Behold, the Station of Extreme Light !
Every so often, poor translation gets turned on its head...
Originally shared by Eli Fennell
Physicists Building Lasers To 'Rip Apart' Empty Space
People tend to think of the vacuum of space as emptiness, but this is not correct. In fact, according to Quantum Electrodynamics, 'empty' space is constantly giving rise to pairs of electrons and positrons, which are the matter and antimatter forms of the same particles.
Due to mutual attraction, these pairs quickly annihilate and cannot be isolated. A new type of laser under development in China, however, may be able to prevent this annihilation. Known as the 'Station of Extreme Light', it will emit extremely short, powerful laser bursts which, in theory, should be able to overcome the electron-positron attractions. The laser would also disturb the particles into emitting electromagnetic waves, especially gamma waves.
These gamma wave photons should then have the power to excite atomic nuclei, opening the door to a new branch of particle physics called 'nuclear photonics'.
Or, conversely, firing these lasers may create the Cloverfield Paradox, thereby shattering spacetime across the multiverse and unleashing aliens, demons, and beasts from the sea into our world.
You know, one or the other of those possibilities. Should be interesting, either way!
#BlindMeWithScience #StationofExtremeLight #Physics
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/physicists-are-planning-build-lasers-so-powerful-they-could-rip-apart-empty-space
Wednesday 31 October 2018
Improving science journalism will have important but limited effects
This is an ideal case, of course, but no less important for that. In such an ideal scenario, time currently spent writing grant proposals would be spent on outreach. It's probably easier to turn scientists into journalists than the other way around, but at the same time, journalists bring a much wider perspective.
Scientists and journalists share a passion for questioning assumptions and biases. We are trained to uncover hidden narratives in the pursuit of deeper understandings. And we share an enthusiasm for revealing new knowledge that can be shared with the world.
These values cannot be taken for granted, especially in our current political environment. It is no secret that both scientists and journalists are facing a concerted wave of allegations around “bias” and “fake news.” This type of regressive criticism is not new. Throughout history, those who have sought to suppress the truth have endeavored to muffle the voices of scientists and journalists. Without these voices societies decay. Therefore, when confronted with the current assaults, we cannot allow ourselves to recoil into our protective harbors and wait for the storm to pass. We cannot wait for others to step into the void. We have to shrug off whatever reluctances we may have and find ways to share the stories of science with a world in desperate need of hearing them.
We recognize that there are differences between the ways journalists and scientists perform their professions, and those differences could serve as barriers for cooperation. Scientists often are wary of the way their work might be presented by journalists. They have seen nuanced research oversimplified or hyped for more dramatic (and sometimes misleading) headlines. At the same time, journalists can be frustrated by scientists who respond to straightforward questions with jargon and are unable or unwilling to explain the essence of their discoveries without caveats and qualifiers.
We believe, however, this mistrust is superficial and can be overcome for the benefit of all of society. Scientists and journalists share core aspirations. Both disciplines are about observing the world, questioning the unknown and collecting facts. Both scientists and journalists know their work is built on the work of others and they must find a way to share their discoveries. Scientists may tell their stories in papers they publish to share with their colleagues in the field. Journalists may tell their stories in print, radio or film, often trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. But the mission is the same. Knowledge can only have an impact if others hear about it.
As far as journalism goes, it seems to me that poor science reporting is (mostly) simply due to ignorance. Maybe there ought to be more outreach courses aimed at journalists. Of course you need experts to tell you about the technical details and the results themselves. But beyond that, many of the techniques of critical analysis aren't that hard.
From the political perspective something much more sinister looks to be going on. It feels less of a case of simple ignorance and more of wilful bullshitting : not caring about the evidence rather than (but not excluding the case of) not understanding it. It's not difficult to understand, say, that something being possible doesn't mean it isn't fantastically unlikely, or that because something did happen once it doesn't mean that it happened much less often than other incidents. False degrees of confidence in or against a result aren't because politicians don't understand this, it's because they don't care (not always out of malevolence or even stupidity, but sometimes). When you strip away the objective evidence, all you have is subjective, emotion-driven ideology. And where it may be difficult to argue with a fact, it's easy to argue with an emotion.
That's not to say that there aren't media outlets that are hugely partisan and essentially nothing but the mouthpieces of their favourite political tribe : there are. These institutions attempt to discredit science but only as part of a larger campaign of discrediting anyone and anything (from any field) that even hints at disagreement with their moral values. Anyone who says otherwise, regardless of their status, is branded as a member of the controlling elite, and conversely, anyone agreeing with them is One of The People. They don't actually care a damn about The People, of course; mostly this kind of rhetoric is used by people who are far more out of touch than the "elite" they like to deride. It is merely a rhetorical tool to sow division, nothing more. The underlying theme is one of avoiding and ignoring the evidence, because even imperfect evidence is, if analysed sensibly, a damn sight harder to argue with than a whimsical feeling.
So yes, improving science journalism is important. But this is only one expression of the root problem, not the problem itself.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-journalists-and-scientists-have-in-common/
Scientists and journalists share a passion for questioning assumptions and biases. We are trained to uncover hidden narratives in the pursuit of deeper understandings. And we share an enthusiasm for revealing new knowledge that can be shared with the world.
These values cannot be taken for granted, especially in our current political environment. It is no secret that both scientists and journalists are facing a concerted wave of allegations around “bias” and “fake news.” This type of regressive criticism is not new. Throughout history, those who have sought to suppress the truth have endeavored to muffle the voices of scientists and journalists. Without these voices societies decay. Therefore, when confronted with the current assaults, we cannot allow ourselves to recoil into our protective harbors and wait for the storm to pass. We cannot wait for others to step into the void. We have to shrug off whatever reluctances we may have and find ways to share the stories of science with a world in desperate need of hearing them.
We recognize that there are differences between the ways journalists and scientists perform their professions, and those differences could serve as barriers for cooperation. Scientists often are wary of the way their work might be presented by journalists. They have seen nuanced research oversimplified or hyped for more dramatic (and sometimes misleading) headlines. At the same time, journalists can be frustrated by scientists who respond to straightforward questions with jargon and are unable or unwilling to explain the essence of their discoveries without caveats and qualifiers.
We believe, however, this mistrust is superficial and can be overcome for the benefit of all of society. Scientists and journalists share core aspirations. Both disciplines are about observing the world, questioning the unknown and collecting facts. Both scientists and journalists know their work is built on the work of others and they must find a way to share their discoveries. Scientists may tell their stories in papers they publish to share with their colleagues in the field. Journalists may tell their stories in print, radio or film, often trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. But the mission is the same. Knowledge can only have an impact if others hear about it.
As far as journalism goes, it seems to me that poor science reporting is (mostly) simply due to ignorance. Maybe there ought to be more outreach courses aimed at journalists. Of course you need experts to tell you about the technical details and the results themselves. But beyond that, many of the techniques of critical analysis aren't that hard.
From the political perspective something much more sinister looks to be going on. It feels less of a case of simple ignorance and more of wilful bullshitting : not caring about the evidence rather than (but not excluding the case of) not understanding it. It's not difficult to understand, say, that something being possible doesn't mean it isn't fantastically unlikely, or that because something did happen once it doesn't mean that it happened much less often than other incidents. False degrees of confidence in or against a result aren't because politicians don't understand this, it's because they don't care (not always out of malevolence or even stupidity, but sometimes). When you strip away the objective evidence, all you have is subjective, emotion-driven ideology. And where it may be difficult to argue with a fact, it's easy to argue with an emotion.
That's not to say that there aren't media outlets that are hugely partisan and essentially nothing but the mouthpieces of their favourite political tribe : there are. These institutions attempt to discredit science but only as part of a larger campaign of discrediting anyone and anything (from any field) that even hints at disagreement with their moral values. Anyone who says otherwise, regardless of their status, is branded as a member of the controlling elite, and conversely, anyone agreeing with them is One of The People. They don't actually care a damn about The People, of course; mostly this kind of rhetoric is used by people who are far more out of touch than the "elite" they like to deride. It is merely a rhetorical tool to sow division, nothing more. The underlying theme is one of avoiding and ignoring the evidence, because even imperfect evidence is, if analysed sensibly, a damn sight harder to argue with than a whimsical feeling.
So yes, improving science journalism is important. But this is only one expression of the root problem, not the problem itself.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-journalists-and-scientists-have-in-common/
Face recognition on a galactic scale
Researchers have taught an artificial intelligence program used to recognise faces on Facebook to identify galaxies in deep space. The result is an AI bot named ClaRAN that scans images taken by radio telescopes. Its job is to spot radio galaxies—galaxies that emit powerful radio jets from supermassive black holes at their centres.
ClaRAN is the brainchild of big data specialist Dr. Chen Wu and astronomer Dr. Ivy Wong, both from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). Dr. Wong said black holes are found at the centre of most, if not all, galaxies. "These supermassive black holes occasionally burp out jets that can be seen with a radio telescope," she said. "Over time, the jets can stretch a long way from their host galaxies, making it difficult for traditional computer programs to figure out where the galaxy is. That's what we're trying to teach ClaRAN to do."
Dr. Wu said ClaRAN grew out of an open source version of Microsoft and Facebook's object detection software. He said the program was completely overhauled and trained to recognise galaxies instead of people. ClaRAN itself is also open source and publicly available on GitHub.
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-artificial-intelligence-bot-galaxies.html
ClaRAN is the brainchild of big data specialist Dr. Chen Wu and astronomer Dr. Ivy Wong, both from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). Dr. Wong said black holes are found at the centre of most, if not all, galaxies. "These supermassive black holes occasionally burp out jets that can be seen with a radio telescope," she said. "Over time, the jets can stretch a long way from their host galaxies, making it difficult for traditional computer programs to figure out where the galaxy is. That's what we're trying to teach ClaRAN to do."
Dr. Wu said ClaRAN grew out of an open source version of Microsoft and Facebook's object detection software. He said the program was completely overhauled and trained to recognise galaxies instead of people. ClaRAN itself is also open source and publicly available on GitHub.
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-artificial-intelligence-bot-galaxies.html
Canada cracks down on witches
What a time to be alive.
Two Canadian women have been charged with pretending to practise witchcraft, breaking a little-known law in Canada's criminal code that could soon be out the door.
It is not illegal to practise witchcraft in Canada - either as part of a religion like Wicca or as an occult practice. However, according to Section 365 of Canada's Criminal Code, it is illegal to "fraudulently pretend to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration". The law has generally been interpreted as a provision against using the occult to perpetuate fraud, say by someone promising to cure a disease with magic. The conviction can lead to a C$2,000 fine and up to six months in jail.
Coughlin, the legal expert, told the BBC the bill is necessary to help bring the criminal code, parts of which date back to 1892, into the modern era. "A lot of them are just out of step with the time, out of step with the facts or really, are duplicative of other offences," says the Dalhousie University professor. "In the case of the witchcraft [law], realistically any behaviour that would fall within that provision... would also be captured by other provisions in the criminal code, like fraud."
Until the law comes into force, however, police have every right to charge being with pretending to practice witchcraft. "It's not uncommon for police to lay every charge they can think of, simply because it gives them a bargaining chip," he says.
Canadian Monica Bodirsky, a witch and artist in Toronto, welcomed the change in the law, which she said is "a holdover from stereotypes and fears of witches being evil". She says current fraud laws are strong enough to target people who take advantage of others, and that witches shouldn't be singled out. "Fraud is fraud," she says. There's a big difference between providing a service - like a tarot reading - and preying on people's beliefs or fears of magic to manipulate them out of large sums of money, she said.
"Fortune telling and phony psychics, it's very easy to tell the difference generally by the price tag," she says. She charges for tarot readings, and believes genuine fortune tellers never tell clients they're cursed or that they can cure an illness. Instead, she says she offers general life advice, and clients have the choice whether to take her advice or not.
She says you shouldn't have to prove that magic is real in order to practise it, or earn a living from it. "If you're going to invest $20, $40, $60 in a tarot reading and you find it's irrelevant to you, or did you no good, why would that being any different than going to a reiki treatment and finding that didn't work?" she asked. "Would you charge a reiki practitioner with fraud?"
Sure, if they claimed they could do something they couldn't. If they say, "I believe this will help, but it's at your own risk", then that's different from saying, "This will definitely help you and if you say it doesn't then you're a liar". If people want to spend their money on something with no tangible benefits, well, they do that all the time. Seems to work well enough for Starbucks at any rate.
Of course, if people are using this to influence their decisions which affect other people, then it gets more tricky. It's clear enough if you use "magic" instead of methods which are proven to work. It's a bit uglier if there's no proven method and the options are subjective. The worst case of all is when people cannot distinguish between methods which do and do not work, which is an epistemic crisis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45983540
Two Canadian women have been charged with pretending to practise witchcraft, breaking a little-known law in Canada's criminal code that could soon be out the door.
It is not illegal to practise witchcraft in Canada - either as part of a religion like Wicca or as an occult practice. However, according to Section 365 of Canada's Criminal Code, it is illegal to "fraudulently pretend to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration". The law has generally been interpreted as a provision against using the occult to perpetuate fraud, say by someone promising to cure a disease with magic. The conviction can lead to a C$2,000 fine and up to six months in jail.
Coughlin, the legal expert, told the BBC the bill is necessary to help bring the criminal code, parts of which date back to 1892, into the modern era. "A lot of them are just out of step with the time, out of step with the facts or really, are duplicative of other offences," says the Dalhousie University professor. "In the case of the witchcraft [law], realistically any behaviour that would fall within that provision... would also be captured by other provisions in the criminal code, like fraud."
Until the law comes into force, however, police have every right to charge being with pretending to practice witchcraft. "It's not uncommon for police to lay every charge they can think of, simply because it gives them a bargaining chip," he says.
