This week's mental breadcrumbs

Just because some deluded barbarians in Europe killed 11 million people under the sign of the swastika doesn't mean that the real Aryans who have used it in their religions for thousands of years are going to stop using it.
http://www.cafepress.com/esangha/517093
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

Or naming daughters with it (Swastika Mukherjee)
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060515/asp/calcutta/story_6220693.asp

Wonder what would happen if Jains (temples have swastikas) tried to build in Germany (swastikas banned.)

I then got sucked into a Fermi Paradox discussion, including re-reading Robin Hanson's Great Filter paper, though I now think that both it and the Drake Equation focus too much on explicit positive things needed for technological life and not on what needs to *not* happen, like your planet's geology wandering into a hostile phase space or your system being within killing distance of a supernova. Technically they'd be folded into a couple of terms of the Drake Equation but it doesn't draw attention to them.

Then discussions on global warming, (also here) and sustainability, causing me to re-visit my energy use calculations, as well as my estimates that we could tame Earth's volcanic activity. And I read much of Winning the Oil Endgame, a book making a case for big easy gains in energy efficiency.

Bacteria and their humans

Our symbiotes

Is Agreeing to Disagree Honest or Rational?

Robin Hanson says no. If you're a truth-seeking rational thinker who understands disagreement theory, and you meet another such, you should come to agree on all matters of fact. The agreement might be on a probability distribution, i.e. agreeing on uncertainty, but that's not the same as agreeing to disagree. If you believe X is true, and another meta-rational believes Y is true, and you meet, something should change.

He mentions Gulliver's Travels, in that the Houyhnhnms agreed too much to seem human; here's a relevant link to the text.