperature is heat” and literally true. An ignoramus might boggle at this: all temperatures are heat? What about fifty degrees below zero on a winter’s night in Alaska? Sorry, that’s heat too - 228 degrees Kelvin. It’s colder than the reference temperature you dubbed neutral, but that was always fake. Likewise, it seems surprising that all life is suffering: even when you’re having sex? Even when you’re on heroin? But to Buddhists, both of those states are some number of degrees worse than the absolute zero suffering of nirvana.