Canadian Monica Bodirsky, a witch and artist in Toronto, welcomed the change in the law, which she said is "a holdover from stereotypes and fears of witches being evil". She says current fraud laws are strong enough to target people who take advantage of others, and that witches shouldn't be singled out. "Fraud is fraud," she says. There's a big difference between providing a service - like a tarot reading - and preying on people's beliefs or fears of magic to manipulate them out of large sums of money, she said.
"Fortune telling and phony psychics, it's very easy to tell the difference generally by the price tag," she says. She charges for tarot readings, and believes genuine fortune tellers never tell clients they're cursed or that they can cure an illness. Instead, she says she offers general life advice, and clients have the choice whether to take her advice or not.
She says you shouldn't have to prove that magic is real in order to practise it, or earn a living from it. "If you're going to invest $20, $40, $60 in a tarot reading and you find it's irrelevant to you, or did you no good, why would that being any different than going to a reiki treatment and finding that didn't work?" she asked. "Would you charge a reiki practitioner with fraud?"
Sure, if they claimed they could do something they couldn't. If they say, "I believe this will help, but it's at your own risk", then that's different from saying, "This will definitely help you and if you say it doesn't then you're a liar". If people want to spend their money on something with no tangible benefits, well, they do that all the time. Seems to work well enough for Starbucks at any rate.
Of course, if people are using this to influence their decisions which affect other people, then it gets more tricky. It's clear enough if you use "magic" instead of methods which are proven to work. It's a bit uglier if there's no proven method and the options are subjective. The worst case of all is when people cannot distinguish between methods which do and do not work, which is an epistemic crisis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45983540
Trump hates foreign babies
For someone apparently so successful, he seems remarkably insecure about foreign infants.
In an interview with Axios, President Drumpf claimed that he was working on an end to birthright citizenship, the 150-year-old principle that says anyone born on US soil is an American citizen. "It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don't," Mr Drumpf said. "You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they're saying I can do it just with an executive order."
Mr Drumpf claimed that such an order was currently in the works, and not long after, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted: "I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President @realDonaldDrumpf."
"The baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all those benefits. It's ridiculous," Mr Drumpf told Axios. "It has to end."
I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of those benefits only happen if you're actually living in the US (or your parent or guardian is) and therefore paying taxes.
In his remarks to Axios, Drumpf falsely claimed that the United States is the only country that has birthright citizenship. In fact, more than 30 countries - including Canada, Mexico, Malaysia and Lesotho - practise automatic "jus soli", or "right of the soil" without restriction. Other countries, like the UK and Australia, allow for a modified version where citizenship is automatically granted if one parent is a citizen or permanent resident.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46034989
In an interview with Axios, President Drumpf claimed that he was working on an end to birthright citizenship, the 150-year-old principle that says anyone born on US soil is an American citizen. "It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don't," Mr Drumpf said. "You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they're saying I can do it just with an executive order."
Mr Drumpf claimed that such an order was currently in the works, and not long after, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted: "I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President @realDonaldDrumpf."
"The baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all those benefits. It's ridiculous," Mr Drumpf told Axios. "It has to end."
I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of those benefits only happen if you're actually living in the US (or your parent or guardian is) and therefore paying taxes.
In his remarks to Axios, Drumpf falsely claimed that the United States is the only country that has birthright citizenship. In fact, more than 30 countries - including Canada, Mexico, Malaysia and Lesotho - practise automatic "jus soli", or "right of the soil" without restriction. Other countries, like the UK and Australia, allow for a modified version where citizenship is automatically granted if one parent is a citizen or permanent resident.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46034989
Tuesday 30 October 2018
Pre-crime to the rescue : sometimes a correlation without causation is enough
Tech firm PredPol - short for predictive policing - claims its data analytics algorithms can improve crime detection by 10-50% in some cities. It takes years of historic data, including the type, location and time of crime, and combines this with lots of other socio-economic data, which is then analysed by an algorithm originally designed to forecast earthquake aftershocks. The software tries to predict where and when specific crimes will occur over the next 12 hours, and the algorithm is updated every day as new data comes in.
"PredPol was inspired by experiments run by the University of California in collaboration with the Los Angeles Police Department," says PredPol co-founder and anthropology professor Jeff Brantingham. "That study demonstrated that algorithmically driven forecasts could predict twice as much crime and, when used in the field, prevent twice as much crime as existing best practice."
Prof Brantingham says machine learning allows PredPol to analyse data, draw conclusions and make connections between large amounts of data that human analysts simply could not cope with.
More than 50 police departments across the US use PredPol software, as well as a handful of forces in the UK. Kent Constabulary, for example, says street violence fell by 6% following a four-month trial. "We found that the model was just incredibly accurate at predicting the times and locations where these crimes were likely to occur," says Steve Clark, deputy chief of Santa Cruz Police Department. At that point, we realised we've got something here."
Sceptics say this is pseudoscience, because crunching crime data to make informed decisions on police deployment is nothing new. Many forces have traditionally used "hot spot analysis", where past offences are recorded and overlaid onto a map, with officers concentrating on those areas. But PredPol and others working in this space, such as Palantir, CrimeScan and ShotSpotter Missions, say that traditional hot spot analysis is just reacting to what happened yesterday, not anticipating what will happen tomorrow. AI and machine learning can spot patterns we've never noticed before.
I'm not sure what they mean by "specific crimes". I presume they mean type of crimes, not specific incidents. If so, it doesn't seem outlandish to me that there could be non-obvious patterns in data that give reasonable, broad indications of what might happen next. Obviously it would be ludicrous to suggest it could be anything like Minority Report's psychics, but a more general crime forecast ? "Tomorrow : cloudy, scattered showers with outbreaks of racial violence" ? Doesn't seem overly-preposterous. The thing about correlation not equalling causation is that sometimes you don't need to understand the cause to get useful information.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46017239
"PredPol was inspired by experiments run by the University of California in collaboration with the Los Angeles Police Department," says PredPol co-founder and anthropology professor Jeff Brantingham. "That study demonstrated that algorithmically driven forecasts could predict twice as much crime and, when used in the field, prevent twice as much crime as existing best practice."
Prof Brantingham says machine learning allows PredPol to analyse data, draw conclusions and make connections between large amounts of data that human analysts simply could not cope with.
More than 50 police departments across the US use PredPol software, as well as a handful of forces in the UK. Kent Constabulary, for example, says street violence fell by 6% following a four-month trial. "We found that the model was just incredibly accurate at predicting the times and locations where these crimes were likely to occur," says Steve Clark, deputy chief of Santa Cruz Police Department. At that point, we realised we've got something here."
Sceptics say this is pseudoscience, because crunching crime data to make informed decisions on police deployment is nothing new. Many forces have traditionally used "hot spot analysis", where past offences are recorded and overlaid onto a map, with officers concentrating on those areas. But PredPol and others working in this space, such as Palantir, CrimeScan and ShotSpotter Missions, say that traditional hot spot analysis is just reacting to what happened yesterday, not anticipating what will happen tomorrow. AI and machine learning can spot patterns we've never noticed before.
I'm not sure what they mean by "specific crimes". I presume they mean type of crimes, not specific incidents. If so, it doesn't seem outlandish to me that there could be non-obvious patterns in data that give reasonable, broad indications of what might happen next. Obviously it would be ludicrous to suggest it could be anything like Minority Report's psychics, but a more general crime forecast ? "Tomorrow : cloudy, scattered showers with outbreaks of racial violence" ? Doesn't seem overly-preposterous. The thing about correlation not equalling causation is that sometimes you don't need to understand the cause to get useful information.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46017239
The UK spaceport's first users
Of course, the satellites are only half of the picture. We will also need a means of getting them into space. This is where UK-based private launch specialist Orbex comes in. With £30 million already secured in public and private investment, the company is well on its way to developing a rocket that’s perfect for launching small satellites.
“The company started as what the British would call a wheeze,” says Orbex CEO Chris Larmour. “Some friends and I were chatting over a beer one night and wondering how hard it was to build a Moon rocket in this day and age. We got to the point where it stopped being a wheeze and we realised it’s potentially quite doable for a small company,” he says.
The rocket the Orbex team is developing stands around 17m tall, weighs in at 15 tonnes when fully fuelled and will be capable of delivering a payload of around 200kg into low Earth orbit, and placing it in position with an accuracy of 15m. It is also remarkably eco-friendly.
“A key driver for us is being a good tenant on the site,” says Larmour. To that end, his company has gone against convention and chosen to use propane as their rocket fuel. This is exactly the same fuel that the farmers and other inhabitants use in that area to run their homes. And the fuel tank of the Orbex rocket is roughly the size of a household tank that people have in their gardens. “We are no more destructive than one farm in that area,” says Larmour.
http://bit.ly/2JoekP2
“The company started as what the British would call a wheeze,” says Orbex CEO Chris Larmour. “Some friends and I were chatting over a beer one night and wondering how hard it was to build a Moon rocket in this day and age. We got to the point where it stopped being a wheeze and we realised it’s potentially quite doable for a small company,” he says.
The rocket the Orbex team is developing stands around 17m tall, weighs in at 15 tonnes when fully fuelled and will be capable of delivering a payload of around 200kg into low Earth orbit, and placing it in position with an accuracy of 15m. It is also remarkably eco-friendly.
“A key driver for us is being a good tenant on the site,” says Larmour. To that end, his company has gone against convention and chosen to use propane as their rocket fuel. This is exactly the same fuel that the farmers and other inhabitants use in that area to run their homes. And the fuel tank of the Orbex rocket is roughly the size of a household tank that people have in their gardens. “We are no more destructive than one farm in that area,” says Larmour.
http://bit.ly/2JoekP2
Satanists are angry at Sabrina the Teenage Witch
Uh huh....
On Sunday, Satanic Temple Co-Founder Lucien Greaves tweeted that the group would be "taking legal action" against Netflix and the show for "appropriating" its copyrighted monument design of Baphomet. Greaves confirmed to SFGATE that the group's lawyer sent a letter to Netflix. He also added that Baphomet, and particularly their design of the figure, is a "central icon" to the Satanic Temple.
In the new "Sabrina" series, half-witch Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) is enrolled at a witchcraft school called the Academy of Unseen Arts, at which a Baphomet statue sits at the center. The show's Satan character becomes Sabrina's adversary and is referred to as the "Dark Lord."
https://www.sfgate.com/tv/article/Satanic-Temple-Netflix-Sabrina-baphomet-statue-13345795.php
On Sunday, Satanic Temple Co-Founder Lucien Greaves tweeted that the group would be "taking legal action" against Netflix and the show for "appropriating" its copyrighted monument design of Baphomet. Greaves confirmed to SFGATE that the group's lawyer sent a letter to Netflix. He also added that Baphomet, and particularly their design of the figure, is a "central icon" to the Satanic Temple.
In the new "Sabrina" series, half-witch Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) is enrolled at a witchcraft school called the Academy of Unseen Arts, at which a Baphomet statue sits at the center. The show's Satan character becomes Sabrina's adversary and is referred to as the "Dark Lord."
https://www.sfgate.com/tv/article/Satanic-Temple-Netflix-Sabrina-baphomet-statue-13345795.php
Julian Assange must learn to be a better house guest
Post satire era, I tell thee...
Earlier this month, Mr Assange was given a new set of house rules by the London embassy that included paying for internet use and taking better care of his cat. He was also asked to keep the bathroom clean and pay for his own food and laundry.
Mr Assange had argued that the conditions violated his "fundamental rights and freedoms", and were intended to force him to leave. The judge said a requirement to pay for internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46027963
Earlier this month, Mr Assange was given a new set of house rules by the London embassy that included paying for internet use and taking better care of his cat. He was also asked to keep the bathroom clean and pay for his own food and laundry.
Mr Assange had argued that the conditions violated his "fundamental rights and freedoms", and were intended to force him to leave. The judge said a requirement to pay for internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46027963
Trump openly promotes violence
An incomplete list : off the top of my head, it doesn't include the time he implied "second amendment people" could assassinate Clinton.
The man is a monster. A literal monster. They say you should never attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to stupidity, and that's true. But they aren't mutually exclusive by any means. And they say he's a symptom, not a cause. That's only partially accurate, because symptoms and causes aren't mutually exclusive either. In fact viral symptoms are exactly intended to propagate the virus further.
No-one thinks of themselves as the villain. Few openly admit to racism or bigotry, but you don't have to be a card-carrying member of the KKK to be a racist. You don't have to go around physically beating people to inspire violence. And you don't have to even despise every minority to normalise discrimination. Calling oneself a nationalist may be technically different to, "white nationalist", but in context, there are no reasonable grounds to doubt the underlying intention.
http://huffp.st/zT5KEea
The man is a monster. A literal monster. They say you should never attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to stupidity, and that's true. But they aren't mutually exclusive by any means. And they say he's a symptom, not a cause. That's only partially accurate, because symptoms and causes aren't mutually exclusive either. In fact viral symptoms are exactly intended to propagate the virus further.
No-one thinks of themselves as the villain. Few openly admit to racism or bigotry, but you don't have to be a card-carrying member of the KKK to be a racist. You don't have to go around physically beating people to inspire violence. And you don't have to even despise every minority to normalise discrimination. Calling oneself a nationalist may be technically different to, "white nationalist", but in context, there are no reasonable grounds to doubt the underlying intention.
http://huffp.st/zT5KEea
Monday 29 October 2018
Hydrogen fuel cells are back, for trains
Haven't heard much of hydrogen fuel cells in a while. Maybe trains would easier from an infrastructure point of view, although anything that increases the cost of trains still further is unlikely to be popular.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45985510/are-hydrogen-trains-the-future-of-uk-travel
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45985510/are-hydrogen-trains-the-future-of-uk-travel
Cheaper, energy-efficient air conditioning is my dream come true
Gimme ! Gimme ! Gimme !
Researchers in the US have scaled up a new low-cost system that could provide efficient cooling for homes while using very little electricity. The team has developed a roof-top sized array, built from a highly reflective material made from glass and polymers. The system is based around what's termed a cooling meta-material, which is essentially an engineered film not found in nature.
Last year, researchers at CU Boulder in the US published research on the extraordinary properties of the new film, which reflects back almost all incoming light from the Sun. But it also has another cooling trick that makes it quite special. If you use the film to cover water, it allows any heat in the liquid to escape into the air. So when the heat escapes and is not replaced because the material deflects away sunlight, temperatures drop rapidly.
In tests, the system kept water around 10C cooler than the ambient air when exposed to midday sunlight in summer. The approach could also be scaled up to cool power stations and data centres. The system has been tested outdoors in a variety of weather conditions. In experiments carried out in the summer of 2017, the reflective system kept a container of water some 12C cooler than the surrounding air in the warmest hours of the day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45991225
Researchers in the US have scaled up a new low-cost system that could provide efficient cooling for homes while using very little electricity. The team has developed a roof-top sized array, built from a highly reflective material made from glass and polymers. The system is based around what's termed a cooling meta-material, which is essentially an engineered film not found in nature.
Last year, researchers at CU Boulder in the US published research on the extraordinary properties of the new film, which reflects back almost all incoming light from the Sun. But it also has another cooling trick that makes it quite special. If you use the film to cover water, it allows any heat in the liquid to escape into the air. So when the heat escapes and is not replaced because the material deflects away sunlight, temperatures drop rapidly.
In tests, the system kept water around 10C cooler than the ambient air when exposed to midday sunlight in summer. The approach could also be scaled up to cool power stations and data centres. The system has been tested outdoors in a variety of weather conditions. In experiments carried out in the summer of 2017, the reflective system kept a container of water some 12C cooler than the surrounding air in the warmest hours of the day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45991225
Sunday 28 October 2018
Technology has finally gone too far
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AI is now producing terrible and terribly overpriced art
Without an artist ? Or I suppose we redefine "artist", or possibly "art". Good luck with that. I think it looks a bit too much like this : https://metro.co.uk/2012/08/23/well-meaning-old-lady-transforms-jesus-christ-fresco-ecce-homo-into-hairy-monkey-in-ill-fitting-tunic-546830/
Via Sakari Maaranen.
Originally shared by Event Horizon
Art without an artist: is this the beginning of a total dissolution of the myth of creative genius, or a pure art-market fetishism of technological and algorithmic novelty ? A bit of both, perhaps.
Despite that in many ways the procedurally recursive and recombinatory creative aggregation of style, method and idiom is what art is (and what artists do), this all begins to seem like a free-floating system in which human agency and subjective experience are no longer the epistemological anchors, boundaries or arbiters of value. Virtual currencies, distributed systems, remote presence - altogether, a curious inversion of the focal point of subjective individuality which arises (mischievously) as a technological consequence of the accelerating process of symbolic refinement and specialisation that initially generated to support and validate that nodal pivot of individual and cultural self.
At the heights of technological sophistication, do we effectively write ourselves out of our own story ?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45980863
Via Sakari Maaranen.
Originally shared by Event Horizon
Art without an artist: is this the beginning of a total dissolution of the myth of creative genius, or a pure art-market fetishism of technological and algorithmic novelty ? A bit of both, perhaps.
Despite that in many ways the procedurally recursive and recombinatory creative aggregation of style, method and idiom is what art is (and what artists do), this all begins to seem like a free-floating system in which human agency and subjective experience are no longer the epistemological anchors, boundaries or arbiters of value. Virtual currencies, distributed systems, remote presence - altogether, a curious inversion of the focal point of subjective individuality which arises (mischievously) as a technological consequence of the accelerating process of symbolic refinement and specialisation that initially generated to support and validate that nodal pivot of individual and cultural self.
At the heights of technological sophistication, do we effectively write ourselves out of our own story ?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45980863
Storing nuclear waste in diamond batteries
Well that's cool.
Researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK have a solution. Geochemist Tom Scott and colleagues have invented a method to encapsulate nuclear waste within diamonds, which as a battery, can provide a clean energy supply lasting in some cases, thousands of years.
Scott said there were no emissions, no moving parts, no maintenance, and zero concerns about safety. The radiation is locked safely away inside the gemstone. All the while, it generates a small, steady stream of electricity. Nickel–63, an unstable isotope, was used in this first experiment. It created a battery with a half-life of a century.
There are other substances which would last over ten times longer, while helping to reduce our nuclear waste stockpile. Older nuclear reactors, in service between the 1950s and the 1970′s, used graphite blocks to cool the uranium rods. But after years of service these blocks become covered in a layer of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of around 5,730 years. Once a power plant is decommissioned, those blocks must be stored as well.
By heating the blocks, scientists can turn carbon-14 into a gas, which would be gathered and compressed into a diamond—since diamonds are just another form of carbon, anyway. Each gemstone emits short-range radiation, which is easily contained by just about any solid material. Since diamond is the strongest substance on Earth, it can be safely stored inside. Researchers covered their work in a lecture at the university entitled, “Ideas to change the world.”
The diamond batteries only put out a small amount of current. They can’t replace contemporary ones quite yet. Scott told Digital Trends, “An alkaline AA battery weighs about 20 grams, has an energy density storage rating of 700 Joules/gram, and [uses] up this energy if operated continuously for about 24 hours.” Meanwhile, “A diamond beta-battery containing 1 gram of C14 will deliver 15 Joules per day, and will continue to produce this level of output for 5,730 years — so its total energy storage rating is 2.7 TeraJ.” Another stumbling block is cost, as anyone who has ever saved up for an engagement ring can attest.
Once these hurdles are overcome, possible applications include powering spacecraft, satellites, high- flying drones, and medical devices such as pacemakers—anything really where batteries are difficult or impossible to charge, or change. One tantalizing speculation: powered by such crystals, interstellar probes could operate even in the darkest reaches of space, where solar power is no longer feasible.
http://www.impactlab.net/2018/10/24/scientists-turn-nuclear-waste-into-diamond-batteries/
Researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK have a solution. Geochemist Tom Scott and colleagues have invented a method to encapsulate nuclear waste within diamonds, which as a battery, can provide a clean energy supply lasting in some cases, thousands of years.
Scott said there were no emissions, no moving parts, no maintenance, and zero concerns about safety. The radiation is locked safely away inside the gemstone. All the while, it generates a small, steady stream of electricity. Nickel–63, an unstable isotope, was used in this first experiment. It created a battery with a half-life of a century.
There are other substances which would last over ten times longer, while helping to reduce our nuclear waste stockpile. Older nuclear reactors, in service between the 1950s and the 1970′s, used graphite blocks to cool the uranium rods. But after years of service these blocks become covered in a layer of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of around 5,730 years. Once a power plant is decommissioned, those blocks must be stored as well.
By heating the blocks, scientists can turn carbon-14 into a gas, which would be gathered and compressed into a diamond—since diamonds are just another form of carbon, anyway. Each gemstone emits short-range radiation, which is easily contained by just about any solid material. Since diamond is the strongest substance on Earth, it can be safely stored inside. Researchers covered their work in a lecture at the university entitled, “Ideas to change the world.”
The diamond batteries only put out a small amount of current. They can’t replace contemporary ones quite yet. Scott told Digital Trends, “An alkaline AA battery weighs about 20 grams, has an energy density storage rating of 700 Joules/gram, and [uses] up this energy if operated continuously for about 24 hours.” Meanwhile, “A diamond beta-battery containing 1 gram of C14 will deliver 15 Joules per day, and will continue to produce this level of output for 5,730 years — so its total energy storage rating is 2.7 TeraJ.” Another stumbling block is cost, as anyone who has ever saved up for an engagement ring can attest.
Once these hurdles are overcome, possible applications include powering spacecraft, satellites, high- flying drones, and medical devices such as pacemakers—anything really where batteries are difficult or impossible to charge, or change. One tantalizing speculation: powered by such crystals, interstellar probes could operate even in the darkest reaches of space, where solar power is no longer feasible.
http://www.impactlab.net/2018/10/24/scientists-turn-nuclear-waste-into-diamond-batteries/
Post-truth is not necessary to accept uncertainty
An interesting read. There's much here I agree with. I just think that just because the findings of science are evidenced-based and provisional, and driven by humans subject to all the frailties associated with using blood-soaked goop to learn about distant galaxies, there's no need to question the assumption of an objective, measurable, external, logical reality. An entirely new philosophical outlook isn't required or beneficial just to recognise that science isn't (and can't be) perfect. Granted, front-line research is a different and much more uncertain endeavour that established paradigms. And I also grant that sometimes major paradigms get overturned. That just means research is uncertain, not that there are no facts at all.
However, I can't say I've ever really been under the impression that science is or is supposed to be infallible, as, according to this, apparently many people are. I've never seen scientists or other experts as authorities beyond reproach, indeed, no such authority exists in any field. That would be just about the most serious error possible, but it's an equal-but-opposite mistake to think that everything is a subjective social construct. That's just reversing the problem. It's just that experts are better at dealing with problem with non-experts. And a consensus of experts is even better. A consensus of experts with strong meta-knowledge of who believes what and a thorough understanding of the alternative theories, well, that may very well be the best of all.
Even "best of all" isn't perfect. Never will be. At a seminar last week, a prominent scientist said that "at some point we have to come to a decision, or we just keep debating this for the next hundred years". I disagree. I think a scientific consensus is immeasurably strengthened exactly because it isn't done by a Committee of Truth. It's people acting independently, coming to their own conclusions. Great Debates aren't intended to settle the matter or decide that anyone espousing theory X is to become a pariah. They're about exchanging ideas and letting people make up their own minds, not to enforce doctrine. Getting the community as a whole to make a decision would be just about the worst approach possible.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/06/consensus-and-conspiracy.html
From the article (a long read) :
Removing from his pocket a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled some notes, the psychologist hesitated before asking, “Do you believe in reality?” For a moment, Latour thought he was being set up for a joke. Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality. As a founder of the new academic discipline of science and technology studies, or S.T.S., Latour regarded himself and his colleagues as allies of science. Of course he believed in reality, he told the psychologist, convinced that the conversation was in jest.
From the look of relief on the man’s face, however, Latour realized that the question had been posed in earnest. “I had to switch interpretations fast enough to comprehend both the monster he was seeing me as,” he later wrote of the encounter, “and his touching openness of mind in daring to address such a monster privately. It must have taken courage for him to meet with one of these creatures that threatened, in his view, the whole establishment of science.”
His early work, it was true, had done more than that of any other living thinker to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we acquire knowledge of what’s real. It had long been taken for granted, for example, that scientific facts and entities, like cells and quarks and prions, existed “out there” in the world before they were discovered by scientists. Latour turned this notion on its head. In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, he argued that scientific facts should instead be seen as a product of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were “networked”; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them.
But what they [Latour's critics] would have missed — what they have always missed — was that Latour never sought to deny the existence of gravity. He has been doing something much more unusual: trying to redescribe the conditions by which this knowledge comes to be known.
Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims... Of course, the risk inherent in this embrace of politics is that climate deniers will seize on any acknowledgment of the social factors involved in science to discredit it even further.
As the assaults on their expertise have increased, some scientists, Latour told me, have begun to realize that the classical view of science — the assumption that the facts speak for themselves and will therefore be interpreted by all citizens in the same way — “doesn’t give them back their old authority.” In an interview last year, Rush Holt Jr., a physicist who served for 16 years in Congress, described the March for Science as a turning point: People, he said, were realizing “that they need to defend the conditions in which science can thrive.”
Whether they are conscious of this epistemological shift, it is becoming increasingly common to hear scientists characterize their discipline as a “social enterprise” and to point to the strength of their scientific track record, their labors of consensus building and the credible reputations of their researchers. Some have even begun to accept that their factual statements about the world are laden with judgments and warnings — that, in Latour’s words, “to state the fact and to ring the bell is one and the same thing.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html
However, I can't say I've ever really been under the impression that science is or is supposed to be infallible, as, according to this, apparently many people are. I've never seen scientists or other experts as authorities beyond reproach, indeed, no such authority exists in any field. That would be just about the most serious error possible, but it's an equal-but-opposite mistake to think that everything is a subjective social construct. That's just reversing the problem. It's just that experts are better at dealing with problem with non-experts. And a consensus of experts is even better. A consensus of experts with strong meta-knowledge of who believes what and a thorough understanding of the alternative theories, well, that may very well be the best of all.
Even "best of all" isn't perfect. Never will be. At a seminar last week, a prominent scientist said that "at some point we have to come to a decision, or we just keep debating this for the next hundred years". I disagree. I think a scientific consensus is immeasurably strengthened exactly because it isn't done by a Committee of Truth. It's people acting independently, coming to their own conclusions. Great Debates aren't intended to settle the matter or decide that anyone espousing theory X is to become a pariah. They're about exchanging ideas and letting people make up their own minds, not to enforce doctrine. Getting the community as a whole to make a decision would be just about the worst approach possible.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/06/consensus-and-conspiracy.html
From the article (a long read) :
Removing from his pocket a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled some notes, the psychologist hesitated before asking, “Do you believe in reality?” For a moment, Latour thought he was being set up for a joke. Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality. As a founder of the new academic discipline of science and technology studies, or S.T.S., Latour regarded himself and his colleagues as allies of science. Of course he believed in reality, he told the psychologist, convinced that the conversation was in jest.
From the look of relief on the man’s face, however, Latour realized that the question had been posed in earnest. “I had to switch interpretations fast enough to comprehend both the monster he was seeing me as,” he later wrote of the encounter, “and his touching openness of mind in daring to address such a monster privately. It must have taken courage for him to meet with one of these creatures that threatened, in his view, the whole establishment of science.”
His early work, it was true, had done more than that of any other living thinker to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we acquire knowledge of what’s real. It had long been taken for granted, for example, that scientific facts and entities, like cells and quarks and prions, existed “out there” in the world before they were discovered by scientists. Latour turned this notion on its head. In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, he argued that scientific facts should instead be seen as a product of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were “networked”; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them.
But what they [Latour's critics] would have missed — what they have always missed — was that Latour never sought to deny the existence of gravity. He has been doing something much more unusual: trying to redescribe the conditions by which this knowledge comes to be known.
Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims... Of course, the risk inherent in this embrace of politics is that climate deniers will seize on any acknowledgment of the social factors involved in science to discredit it even further.
As the assaults on their expertise have increased, some scientists, Latour told me, have begun to realize that the classical view of science — the assumption that the facts speak for themselves and will therefore be interpreted by all citizens in the same way — “doesn’t give them back their old authority.” In an interview last year, Rush Holt Jr., a physicist who served for 16 years in Congress, described the March for Science as a turning point: People, he said, were realizing “that they need to defend the conditions in which science can thrive.”
Whether they are conscious of this epistemological shift, it is becoming increasingly common to hear scientists characterize their discipline as a “social enterprise” and to point to the strength of their scientific track record, their labors of consensus building and the credible reputations of their researchers. Some have even begun to accept that their factual statements about the world are laden with judgments and warnings — that, in Latour’s words, “to state the fact and to ring the bell is one and the same thing.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html
The importance of causal reasoning in AI
I think it would be unreasonable to expect causal reasoning to be the key to "true" A.I., but it would certainly be interesting to implement. I remember from many years ago playing with stupid chatbot that had one very interesting feature : it could do crude deductive reasoning, connecting simple, short chains of if-then statements. I imagined that if you could make this sufficiently extended and detailed we'd get something like causal reasoning. Of course it would have to be fantastically complicated to do anything useful, but then, our own understanding of the word is fantastically complex. Surely we reason by a mixture of induction and something at least similar to true deduction. We recognise patterns, but infer and understand (even if incorrectly) deeper underlying causes that allow us to make predictions in unfamiliar situations. I doubt there's any single magic tool we could implement that would give true sentience, but this does seem interesting.
That’s a dramatic thing to say, that science has abandoned cause and effect. Isn’t that exactly what all of science is about?
Of course, but you cannot see this noble aspiration in scientific equations. The language of algebra is symmetric: If X tells us about Y, then Y tells us about X. I’m talking about deterministic relationships. There’s no way to write in mathematics a simple fact — for example, that the upcoming storm causes the barometer to go down, and not the other way around.
Mathematics has not developed the asymmetric language required to capture our understanding that if X causes Y that does not mean that Y causes X. Seeing that we lack a calculus for asymmetrical relations, science encourages us to create one. And this is where mathematics comes in. It turned out to be a great thrill for me to see that a simple calculus of causation solves problems that the greatest statisticians of our time deemed to be ill-defined or unsolvable. And all this with the ease and fun of finding a proof in high-school geometry.
We did not expect that so many problems could be solved by pure curve fitting. It turns out they can. But I’m asking about the future — what next? Can you have a robot scientist that would plan an experiment and find new answers to pending scientific questions? That’s the next step. We also want to conduct some communication with a machine that is meaningful, and meaningful means matching our intuition. If you deprive the robot of your intuition about cause and effect, you’re never going to communicate meaningfully. Robots could not say “I should have done better,” as you and I do. And we thus lose an important channel of communication.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/
That’s a dramatic thing to say, that science has abandoned cause and effect. Isn’t that exactly what all of science is about?
Of course, but you cannot see this noble aspiration in scientific equations. The language of algebra is symmetric: If X tells us about Y, then Y tells us about X. I’m talking about deterministic relationships. There’s no way to write in mathematics a simple fact — for example, that the upcoming storm causes the barometer to go down, and not the other way around.
Mathematics has not developed the asymmetric language required to capture our understanding that if X causes Y that does not mean that Y causes X. Seeing that we lack a calculus for asymmetrical relations, science encourages us to create one. And this is where mathematics comes in. It turned out to be a great thrill for me to see that a simple calculus of causation solves problems that the greatest statisticians of our time deemed to be ill-defined or unsolvable. And all this with the ease and fun of finding a proof in high-school geometry.
We did not expect that so many problems could be solved by pure curve fitting. It turns out they can. But I’m asking about the future — what next? Can you have a robot scientist that would plan an experiment and find new answers to pending scientific questions? That’s the next step. We also want to conduct some communication with a machine that is meaningful, and meaningful means matching our intuition. If you deprive the robot of your intuition about cause and effect, you’re never going to communicate meaningfully. Robots could not say “I should have done better,” as you and I do. And we thus lose an important channel of communication.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/
Saturday 27 October 2018
Crows can make compound tools
Incredibly, four of the eight birds discovered the key to solving the puzzle within just five minutes. By combining two of the shorter sticks, the crows were able to reach the food and push it out of an opening at the other end of the box. A crow named Mango actually created tools featuring three or four parts, offering, according to the study, “the first evidence of compound-tool construction with more than two elements in any non-human animal.”
Alex Kacelnik, a behavioural ecologist at Oxford and one of the study’s lead researchers, tells BBC News’ Gill the findings subvert the idea that animals “try everything at random and improve by reinforcement.” Instead, he argues that the crows, which received no demonstration or aid throughout the experiment, were able to predict the properties of a tool not yet in existence.
“So they can predict what something that does not yet exist would do if they made it,” Kacelnik explains. “Then they can make it and they can use it.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-caledonian-crows-can-assemble-compound-tools-180970630/
Alex Kacelnik, a behavioural ecologist at Oxford and one of the study’s lead researchers, tells BBC News’ Gill the findings subvert the idea that animals “try everything at random and improve by reinforcement.” Instead, he argues that the crows, which received no demonstration or aid throughout the experiment, were able to predict the properties of a tool not yet in existence.
“So they can predict what something that does not yet exist would do if they made it,” Kacelnik explains. “Then they can make it and they can use it.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-caledonian-crows-can-assemble-compound-tools-180970630/
We already know the Standard Model isn't quite correct
According to the Standard Model, neutrinos should be massless. But they aren’t; they have strangely small masses that don’t seem to fit in with the masses of the rest of the fundamental particles. This fact could possibly be accounted for by a tweak in the theory. Or it could have deep implications for our understanding of the universe.
“It's a picture we've gotten used to, so it doesn't seem very exotic anymore,” says Scholberg, who has been involved in many neutrino experiments over the years. “But it's certainly not part of the original Standard Model.”
“Behind the scenes, there's grumbling noisiness that maybe there's something else out there,” says Kate Scholberg, a neutrino physicist at Duke University. “It could be nothing, or it could be something very exciting.”
This extra neutrino—suggested by results from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector and the MiniBooNE experiment—wouldn’t match up with the generations of particles in the Standard Model. It would be “sterile,” meaning it likely wouldn’t interact directly with any Standard Model particles. It might even be a form of dark matter.
Other experiments, such as MINOS and IceCube, have published results that are difficult to reconcile with the sterile neutrinos seen by LSND. When Kopp and his colleagues looked for evidence for a fourth neutrino flavor, the numbers just didn’t work. Kopp doesn’t think this rules out sterile neutrinos yet: “It's certainly not impossible that a more complicated scenario with extra neutrinos could fit the data.”
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/already-beyond-the-standard-model
“It's a picture we've gotten used to, so it doesn't seem very exotic anymore,” says Scholberg, who has been involved in many neutrino experiments over the years. “But it's certainly not part of the original Standard Model.”
“Behind the scenes, there's grumbling noisiness that maybe there's something else out there,” says Kate Scholberg, a neutrino physicist at Duke University. “It could be nothing, or it could be something very exciting.”
This extra neutrino—suggested by results from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector and the MiniBooNE experiment—wouldn’t match up with the generations of particles in the Standard Model. It would be “sterile,” meaning it likely wouldn’t interact directly with any Standard Model particles. It might even be a form of dark matter.
Other experiments, such as MINOS and IceCube, have published results that are difficult to reconcile with the sterile neutrinos seen by LSND. When Kopp and his colleagues looked for evidence for a fourth neutrino flavor, the numbers just didn’t work. Kopp doesn’t think this rules out sterile neutrinos yet: “It's certainly not impossible that a more complicated scenario with extra neutrinos could fit the data.”
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/already-beyond-the-standard-model
Talent-luck : hidden talents
https://repl.it/@RhysTaylor1/TalentVersusLuck
I didn't have time to work on my talent-luck simulator much lately, but here's something that might be interesting. Those not following this regularly should consult the link for an overview (and code). Briefly, I'm exploring a claim that it's luck, not talent, that's largely responsible for success. If abilities follow a Gaussian distribution, then luck is one plausible mechanism to transform this into the power-law distribution of wealth that's actually seen. The basic model is that agents (who have some starting wealth and fixed talent) pseudo-randomly encounter events which can either be lucky and (if they're sufficiently talented) double their wealth or, if they're unlucky, halve their wealth (regardless of talent).
One of the other claims of the previous paper is that luck is strongly dominant : "almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals". This is basically true in the model, but there's a significant caveat that they didn't discuss.
By default, the model has 1000 agents who have a Gaussian distribution of talent. Plotting the distribution of talent against money at the end of the simulation reveals a textbook case of no correlation. The wealthiest individuals may be of slightly above-average abilities, but not very much, and the most talented individuals can be among the poorest. So it seems that talent barely matters at all, except that the least talented people aren't likely to do very well.
But this is not necessarily the case. Previously I've shown that this is because the model gives talent the minimal possible role, and if it's allowed to affect the luck status of an event as well as giving a chance to mitigate unlucky events, a clear correlation emerges while preserving the same power-law of wealth distribution. Here I've found something different : even in the standard model, talent does correlate with wealth, it's just hidden in the noise.
It seemed to me that since talent does have a role, once we compare individuals who experience the same number of events, there ought to be a correlation of talent and wealth. Comparing the whole of society "washes out" the role that talent plays : someone who only encounters a single event is never going to become the richest, regardless of their talent. Lumping all the individuals together isn't really a fair comparison as far as the role of talent goes. So it's useful to compare individuals who experience the same number of events.
In the first plot I used the standard model conditions. The lines are linear regression fits to the agents who experience the specified number of events. That doesn't reveal very much, the slope of the lines is basically random. If talent was making a difference, I'd expect the lines to generally increase in gradient with the number of events. So it looks like luck actually does dominate here.
In a sense that's true. Whether an agent experiences an event or not is largely a matter of luck. As shown previously, this is mainly due to an agent's location (essentially a postcode lottery if you like) because the position of the events is random in space but not in time.
But it's not the whole story. This plot is misleading for two reasons. First, the number of agents is small, so the number who experience high numbers of events is small. This means the trends are largely affected (or even dominated) by scatter due to small number statistics. Luck does indeed have an important role, but it only looks so strongly dominant here because there just isn't enough data to see the trend. If we increase the number of agents to 5000 (second plot), we see something very different. There's a clear overall increase in slope of talent-wealth with increasing number of events. Agents who are equally lucky are more likely to succeed if they have higher talent.
Second, the Gaussian distribution of abilities is questionable in reality but not helpful in the model : it keeps the number of extremely talented individuals low, so again there's just no data at the extreme end. Hence it's scatter-dominated and the effects of talent cannot be seen. If a uniform distribution of talent is used (third plot), the increase in slope of the lines becomes clearer.
These are subtle effects, hard to see in the raw plots but quite evident in the linear regression slopes. It should be emphasised that in this model agents do have to be lucky to succeed. But once we control for that, once we compare agents who have equal opportunities, we still see that talent really does matter. It's just not clear in the original plots because it's hidden by the noise.
I didn't have time to work on my talent-luck simulator much lately, but here's something that might be interesting. Those not following this regularly should consult the link for an overview (and code). Briefly, I'm exploring a claim that it's luck, not talent, that's largely responsible for success. If abilities follow a Gaussian distribution, then luck is one plausible mechanism to transform this into the power-law distribution of wealth that's actually seen. The basic model is that agents (who have some starting wealth and fixed talent) pseudo-randomly encounter events which can either be lucky and (if they're sufficiently talented) double their wealth or, if they're unlucky, halve their wealth (regardless of talent).
One of the other claims of the previous paper is that luck is strongly dominant : "almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals". This is basically true in the model, but there's a significant caveat that they didn't discuss.
By default, the model has 1000 agents who have a Gaussian distribution of talent. Plotting the distribution of talent against money at the end of the simulation reveals a textbook case of no correlation. The wealthiest individuals may be of slightly above-average abilities, but not very much, and the most talented individuals can be among the poorest. So it seems that talent barely matters at all, except that the least talented people aren't likely to do very well.
But this is not necessarily the case. Previously I've shown that this is because the model gives talent the minimal possible role, and if it's allowed to affect the luck status of an event as well as giving a chance to mitigate unlucky events, a clear correlation emerges while preserving the same power-law of wealth distribution. Here I've found something different : even in the standard model, talent does correlate with wealth, it's just hidden in the noise.
It seemed to me that since talent does have a role, once we compare individuals who experience the same number of events, there ought to be a correlation of talent and wealth. Comparing the whole of society "washes out" the role that talent plays : someone who only encounters a single event is never going to become the richest, regardless of their talent. Lumping all the individuals together isn't really a fair comparison as far as the role of talent goes. So it's useful to compare individuals who experience the same number of events.
In the first plot I used the standard model conditions. The lines are linear regression fits to the agents who experience the specified number of events. That doesn't reveal very much, the slope of the lines is basically random. If talent was making a difference, I'd expect the lines to generally increase in gradient with the number of events. So it looks like luck actually does dominate here.
In a sense that's true. Whether an agent experiences an event or not is largely a matter of luck. As shown previously, this is mainly due to an agent's location (essentially a postcode lottery if you like) because the position of the events is random in space but not in time.
But it's not the whole story. This plot is misleading for two reasons. First, the number of agents is small, so the number who experience high numbers of events is small. This means the trends are largely affected (or even dominated) by scatter due to small number statistics. Luck does indeed have an important role, but it only looks so strongly dominant here because there just isn't enough data to see the trend. If we increase the number of agents to 5000 (second plot), we see something very different. There's a clear overall increase in slope of talent-wealth with increasing number of events. Agents who are equally lucky are more likely to succeed if they have higher talent.
Second, the Gaussian distribution of abilities is questionable in reality but not helpful in the model : it keeps the number of extremely talented individuals low, so again there's just no data at the extreme end. Hence it's scatter-dominated and the effects of talent cannot be seen. If a uniform distribution of talent is used (third plot), the increase in slope of the lines becomes clearer.
These are subtle effects, hard to see in the raw plots but quite evident in the linear regression slopes. It should be emphasised that in this model agents do have to be lucky to succeed. But once we control for that, once we compare agents who have equal opportunities, we still see that talent really does matter. It's just not clear in the original plots because it's hidden by the noise.
The public's views on the ethics of self-driving cars
I think the cultural differences in ethics are far more interesting in their own right than how to apply them to self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles are going to have to be significantly safer than human drivers anyway, and most of the time the only option they'll have is to slow down or not. Situations where there is a clear choice between who to kill are going to be vanishingly rare, it will be almost exclusively about juggling probabilities. The machine won't have significantly better to judge this on than a human anyway : it won't know the life stories of the people involved; it won't be able to make any complex calculations beyond simple numbers. I doubt it will be good enough to distinguish between old and young.
The results from the Moral Machine suggest there are a few shared principles when it comes to these ethical dilemmas. But the paper’s authors also found variations in preferences that followed certain divides. None of these reversed these core principles (like sparing the many over the few), but they did vary by a degree.
The researchers found that in countries in Asia and the Middle East, for example, like China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the preference to spare younger rather than older characters was “much less pronounced.” People from these countries also cared relatively less about sparing high net-worth individuals compared to people who answered from Europe and North America.
The study’s authors suggest this might be because of differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures. In the former, where the distinct value of each individual as an individual is emphasized, there was a “stronger preference for sparing the greater number of characters.” Counter to this, the weaker preference for sparing younger characters might be the result of collectivist cultures, “which emphasize the respect that is due to older members of the community.”
These variations suggest that “geographical and cultural proximity may allow groups of territories to converge on shared preferences for machine ethics,” say the study’s authors.
However, there were other factors that correlated with variations that weren’t necessarily geographic. Less prosperous countries, for example, with a lower gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and weaker civic institutions were less likely to want to crash into jaywalkers rather than people crossing the road legally, “presumably because of their experience of lower rule compliance and weaker punishment of rule deviation.”
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/10/24/18013392/self-driving-car-ethics-dilemma-mit-study-moral-machine-results
The results from the Moral Machine suggest there are a few shared principles when it comes to these ethical dilemmas. But the paper’s authors also found variations in preferences that followed certain divides. None of these reversed these core principles (like sparing the many over the few), but they did vary by a degree.
The researchers found that in countries in Asia and the Middle East, for example, like China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the preference to spare younger rather than older characters was “much less pronounced.” People from these countries also cared relatively less about sparing high net-worth individuals compared to people who answered from Europe and North America.
The study’s authors suggest this might be because of differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures. In the former, where the distinct value of each individual as an individual is emphasized, there was a “stronger preference for sparing the greater number of characters.” Counter to this, the weaker preference for sparing younger characters might be the result of collectivist cultures, “which emphasize the respect that is due to older members of the community.”
These variations suggest that “geographical and cultural proximity may allow groups of territories to converge on shared preferences for machine ethics,” say the study’s authors.
However, there were other factors that correlated with variations that weren’t necessarily geographic. Less prosperous countries, for example, with a lower gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and weaker civic institutions were less likely to want to crash into jaywalkers rather than people crossing the road legally, “presumably because of their experience of lower rule compliance and weaker punishment of rule deviation.”
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/10/24/18013392/self-driving-car-ethics-dilemma-mit-study-moral-machine-results
I suddenly really need to know this
Sometimes ya gotta ask the really big questions.
When elephants suck water in their trunks, do they get the same burning feel as humans get when we accidentally get water in our noses? And when elephans spray the water out of their trunks is there boogers in the water?
http://blog.whyanimalsdothething.com/post/179455404282/when-elephants-suck-water-in-their-trunks-do-they
When elephants suck water in their trunks, do they get the same burning feel as humans get when we accidentally get water in our noses? And when elephans spray the water out of their trunks is there boogers in the water?
http://blog.whyanimalsdothething.com/post/179455404282/when-elephants-suck-water-in-their-trunks-do-they
Tardigrades survive by turning themselves into glass
Originally, it was thought that the water bear employed a sugar called trehalose to shield its cells from damage. Brine shrimp (sea monkeys) and nematode worms use this sugar to protect against desiccation, through a process called anhydrobiosis. Those organisms produce enough of the sugar to make it 20% of their body weight.
Not the water bear. Trehalose only takes up about 2% of its entire system, when it's in stasis. Though employing a sugar to preserve one's body sounds strange, the newly discovered process that the water bear goes through is even more bizarre. It turns itself into glass.
In this study, tardigrades were placed into a drying-out chamber, which mimicked conditions the organisms would encounter in a disappearing pond. As the water bears underwent anhydrobiosis, scientists examined what genes were activated. These genes produced a certain protein, which they named tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs).
When desiccation begins and TDP is activated, it engages a process known as vitrification. Boothby said, “The glass is coating the molecules inside of the tardigrade cells, keeping them intact." From there, it goes into a form of stasis until it detects water. When that occurs, the protein is dissolved into the liquid and the tardigrade is revived.
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/scientists-finally-figure-out-why-the-water-bear-is-nearly-unstoppable
Not the water bear. Trehalose only takes up about 2% of its entire system, when it's in stasis. Though employing a sugar to preserve one's body sounds strange, the newly discovered process that the water bear goes through is even more bizarre. It turns itself into glass.
In this study, tardigrades were placed into a drying-out chamber, which mimicked conditions the organisms would encounter in a disappearing pond. As the water bears underwent anhydrobiosis, scientists examined what genes were activated. These genes produced a certain protein, which they named tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs).
When desiccation begins and TDP is activated, it engages a process known as vitrification. Boothby said, “The glass is coating the molecules inside of the tardigrade cells, keeping them intact." From there, it goes into a form of stasis until it detects water. When that occurs, the protein is dissolved into the liquid and the tardigrade is revived.
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/scientists-finally-figure-out-why-the-water-bear-is-nearly-unstoppable
War is not yet over
Rumours of the end of war are greatly exaggerated...
I think my next long read has to be something by Pinker. It feels very unfair to read critiques without reading what they're criticising. And I'm not familiar with all of the methods here either. Bearing that in mind though, I didn't spot anything obviously wrong.
The overall gist seems to be that Pinker is not properly accounting for the stochastic, extreme (but bounded, as causalities cannot take any arbitrary value) nature of war and the incompleteness of the data. Rather than examining conflict as a continuous process, in which wars are tail-end extremities but not representative of the usual occurrences (or equivalently, especially destructive conflicts are effectively statistical flukes when considering war in general), the correct approach is to study the frequency of those tail-end events over time. And there's not much evidence that these are getting rarer. Historically, the interval between major conflicts has been so long that there just hasn't been enough time since the last one to make any conclusion at all.
My only significant caveat would be that they don't clearly describe if Pinker is claiming violence overall is declining, or only warfare. So the nature of what they're trying to refute is a bit confused. I get the impression that Pinker is describing the overall levels, but here they specifically and exclusively concentrate on warfare. Fair enough if the original claim is that war is becoming rarer, but not necessarily if it's about violence. Living with the risk of war and the risk of being murdered are quite different prospects, I think.
From the paper (it's 26 pages so yer not allowed to claim TLDR for the summary) :
First, we are dealing with a “fat-tailed” phenomenon. What characterizes fat tailed variables? These have their properties (such as the average) dominated by extreme events, those "in the tails". Further, historical data are temporal (spread out over time) and statistical analyses of time series (such as financial data) require far more sophistication than simple statistical tests found in empirical scientific papers (there is a difference between ensemble probability and time probability, though not always, and the effect of the bias needs to be established).
The analysis needs to incorporate the unreliability of historical data – there is no way to go back and fact-check the casualties in the Peloponesian war and we rarely only have more than one side to the story. Estimates of war casualties are often anecdotal, spreading via citations, and based on vague computations, almost impossible to verify using period sources... the number of gaps between wars can be treated as a random variable, and its effect must be taken into consideration in the interpretation of the results.
Pinker (2011) treats as a single event the “Mongolian invasions” which lasted more than a century and a quarter. This swelled the numbers per event over the Middle Ages and contributed to the illusion that violence has dropped since, given that subsequent “events” had shorter durations. Likewise, the data makes it hard to assess whether the numbers include people who died of side effects of wars – say for example it makes a difference whether the victims of famine from the siege of Jerusalem are included or not in the historical figures.
At the core, Pinker’s severe mistake is one of standard naive empiricism – basically mistaking data (actually absence of data) for evidence and building his theory of why violence has dropped without even ascertaining whether violence did indeed drop. This is not to say that Pinker’s socio-psychological theories can’t be right: they are just not sufficiently connected to data to start remotely looking like science. Fundamentally, statistics is about ensuring people do not build scientific theories from hot air, that is without significant departure from random. Otherwise, it is patently "fooled by randomness". And we have a very clear idea what departure from random means.
For fat tailed variables, the conventional mechanism of the law of large numbers (on which statistical inference reposes) is considerably slower and significance requires more data and longer periods. Simply, the sample average is not a good estimator of the “true” mean; it has what is called a small sample bias when data is one-tailed (i.e. can only take either positive or negative values, as is the case with violence). In other words, not only do we need a lot of data to know what’s going on, but , as in the case of violence, we should expect that the mean violence as measured in sample to be lower than the true mean. Ironically, there are claims that can be done on little data: inference is asymmetric under fat-tailed domains. We require more data to assert that there are no black swans than to assert that there are black swans, hence we would need much more data to claim a drop in violence than to claim a rise in it.
The second – more serious – error Pinker made in his conclusion is to believe that tail events and the mean are somehow different animals, not realizing that the mean includes these tail events. Further, for fat-tailed variables, the mean is almost entirely determined by extremes. If you are uncertain about the tails, then you are uncertain about the mean. It is thus incoherent to say that violence has dropped but maybe not the risk of tail events; it would be like saying that someone is "extremely virtuous except during the school shooting episode when he killed 30 students", or that nuclear weapons are very safe as they only kill a small percentage of the time.
We think it is important to stress that our data set, despite its evident temporal connotation, does not form a proper time series. It is in fact trivial to notice that the different conflicts of humanity do not share the same set of causes. Battles belonging to different centuries and continents are not only independent, but also surely have different origins. In statistical words, we cannot assume the existence of a unique conflict generator process, as if conflicts were coming from the same source.
For this reason, we believe that performing time series analysis on this kind of data is useless, if not dangerous, given that one could extrapolate misleading trends, as done for example in Pinker (2011). How could the An Lushan rebellion in China (755 AD) be dependent on the Siege of Constantinople by the Arabs (717 AD), or have an impact on the Viking Raids in Ireland (from 795 AD on)?
And then, after accounting for the bounded, tail-heavy nature of war and using more robust statistical methods (they say their conclusions are robust so long as the data is no more than 30% incomplete or wrong; they restrict themselves to conflicts with more than 3,000 (seems low to me, but sometimes they use much higher) causality rates, which should not suffer from too much incompleteness) :
Conclusion : Is there any trend? The short answer is no. Our data do not support the presence of any particular trend in the number of armed conflicts over time. Humanity seems to be as belligerent as always. No increase, nor decrease.
Naturally we are speaking about the type of conflicts for which we have performed our analysis, that is to say the largest and most destructive ones. We cannot say anything about small fights with a few casualties, since they do not belong to our data set - however it is crucial that, as a central property of the fat-tailedness of the process, a decline in homicide does not affect the total properties of violence and anyone’s risk of death. As we said, the mean is tail driven.
If we focus our attention on our data set, and in particular on the observations belonging to the last 600 years (from 1500 AD on), for which missing observations should be fewer and reporting errors smaller, our analyses suggest that the number of large conflicts over time follows a homogeneous Poisson process... In simple terms, this finding supports the idea that wars are randomly distributed accidents over time, not following any particular trend, as already pointed out by Richardson (1960).
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
I think my next long read has to be something by Pinker. It feels very unfair to read critiques without reading what they're criticising. And I'm not familiar with all of the methods here either. Bearing that in mind though, I didn't spot anything obviously wrong.
The overall gist seems to be that Pinker is not properly accounting for the stochastic, extreme (but bounded, as causalities cannot take any arbitrary value) nature of war and the incompleteness of the data. Rather than examining conflict as a continuous process, in which wars are tail-end extremities but not representative of the usual occurrences (or equivalently, especially destructive conflicts are effectively statistical flukes when considering war in general), the correct approach is to study the frequency of those tail-end events over time. And there's not much evidence that these are getting rarer. Historically, the interval between major conflicts has been so long that there just hasn't been enough time since the last one to make any conclusion at all.
My only significant caveat would be that they don't clearly describe if Pinker is claiming violence overall is declining, or only warfare. So the nature of what they're trying to refute is a bit confused. I get the impression that Pinker is describing the overall levels, but here they specifically and exclusively concentrate on warfare. Fair enough if the original claim is that war is becoming rarer, but not necessarily if it's about violence. Living with the risk of war and the risk of being murdered are quite different prospects, I think.
From the paper (it's 26 pages so yer not allowed to claim TLDR for the summary) :
First, we are dealing with a “fat-tailed” phenomenon. What characterizes fat tailed variables? These have their properties (such as the average) dominated by extreme events, those "in the tails". Further, historical data are temporal (spread out over time) and statistical analyses of time series (such as financial data) require far more sophistication than simple statistical tests found in empirical scientific papers (there is a difference between ensemble probability and time probability, though not always, and the effect of the bias needs to be established).
The analysis needs to incorporate the unreliability of historical data – there is no way to go back and fact-check the casualties in the Peloponesian war and we rarely only have more than one side to the story. Estimates of war casualties are often anecdotal, spreading via citations, and based on vague computations, almost impossible to verify using period sources... the number of gaps between wars can be treated as a random variable, and its effect must be taken into consideration in the interpretation of the results.
Pinker (2011) treats as a single event the “Mongolian invasions” which lasted more than a century and a quarter. This swelled the numbers per event over the Middle Ages and contributed to the illusion that violence has dropped since, given that subsequent “events” had shorter durations. Likewise, the data makes it hard to assess whether the numbers include people who died of side effects of wars – say for example it makes a difference whether the victims of famine from the siege of Jerusalem are included or not in the historical figures.
At the core, Pinker’s severe mistake is one of standard naive empiricism – basically mistaking data (actually absence of data) for evidence and building his theory of why violence has dropped without even ascertaining whether violence did indeed drop. This is not to say that Pinker’s socio-psychological theories can’t be right: they are just not sufficiently connected to data to start remotely looking like science. Fundamentally, statistics is about ensuring people do not build scientific theories from hot air, that is without significant departure from random. Otherwise, it is patently "fooled by randomness". And we have a very clear idea what departure from random means.
For fat tailed variables, the conventional mechanism of the law of large numbers (on which statistical inference reposes) is considerably slower and significance requires more data and longer periods. Simply, the sample average is not a good estimator of the “true” mean; it has what is called a small sample bias when data is one-tailed (i.e. can only take either positive or negative values, as is the case with violence). In other words, not only do we need a lot of data to know what’s going on, but , as in the case of violence, we should expect that the mean violence as measured in sample to be lower than the true mean. Ironically, there are claims that can be done on little data: inference is asymmetric under fat-tailed domains. We require more data to assert that there are no black swans than to assert that there are black swans, hence we would need much more data to claim a drop in violence than to claim a rise in it.
The second – more serious – error Pinker made in his conclusion is to believe that tail events and the mean are somehow different animals, not realizing that the mean includes these tail events. Further, for fat-tailed variables, the mean is almost entirely determined by extremes. If you are uncertain about the tails, then you are uncertain about the mean. It is thus incoherent to say that violence has dropped but maybe not the risk of tail events; it would be like saying that someone is "extremely virtuous except during the school shooting episode when he killed 30 students", or that nuclear weapons are very safe as they only kill a small percentage of the time.
We think it is important to stress that our data set, despite its evident temporal connotation, does not form a proper time series. It is in fact trivial to notice that the different conflicts of humanity do not share the same set of causes. Battles belonging to different centuries and continents are not only independent, but also surely have different origins. In statistical words, we cannot assume the existence of a unique conflict generator process, as if conflicts were coming from the same source.
For this reason, we believe that performing time series analysis on this kind of data is useless, if not dangerous, given that one could extrapolate misleading trends, as done for example in Pinker (2011). How could the An Lushan rebellion in China (755 AD) be dependent on the Siege of Constantinople by the Arabs (717 AD), or have an impact on the Viking Raids in Ireland (from 795 AD on)?
And then, after accounting for the bounded, tail-heavy nature of war and using more robust statistical methods (they say their conclusions are robust so long as the data is no more than 30% incomplete or wrong; they restrict themselves to conflicts with more than 3,000 (seems low to me, but sometimes they use much higher) causality rates, which should not suffer from too much incompleteness) :
Conclusion : Is there any trend? The short answer is no. Our data do not support the presence of any particular trend in the number of armed conflicts over time. Humanity seems to be as belligerent as always. No increase, nor decrease.
Naturally we are speaking about the type of conflicts for which we have performed our analysis, that is to say the largest and most destructive ones. We cannot say anything about small fights with a few casualties, since they do not belong to our data set - however it is crucial that, as a central property of the fat-tailedness of the process, a decline in homicide does not affect the total properties of violence and anyone’s risk of death. As we said, the mean is tail driven.
If we focus our attention on our data set, and in particular on the observations belonging to the last 600 years (from 1500 AD on), for which missing observations should be fewer and reporting errors smaller, our analyses suggest that the number of large conflicts over time follows a homogeneous Poisson process... In simple terms, this finding supports the idea that wars are randomly distributed accidents over time, not following any particular trend, as already pointed out by Richardson (1960).
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
Thursday 25 October 2018
A notepad you can microwave for some reason
Definitely one from the department of, "uh huh..."
Originally shared by BBC Focus Magazine - science and technology
Rocketbook Wave: a microwavable notepad - functional, not delicious
http://bit.ly/2Se91pt
Originally shared by BBC Focus Magazine - science and technology
Rocketbook Wave: a microwavable notepad - functional, not delicious
http://bit.ly/2Se91pt
Wednesday 24 October 2018
Review : Doctor Who and Rosa Parks
I loved this episode ! I'm not usually a fan of the historical settings - they tend to be inserting random monsters or aliens for no particular reason. It's kinda fun to see such things in a different environment, I guess, but there's not usually any strong motivation to set it in the past. This is one of the exceptions, where the historical setting is integral to the plot. I wasn't sure if Doctor Who should tackle a subject like this, but I thought it did it extremely well. It doesn't have Rosa Parks turn out to be an alien or anything daft like that. Rather the connection to the far future is sensitively and carefully done and fully consistent with the main theme. Though I will say that the very end vision of the future is, it must be said, too brief and uninformative and feels tacked on for the sake of it. Fortunately this is unimportant to the story.
Whittaker is starting to get into her stride now. Still polite and helpful, but there's a definite edge and intensity in some scenes that wasn't there before. It's a strong contrast to the previous episodes : minimal effects work, very understated and with lots of tension. I'm very pleased with how this is developing.
I'd never heard of Rosa Parks before, because the Civil Rights movement is not much of a thing in British high school education.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCAn2lUEcg4
Whittaker is starting to get into her stride now. Still polite and helpful, but there's a definite edge and intensity in some scenes that wasn't there before. It's a strong contrast to the previous episodes : minimal effects work, very understated and with lots of tension. I'm very pleased with how this is developing.
I'd never heard of Rosa Parks before, because the Civil Rights movement is not much of a thing in British high school education.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCAn2lUEcg4
Tuesday 23 October 2018
Turning Hubble off and then on again
They literally tried turning it off and on again. As above, so below.
In an attempt to correct the erroneously high rates produced by the backup gyro, the Hubble operations team executed a running restart of the gyro on Oct. 16. This procedure turned the gyro off for one second, and then restarted it before the wheel spun down. The intention was to clear any faults that may have occurred during startup on Oct. 6, after the gyro had been off for more than 7.5 years. However, the resulting data showed no improvement in the gyro’s performance.
On Oct. 18, the Hubble operations team commanded a series of spacecraft maneuvers, or turns, in opposite directions to attempt to clear any blockage that may have caused the float to be off-center and produce the exceedingly high rates. During each maneuver, the gyro was switched from high mode to low mode to dislodge any blockage that may have accumulated around the float.
Following the Oct. 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for brief periods of time. On Oct. 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to perform additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which appear to have cleared the issue. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/update-on-the-hubble-space-telescope-safe-mode
In an attempt to correct the erroneously high rates produced by the backup gyro, the Hubble operations team executed a running restart of the gyro on Oct. 16. This procedure turned the gyro off for one second, and then restarted it before the wheel spun down. The intention was to clear any faults that may have occurred during startup on Oct. 6, after the gyro had been off for more than 7.5 years. However, the resulting data showed no improvement in the gyro’s performance.
On Oct. 18, the Hubble operations team commanded a series of spacecraft maneuvers, or turns, in opposite directions to attempt to clear any blockage that may have caused the float to be off-center and produce the exceedingly high rates. During each maneuver, the gyro was switched from high mode to low mode to dislodge any blockage that may have accumulated around the float.
Following the Oct. 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for brief periods of time. On Oct. 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to perform additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which appear to have cleared the issue. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/update-on-the-hubble-space-telescope-safe-mode
The latter-day Lady of the Lake, in reverse
This is no basis for a system of government !
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/19/experience-pulled-a-1500-year-old-sword-lake-saga-vanecek
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/19/experience-pulled-a-1500-year-old-sword-lake-saga-vanecek
The world's oldest intact ship
Several people have mentioned this, but now there's a picture !
A Greek merchant ship dating back more than 2,400 years has been found lying on its side off the Bulgarian coast. The 23m (75ft) wreck, found in the Black Sea by an Anglo-Bulgarian team, is being hailed as officially the world's oldest known intact shipwreck. The researchers were stunned to find the merchant vessel closely resembled in design a ship that decorated ancient Greek wine vases. The rudder, rowing benches and even the contents of its hold remain intact.
The reason the trading vessel, dating back to around 400 BC, has remained in such good condition for so long is that the water is anoxic, or free of oxygen. Lying more than 2,000m below the surface, it is also beyond the reach of modern divers. "It's preserved, it's safe. It's not deteriorating and it's unlikely to attract hunters."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45951132
A Greek merchant ship dating back more than 2,400 years has been found lying on its side off the Bulgarian coast. The 23m (75ft) wreck, found in the Black Sea by an Anglo-Bulgarian team, is being hailed as officially the world's oldest known intact shipwreck. The researchers were stunned to find the merchant vessel closely resembled in design a ship that decorated ancient Greek wine vases. The rudder, rowing benches and even the contents of its hold remain intact.
The reason the trading vessel, dating back to around 400 BC, has remained in such good condition for so long is that the water is anoxic, or free of oxygen. Lying more than 2,000m below the surface, it is also beyond the reach of modern divers. "It's preserved, it's safe. It's not deteriorating and it's unlikely to attract hunters."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45951132
Not everyone can afford elite tutors
On how money gives an unfair advantage.
Matthew Larriva earns $600 an hour when he commits to one-to-one coaching for the SAT or ACT tests, standardised exams used by US universities. The Ivy League graduate began tutoring in 2011 and has since opened his own test-preparation agency. Other companies were “generalised”, he felt, and there was space for a high-end option. Now he matches up families with tutors paid at about $250 per hour, writes books, gives presentations and accepts only one or two students himself at a time.
Some people, he says, do the maths and assume he’s grossing over a million dollars a year, but they don’t see the time spent working behind the scenes. “It requires constant prep, travel and marketing to make it into an engagement where you can charge $600 an hour,” he says. “And once you're in the door, it's gruelling work during nights, weekends and holidays trying to play educator to the student, counsellor to the parents and mediator between the family.”
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20181022-the-elite-super-tutors-on-six-figure-salaries
Matthew Larriva earns $600 an hour when he commits to one-to-one coaching for the SAT or ACT tests, standardised exams used by US universities. The Ivy League graduate began tutoring in 2011 and has since opened his own test-preparation agency. Other companies were “generalised”, he felt, and there was space for a high-end option. Now he matches up families with tutors paid at about $250 per hour, writes books, gives presentations and accepts only one or two students himself at a time.
Some people, he says, do the maths and assume he’s grossing over a million dollars a year, but they don’t see the time spent working behind the scenes. “It requires constant prep, travel and marketing to make it into an engagement where you can charge $600 an hour,” he says. “And once you're in the door, it's gruelling work during nights, weekends and holidays trying to play educator to the student, counsellor to the parents and mediator between the family.”
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20181022-the-elite-super-tutors-on-six-figure-salaries
Monday 22 October 2018
Brexiteers failing to take responsibility
Yes, this.
Brexiter argument today seems to be: Yeah, we know we fucked up, but it's too late now. Not very inspiring. Also wrong. This thing can be stopped anytime before March and reversed thereafter.
I am growing rather tired of people, across the political spectrum, incl Remainers, saying: You can do nothing about the bad thing.
If something is a bad idea, don't fucking do it mate. And for heaven's sake don't sit on the sidelines telling other people to embrace the same defeatism and lack of imagination you have displayed.
As for 'humiliation', we've watched Brexiters humiliate this country for two years by staking its reputation and well-being on a plan they cannot even articulate. You'll have to forgive us for not being entirely convinced that a final push will fix that.
I should mention at this point that I have been quite ill and unable to drink for several days. Am getting increasingly cross about it.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1054058233625825287.html?refreshed=yes
Brexiter argument today seems to be: Yeah, we know we fucked up, but it's too late now. Not very inspiring. Also wrong. This thing can be stopped anytime before March and reversed thereafter.
I am growing rather tired of people, across the political spectrum, incl Remainers, saying: You can do nothing about the bad thing.
If something is a bad idea, don't fucking do it mate. And for heaven's sake don't sit on the sidelines telling other people to embrace the same defeatism and lack of imagination you have displayed.
As for 'humiliation', we've watched Brexiters humiliate this country for two years by staking its reputation and well-being on a plan they cannot even articulate. You'll have to forgive us for not being entirely convinced that a final push will fix that.
I should mention at this point that I have been quite ill and unable to drink for several days. Am getting increasingly cross about it.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1054058233625825287.html?refreshed=yes
Debating lunatics is a choice to handle with great care
A perfectly respectable position.
Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time has sometimes been held as at least partially responsible for the subsequent collapse of the BNP. Brits are not fans of Trumpian politics - no, not even the Tories who are trying to appease the racist Oompa Loompa across the pond, not really. A well-moderated discussion would likely hurt Bannon a lot more than any benefits of exposure : hisideas gibberish are simply too far outside existing norms to gain respectability with a program or two.
That said, the BBC has consistently failed to adequately examine the self-serving hypocritical nonsense that Farage is wont to vent from hisanus mouth, so Sturgeon's choice is probably a good one. Getting politicians to debate with such a lunatic doesn't serve anyone : rather than elevating Bannon, it just denigrates the others even further. You can't have a sensible debate with a lunatic. It's better to avoid such things entirely.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/20/nicola-sturgeon-quits-bbc-event-over-steve-bannon-invitation
Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time has sometimes been held as at least partially responsible for the subsequent collapse of the BNP. Brits are not fans of Trumpian politics - no, not even the Tories who are trying to appease the racist Oompa Loompa across the pond, not really. A well-moderated discussion would likely hurt Bannon a lot more than any benefits of exposure : his
That said, the BBC has consistently failed to adequately examine the self-serving hypocritical nonsense that Farage is wont to vent from his
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/20/nicola-sturgeon-quits-bbc-event-over-steve-bannon-invitation
Things the Standard Model can't explain
There are others, of course, but this is a nice introduction.
1. Why do neutrinos have mass?
2. What is dark matter?
3. Why is there so much matter in the universe?
4. Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?
5. Is there a particle associated with the force of gravity?
I'd probably add :
"Just what the hell are singularities, anyway ?"
"Seriously, WTF is going on with the double slit experiment ?"
"If I did travel back in time and interfere with the past, what would happen ?"
"What is the nature of a mental concept ?"
"What's it all about, I mean, you know, when you get right down to it ?"
Via Stavros Skamagkis.
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/five-mysteries-the-standard-model-cant-explain?utm_source=main_feed_click&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=main_feed&utm_content=click
1. Why do neutrinos have mass?
2. What is dark matter?
3. Why is there so much matter in the universe?
4. Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?
5. Is there a particle associated with the force of gravity?
I'd probably add :
"Just what the hell are singularities, anyway ?"
"Seriously, WTF is going on with the double slit experiment ?"
"If I did travel back in time and interfere with the past, what would happen ?"
"What is the nature of a mental concept ?"
"What's it all about, I mean, you know, when you get right down to it ?"
Via Stavros Skamagkis.
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/five-mysteries-the-standard-model-cant-explain?utm_source=main_feed_click&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=main_feed&utm_content=click
Sunday 21 October 2018
Repeated votes are indeed undemocratic - but only if the result is decisive
I dunno how many people it takes before it's clear the democratic will of the populace isn't settled.
Had it been a decisive victory, then people would still be entitled to protest. Though they'd have the right to raise their case, if protests and petitions remained confined to a small number, one could legitimately argue that a second vote would be undermining democracy. That would be indeed a case of voting again and again until the correct outcome was reached. Additional votes when it's clear that none are needed could indeed be said to be suspicious, even perversely anti-democratic.
But it wasn't decisive at all, it was marginal. Protests have been sustained and escalated ever since. Petitions have shown that the mood has changed. New information has been presented that wasn't available previously. So I don't see how on earth a second vote undermines democracy in this case. If the people want another vote, which they very clearly do, then denying them another choice is clearly undemocratic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45926996
Had it been a decisive victory, then people would still be entitled to protest. Though they'd have the right to raise their case, if protests and petitions remained confined to a small number, one could legitimately argue that a second vote would be undermining democracy. That would be indeed a case of voting again and again until the correct outcome was reached. Additional votes when it's clear that none are needed could indeed be said to be suspicious, even perversely anti-democratic.
But it wasn't decisive at all, it was marginal. Protests have been sustained and escalated ever since. Petitions have shown that the mood has changed. New information has been presented that wasn't available previously. So I don't see how on earth a second vote undermines democracy in this case. If the people want another vote, which they very clearly do, then denying them another choice is clearly undemocratic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45926996
Review : Doctor Who season 11 episode 2
I liked the first episode well enough, but I found the second a big improvement. Not exactly the most complex of storylines, but it was well-executed. The supporting cast were surprisingly decent, the plot development was interesting and well-paced. Though it's clear Whittaker is always going to be the polite, helpful Doctor, she got to show a much wider range of emotions this time. So far it's sticking to relatively safe plotlines but that's not a bad thing, and we got the first hint of the overall story arc. This was introduced with the brief subtly we got back in the Russel T. Davies era, which I much prefer than the more brazen style of Moffat. Davies was always better at setting up and delivering a season finale, so that bodes well.
I'm not sure I'm so keen on having a whole gang of companions rather than just one or two : we don't get the chance for much focused character development. But it's still early days, so this could work. On the other hand, the only thing I definitely don't like is the new TARDIS interior, which is a strange return to the "Grunge" phase of Tennant. Dunno why they did that, but oh well.
Overall, I thoroughly approve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw5K4TlNUxY
I'm not sure I'm so keen on having a whole gang of companions rather than just one or two : we don't get the chance for much focused character development. But it's still early days, so this could work. On the other hand, the only thing I definitely don't like is the new TARDIS interior, which is a strange return to the "Grunge" phase of Tennant. Dunno why they did that, but oh well.
Overall, I thoroughly approve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw5K4TlNUxY
Saturday 20 October 2018
Rallying for a People's Vote
Protesters seeking a referendum on the final Brexit deal have attended a rally which organisers say was the "biggest" demonstration of its kind. Young voters led the People's Vote march to London's Parliament Square, which supporters say attracted more than 600,000 people. The People's Vote campaign said stewards on the route estimated 670,000 were taking part. Scotland Yard said it was not able to estimate the size of the crowd.
Many held home-made signs and banners with slogans like "The wrexiteers", "Brexit stole my future" and "Even Baldrick had a plan".
Aleta Doyle, 46, from Peterborough, who attended with her 12-year-old son Leo, said she was marching "for my children's future and European unity". And Leo Buckley, 16, from Hampshire, said: "Young people stand to lose the most. I'm going to be poorer and not have the same career opportunities." At the other end of the age spectrum, Joe Trickey from Croydon celebrated his 83rd birthday at the march. He said: "I believe very strongly in the EU as a place of peace and strength."
Dr Mike Galsworthy, from NHS Against Brexit, told BBC News: "Whether you voted leave, or whether you voted remain - when a contract comes back, you do have the right to read the small print and say actually 'no, no. no, this isn't what we want to be signing up for'."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45925542
Many held home-made signs and banners with slogans like "The wrexiteers", "Brexit stole my future" and "Even Baldrick had a plan".
Aleta Doyle, 46, from Peterborough, who attended with her 12-year-old son Leo, said she was marching "for my children's future and European unity". And Leo Buckley, 16, from Hampshire, said: "Young people stand to lose the most. I'm going to be poorer and not have the same career opportunities." At the other end of the age spectrum, Joe Trickey from Croydon celebrated his 83rd birthday at the march. He said: "I believe very strongly in the EU as a place of peace and strength."
Dr Mike Galsworthy, from NHS Against Brexit, told BBC News: "Whether you voted leave, or whether you voted remain - when a contract comes back, you do have the right to read the small print and say actually 'no, no. no, this isn't what we want to be signing up for'."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45925542
Friday 19 October 2018
Julian Assange can't even look after his kitty cat
How the mighty have fallen.
Julian Assange is to launch legal action against the government of Ecuador, accusing it of violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms". The Wikileaks co-founder has lived in its UK embassy since 2012 after seeking asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden over a rape claim - later dropped. He was given a set of house rules by the London embassy this week, including taking better care of his cat. In a memo, it threatened to confiscate the pet if he did not look after it, it said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45915017
Julian Assange is to launch legal action against the government of Ecuador, accusing it of violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms". The Wikileaks co-founder has lived in its UK embassy since 2012 after seeking asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden over a rape claim - later dropped. He was given a set of house rules by the London embassy this week, including taking better care of his cat. In a memo, it threatened to confiscate the pet if he did not look after it, it said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45915017
Many Worlds makes everything meanignless
This is what I've been saying for aaaaages. I don't necessarily agree with everything here, especially the stuff about consciousness, but I agree with the overall conclusions.
But one of the most serious difficulties with the MWI is what it does to the notion of self. What can it mean to say that splittings generate copies of me? In what sense are those other copies “me?”
David Wallace, one of the most ingenious Everettians, has argued that purely in linguistic terms the notion of “I” can make sense only if identity/consciousness/mind is confined to a single branch of the quantum multiverse. Since it is not clear how that can possibly happen, Wallace might then have inadvertently demonstrated that the MWI is not after all proposing a conceit of “multiple selves.” On the contrary, it is dismantling the whole notion of selfhood. It is denying any real meaning of “you.”
What this boils down to is the interpretation of probabilities in the MWI. If all outcomes occur with 100-percent probability, where does that leave the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics? And how can two (or for that matter, a thousand) mutually exclusive outcomes all have 100-percent probability?
Or perhaps : how does probability have determinate values within individual realities ?
What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.
It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable.
As usual, I would slightly temper this. I accept that there's no reason the Universe should make sense or that what seems logical and irrefutable to me is definitely the case. There's no particular reason to assume a kilo or so of warm skull-based goop should be able to understand reality. But let's not go nuts with this. It might be that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, even illogical. But that option is a last resort, and Many Worlds doesn't explain anything. It just resorts to saying everything is a statistical fluke, which is monumentally unhelpful.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/
But one of the most serious difficulties with the MWI is what it does to the notion of self. What can it mean to say that splittings generate copies of me? In what sense are those other copies “me?”
David Wallace, one of the most ingenious Everettians, has argued that purely in linguistic terms the notion of “I” can make sense only if identity/consciousness/mind is confined to a single branch of the quantum multiverse. Since it is not clear how that can possibly happen, Wallace might then have inadvertently demonstrated that the MWI is not after all proposing a conceit of “multiple selves.” On the contrary, it is dismantling the whole notion of selfhood. It is denying any real meaning of “you.”
What this boils down to is the interpretation of probabilities in the MWI. If all outcomes occur with 100-percent probability, where does that leave the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics? And how can two (or for that matter, a thousand) mutually exclusive outcomes all have 100-percent probability?
Or perhaps : how does probability have determinate values within individual realities ?
What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.
It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable.
As usual, I would slightly temper this. I accept that there's no reason the Universe should make sense or that what seems logical and irrefutable to me is definitely the case. There's no particular reason to assume a kilo or so of warm skull-based goop should be able to understand reality. But let's not go nuts with this. It might be that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, even illogical. But that option is a last resort, and Many Worlds doesn't explain anything. It just resorts to saying everything is a statistical fluke, which is monumentally unhelpful.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/
Brain May is really into 3D photography
He might be best known for his day job, playing guitar in one of the world’s biggest rock bands, but May also holds a doctorate in astrophysics and is a lifelong fan of stereo photography, a photographic process which creates 3D images from prints or digital images. May has now combined his two his biggest passions to create a book that charts the Soviet-American race to our nearest neighbour in all its 3D glory.
The LSC has already published several books about 3D photography, but May says this is their most ambitious yet. “No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”
The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could later be turned into 3D images.
“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those."
“For me it’s a passion, I’m completely geeky where this is concerned so if we’re on tour with Queen I’ll be back in the hotel at 3am trying to put two of these images together that Claudia has sent me and make them work as a 3D. That’s what you see in the book. I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181019-the-space-race-like-youve-never-seen-it-before
The LSC has already published several books about 3D photography, but May says this is their most ambitious yet. “No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”
The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could later be turned into 3D images.
“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those."
“For me it’s a passion, I’m completely geeky where this is concerned so if we’re on tour with Queen I’ll be back in the hotel at 3am trying to put two of these images together that Claudia has sent me and make them work as a 3D. That’s what you see in the book. I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181019-the-space-race-like-youve-never-seen-it-before
The forgotten female Samurai
Let's ignore the presumed typo :
The expedition was successful, and upon her return, it is said that the early empress subdued revolts and ruled for the next 700 years until the age of 100.
Because the rest of it is interesting :
Between 1180-1185, conflicts between the rival samurai dynasties of Minamoto and Taira gave rise to one of the most famous women warriors in Japanese history: Tomoe Gozen. The Heike Monogatari, a medieval chronicle of the Genpei War, gives a particularly vivid character description: “Tomoe had long black hair and a fair complexion, and her face was very lovely,” recounts the text, “moreover she was a fearless rider whom neither the fiercest horse nor the roughest ground could dismay, and so dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for a thousand warriors.” Gozen’s expert talents included archery, horseback riding, and the art of the katana, a long, traditional samurai sword.
Particularly interesting about Gozen: She was one of the few women warriors who engaged in offensive battle, known as onna-musha, rather than the defensive fighting more common among traditional onna-bugeisha. In 1184, she led 300 samurai into a fierce battle against 2,000 opposing Tiara clan warriors, and during the Battle of Awazu later that same year, she slayed several adversaries before decapitating the Musashi clan’s leader and presenting his head to her master, General Kiso Yoshinaka. Gozen’s reputation was so high, it’s said Yoshinaka considered her the first true general of Japan.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868—a new era of imperial rule that stood for modernization, industrialization, and Westernization—the Samurai class who had once bravely protected the nation fell from power, and the legacy of the equally fearsome onna-bugeisha faded from view. Meanwhile, Westerners rewrote the history of Japanese warring culture, overlooking the heroic quests of the onna-bugeisha and elevating, instead, exaggerated representations of swaggering male Samurai and subservient Japanese women, clad in kimono and tightly-bound obi. Indeed, historian Stephen Turnbull regards “the exploits of female warriors as the greatest untold story in samurai history.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/a383aj/female-samurai-onna-bugeisha-japan?fbclid=IwAR3yjDcllZI29TDUb7Wa9F9CZUDRqSEF-dBeu_g6Te7IUc-ieg26SOG4Fjc
The expedition was successful, and upon her return, it is said that the early empress subdued revolts and ruled for the next 700 years until the age of 100.
Because the rest of it is interesting :
Between 1180-1185, conflicts between the rival samurai dynasties of Minamoto and Taira gave rise to one of the most famous women warriors in Japanese history: Tomoe Gozen. The Heike Monogatari, a medieval chronicle of the Genpei War, gives a particularly vivid character description: “Tomoe had long black hair and a fair complexion, and her face was very lovely,” recounts the text, “moreover she was a fearless rider whom neither the fiercest horse nor the roughest ground could dismay, and so dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for a thousand warriors.” Gozen’s expert talents included archery, horseback riding, and the art of the katana, a long, traditional samurai sword.
Particularly interesting about Gozen: She was one of the few women warriors who engaged in offensive battle, known as onna-musha, rather than the defensive fighting more common among traditional onna-bugeisha. In 1184, she led 300 samurai into a fierce battle against 2,000 opposing Tiara clan warriors, and during the Battle of Awazu later that same year, she slayed several adversaries before decapitating the Musashi clan’s leader and presenting his head to her master, General Kiso Yoshinaka. Gozen’s reputation was so high, it’s said Yoshinaka considered her the first true general of Japan.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868—a new era of imperial rule that stood for modernization, industrialization, and Westernization—the Samurai class who had once bravely protected the nation fell from power, and the legacy of the equally fearsome onna-bugeisha faded from view. Meanwhile, Westerners rewrote the history of Japanese warring culture, overlooking the heroic quests of the onna-bugeisha and elevating, instead, exaggerated representations of swaggering male Samurai and subservient Japanese women, clad in kimono and tightly-bound obi. Indeed, historian Stephen Turnbull regards “the exploits of female warriors as the greatest untold story in samurai history.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/a383aj/female-samurai-onna-bugeisha-japan?fbclid=IwAR3yjDcllZI29TDUb7Wa9F9CZUDRqSEF-dBeu_g6Te7IUc-ieg26SOG4Fjc
Thursday 18 October 2018
How immigration sparked a revolution in healthcare
People had a vague sense of these inequalities at the time, but it took decades for statisticians to put hard numbers on them. Once they had, they realised that the explanation must lie in differences between human populations – notably, socioeconomic differences.
All over the world, the poor, immigrants and ethnic minorities were more susceptible – not, as eugenicists liked to claim, because they were constitutionally inferior, but because they were more likely to eat badly, to live in crowded conditions, to be suffering from other, underlying diseases, and to have poor access to healthcare.
Previously, social Darwinist – and misguided – thinking about some human "races" or castes being superior to others had mixed insidiously with the insight of Louis Pasteur and others that infectious diseases were preventable. They produced a toxic cocktail of an idea: people who caught infectious diseases only had themselves to blame.
The pandemic revealed the truth: that although the poor and immigrants died in higher numbers, nobody was immune. When it came to contagion, in other words, there was no point in treating individuals in isolation or lecturing them on personal responsibility. Infectious diseases were a problem that had to be tackled at the population level.
Starting in the 1920s, this cognitive shift began to be reflected in changes to public health strategy. Many countries created or re-organised their health ministries, set up better systems of disease surveillance, and embraced the concept of socialised medicine – healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery.
There had been moves in this direction earlier – you don't put a universal healthcare system in place at the drop of a hat – but the pandemic seems to have galvanised governments. In Britain these efforts came to fruition in 1948, with the birth of the National Health Service, but Russia already had a centralised, fully public healthcare system up-and-running by 1920. To begin with only urban folk benefited (rural populations were finally covered in 1969), but it was still a major achievement, and the driving force behind it was Vladimir Lenin.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-the-flu-that-transformed-the-20th-century
All over the world, the poor, immigrants and ethnic minorities were more susceptible – not, as eugenicists liked to claim, because they were constitutionally inferior, but because they were more likely to eat badly, to live in crowded conditions, to be suffering from other, underlying diseases, and to have poor access to healthcare.
Previously, social Darwinist – and misguided – thinking about some human "races" or castes being superior to others had mixed insidiously with the insight of Louis Pasteur and others that infectious diseases were preventable. They produced a toxic cocktail of an idea: people who caught infectious diseases only had themselves to blame.
The pandemic revealed the truth: that although the poor and immigrants died in higher numbers, nobody was immune. When it came to contagion, in other words, there was no point in treating individuals in isolation or lecturing them on personal responsibility. Infectious diseases were a problem that had to be tackled at the population level.
Starting in the 1920s, this cognitive shift began to be reflected in changes to public health strategy. Many countries created or re-organised their health ministries, set up better systems of disease surveillance, and embraced the concept of socialised medicine – healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery.
There had been moves in this direction earlier – you don't put a universal healthcare system in place at the drop of a hat – but the pandemic seems to have galvanised governments. In Britain these efforts came to fruition in 1948, with the birth of the National Health Service, but Russia already had a centralised, fully public healthcare system up-and-running by 1920. To begin with only urban folk benefited (rural populations were finally covered in 1969), but it was still a major achievement, and the driving force behind it was Vladimir Lenin.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-the-flu-that-transformed-the-20th-century
Views of Earth from space
The in-article photos are of oddly low resolution but if you enlarge them they get much better.
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is a master of the post-industrial sublime. His sweeping point of view is, at the very least, ambivalent. His shots, most recently taken from the coolest possible standpoint of a helicopter and sometimes a satellite, are at first sight surreal and glorious, but they have an ominous documentary undertow.
His large-format photos aestheticise mining, deforestation, industrial waste and decay, monumental piles of garbage, plastic, rubber; expanses of new and decommissioned equipment so vast that they look like crystalline formations; dense human settlements which from an Olympian standpoint look like creeping mould or infestations.
“Most people would walk by a dump pile and assume that there’s no picture there,” Burtynsky has said. “But there’s always a picture, you just have to go in there and find it.” One of his famous sequences depicts mountains of discarded tires in California. Another shows mountains of poached ivory being burnt. Waves of rock curve into an unsettling symmetry in his photo of Chuquicamata, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines. There is dark irony in his radically anti-idyllic view of the world.
“Scientists do a pretty terrible job of telling stories, whereas artists have the ability to take the world and make it accessible for everyone,” argues Burtynsky. According to his new book Anthropocene, it is estimated that it currently takes 60 billion tonnes of material annually (biomass, fossil energy carriers, metal ores, industrial and construction minerals) to feed humanity’s global metabolism. Burtynsky’s images offer a disturbing insight into how we’re consuming the Earth at an alarming rate – as well as giving a sense of the scale at which we’re dumping it back out, in giant heaps, streams, and lagoons.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181017-striking-photos-of-human-scars-on-earth
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is a master of the post-industrial sublime. His sweeping point of view is, at the very least, ambivalent. His shots, most recently taken from the coolest possible standpoint of a helicopter and sometimes a satellite, are at first sight surreal and glorious, but they have an ominous documentary undertow.
His large-format photos aestheticise mining, deforestation, industrial waste and decay, monumental piles of garbage, plastic, rubber; expanses of new and decommissioned equipment so vast that they look like crystalline formations; dense human settlements which from an Olympian standpoint look like creeping mould or infestations.
“Most people would walk by a dump pile and assume that there’s no picture there,” Burtynsky has said. “But there’s always a picture, you just have to go in there and find it.” One of his famous sequences depicts mountains of discarded tires in California. Another shows mountains of poached ivory being burnt. Waves of rock curve into an unsettling symmetry in his photo of Chuquicamata, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines. There is dark irony in his radically anti-idyllic view of the world.
“Scientists do a pretty terrible job of telling stories, whereas artists have the ability to take the world and make it accessible for everyone,” argues Burtynsky. According to his new book Anthropocene, it is estimated that it currently takes 60 billion tonnes of material annually (biomass, fossil energy carriers, metal ores, industrial and construction minerals) to feed humanity’s global metabolism. Burtynsky’s images offer a disturbing insight into how we’re consuming the Earth at an alarming rate – as well as giving a sense of the scale at which we’re dumping it back out, in giant heaps, streams, and lagoons.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181017-striking-photos-of-human-scars-on-earth
The strange tale of the sailing submarine
Go home, submarine, you're drunk.
And it did.
Gallemore came up with an unusual idea: turn the submarine into a sailboat. They could rig masts and arms to the superstructure of the boat, and make sails out of the crews’ hammocks. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it wouldn’t be fast, but it would get them going again.
Lt. Douglas gave the go-ahead to the unconventional idea, and all hands got to work. Some sewed hammocks together to make sails, other found whatever they could to rig them. The torpedo loading crane was brought on deck and assembled; it would serve as a mast for a foresail made of twelve hammocks. Bunk frames were disassembled to make the yards, and the motley assembly was unfurled. The sail caught the wind, and they started slowing making way.
The crew continued putting on sail. Six blankets were stitched together to make a mainsail that was rigged to the apparently useless radio antenna mast on the conning tower. That added another 0.5 knot (0.9 km/h) to their speed, but Lt. Gallemore wasn’t finished yet. He ordered a third sail rigged, this time of eight blankets and rigged to a third mast by the stern. With a foresail, a mainsail, and now a mizzen, the R-14 was a three-masted square-rigged sailing vessel, the first and only submarine to be so rigged.
http://hackaday.com/2018/10/17/hacking-when-it-counts-setting-sail-in-a-submarine/
And it did.
Gallemore came up with an unusual idea: turn the submarine into a sailboat. They could rig masts and arms to the superstructure of the boat, and make sails out of the crews’ hammocks. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it wouldn’t be fast, but it would get them going again.
Lt. Douglas gave the go-ahead to the unconventional idea, and all hands got to work. Some sewed hammocks together to make sails, other found whatever they could to rig them. The torpedo loading crane was brought on deck and assembled; it would serve as a mast for a foresail made of twelve hammocks. Bunk frames were disassembled to make the yards, and the motley assembly was unfurled. The sail caught the wind, and they started slowing making way.
The crew continued putting on sail. Six blankets were stitched together to make a mainsail that was rigged to the apparently useless radio antenna mast on the conning tower. That added another 0.5 knot (0.9 km/h) to their speed, but Lt. Gallemore wasn’t finished yet. He ordered a third sail rigged, this time of eight blankets and rigged to a third mast by the stern. With a foresail, a mainsail, and now a mizzen, the R-14 was a three-masted square-rigged sailing vessel, the first and only submarine to be so rigged.
http://hackaday.com/2018/10/17/hacking-when-it-counts-setting-sail-in-a-submarine/
Dogs process words differently to people
The Emory researchers focused on questions surrounding the brain mechanisms dogs use to differentiate between words, or even what constitutes a word to a dog.
For the current study, 12 dogs of varying breeds were trained for months by their owners to retrieve two different objects, based on the objects' names. During one experiment, the trained dog lay in the fMRI scanner while the dog's owner stood directly in front of the dog at the opening of the machine and said the names of the dog's toys at set intervals, then showed the dog the corresponding toys. As a control, the owner then spoke gibberish words, such as "bobbu" and "bodmick," then held up novel objects like a hat or a doll.
The results showed greater activation in auditory regions of the brain to the novel pseudowords relative to the trained words. "We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between words that they know and words that they don't," Prichard says. "What's surprising is that the result is opposite to that of research on humans -- people typically show greater neural activation for known words than novel words."
The researchers hypothesize that the dogs may show greater neural activation to a novel word because they sense their owners want them to understand what they are saying, and they are trying to do so. "Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also receive praise or food," Berns says.
"Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words," Berns says, "but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015120901.htm?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
For the current study, 12 dogs of varying breeds were trained for months by their owners to retrieve two different objects, based on the objects' names. During one experiment, the trained dog lay in the fMRI scanner while the dog's owner stood directly in front of the dog at the opening of the machine and said the names of the dog's toys at set intervals, then showed the dog the corresponding toys. As a control, the owner then spoke gibberish words, such as "bobbu" and "bodmick," then held up novel objects like a hat or a doll.
The results showed greater activation in auditory regions of the brain to the novel pseudowords relative to the trained words. "We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between words that they know and words that they don't," Prichard says. "What's surprising is that the result is opposite to that of research on humans -- people typically show greater neural activation for known words than novel words."
The researchers hypothesize that the dogs may show greater neural activation to a novel word because they sense their owners want them to understand what they are saying, and they are trying to do so. "Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also receive praise or food," Berns says.
"Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words," Berns says, "but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015120901.htm?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
Wednesday 17 October 2018
There is no one scientific method
One of the Science of Discworld books claimed that you can't have an individual scientist because scientists must always check each other's work or it's not science. This has always struck me as wrong-headed and gives too much weight to peer review and not enough to observational testing. I like this interpretation - there simply different kinds of science - much better.
So what is it that distinguishes the science of the ancient world from modern science? Modern science has developed far beyond ancient science primarily due to the organization of the scientific community which has developed institutions that facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. In antiquity, even the greatest scientists usually worked alone, or at most had a few students. The isolation of scientists meant that idea diffusion was severely limited compared to what it is today, and it also meant that ancient science never embodied what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a scientific research program.
While the scientific revolution was a unique historical event that had to wait for Goldilocks conditions to obtain before it could occur, science without a scientific revolution was not historically unique. Nor have scientific research programs been unique to modern civilization. It would be fair to say that there was an ancient scientific research program, and indeed also a medieval scientific research program, but it must also be said that these early research programs differed from modern research programs in important ways. And while the difference between early and modern scientific research programs may be a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind, as we know from the study of emergent complexity, sometimes more can be different.
The tightly-coupled scientific research programs of today converge on results (or even upon falsification) much more rapidly than the loosely-coupled scientific research programs of the past, which might produce an interesting result every few hundred years.
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
So what is it that distinguishes the science of the ancient world from modern science? Modern science has developed far beyond ancient science primarily due to the organization of the scientific community which has developed institutions that facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. In antiquity, even the greatest scientists usually worked alone, or at most had a few students. The isolation of scientists meant that idea diffusion was severely limited compared to what it is today, and it also meant that ancient science never embodied what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a scientific research program.
While the scientific revolution was a unique historical event that had to wait for Goldilocks conditions to obtain before it could occur, science without a scientific revolution was not historically unique. Nor have scientific research programs been unique to modern civilization. It would be fair to say that there was an ancient scientific research program, and indeed also a medieval scientific research program, but it must also be said that these early research programs differed from modern research programs in important ways. And while the difference between early and modern scientific research programs may be a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind, as we know from the study of emergent complexity, sometimes more can be different.
The tightly-coupled scientific research programs of today converge on results (or even upon falsification) much more rapidly than the loosely-coupled scientific research programs of the past, which might produce an interesting result every few hundred years.
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
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