2021-11-13
Readings
- Good video on quantum locking and some other fun practical effects one can do relating to quantum physics that can be done in a well-science-equipped home:
- Another exciting advance in helping paralysed people have a more normal life. I can be excited by transhumanism, but the forms of these advances that give better lives to people dealt a bad hand by the fates, that’s more exciting by many degrees to me: https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-implant-enables-paralyzed-man-to-communicate-thoughts-via-imaginary-handwriting
- A great paper that’s very close to what I’m doing at work, on insect brain miniaturisation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438821001021
- Some of the technical challenges in data representation in sufficiently-free-form video games:
- Cell type differentiation is fascinating, with the same genetics creating a large family of cell functions. Size has a role to play too: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-stem-cells-bigger-doesnt.html
- CO2 capture in industrial waste streams reduces pollution - some work on improving capacity and pressure-resistance of membranes that do this: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-co2-special-membranes.html
- I watched 2 IQ2US debates this week, one on “Cancel Culture is Toxic” (Kmele Foster did a particularly great job in the debate, while I was a bit disappointed in Kasparov because the style of his statements were not engaging) - I favour a yes. And an older one on “Cancel Student Debt” (a topic where I have some sympathy for the resolution but don’t want exactly that). The older one is sticking in my head because of one of the arguments presented on the “yes” side surprised me; Ashley Harrington mostly made race-focused arguments that didn’t resonate with me at all, but she made one argument that’s still ringing in my head - the interaction of student debt with our credit system creates exaggerated differences between those whose families can pay for most/all of uni and those whose can’t. I still don’t like the solution, but my existing conclusions sit much less comfortably with me given that new argument. Watch both; they’re free and they’re great.
Unprompted Thoughts
- I’ve been thinking about the development of the capacity for grammar, and how tied it should be to the development of capacity for abstract thought. The issue, I think, is to get far enough away from a problem we often see in language - seeing every sentence as a way to express gut feels - to the level where people can mean precise things. Distance between connotation and flat meaning is crucial to do this well - they likely won’t be entirely divorced (except perhaps with autism or other disorders), but with enough time and training people can reach good, occasionally stunning, levels of abstraction.
- I went to a talk this week hearing someone describe their research on improvements in drawing useful inferences from general knowledge-bases like Wikidata. I was heavily involved in the Wikipedia community a long time ago, and there was a side project trying to do something like this at that time (maybe it wasn’t Wikidata; the dates don’t line up with whatever it was that I remember, but it may have been DBPedia or something else). These sites are large network-accessible databases of what seem to be very mundane data, in object-attribute form (like “Berlin is in Germany, Berlin is a city, …”. At the time I wasn’t sure if interest in these would persist; clearly they have. Even if they would persist, is this the kind of information that we need to gather, given that a person (or anything enough like a person) would gather this kind of information organically? And maybe there’s value in having different individuals building their own semantic webs? A centralised curated site may be a minus.
- Thinking about how intelligence, because of the nature of complex life probably requiring entropy gradients plus the ability to have enough matter to evolve and manage complexity, probably would not evolve at a physical scale near the boundaries of where physics is best represented as a continuum and proportions makes way to discrete objects (molecules, quantum effects) - this may be a reliable landmark for societal/technological development as over all the forms entities might form, quantum effects are almost certain to be alien to the logics that work for them in the infancy of their species. Trying to decide how watertight this intuition would be (it’s hard to construct counterexamples, but this isn’t direct empiricism and there’s only so far that reason can go unsupported)
Current Events
- Drone attack on Iraqi PM - this is one of the first such attacks, but will not be the last. It’s getting cheaper and easier to do high-tech attacks, and eventually we’ll hit a point where some are effectively untraceable, whether targeted or not. What then?
- A large infrastructure bill passed, amusingly with “no” votes from most people aligned with AOC’s faction, and with a number of “yes” votes from Republicans. I’m hoping to see her faction further isolated from other parts of the left; this may be a route to that. I would also like to see a return to some level of bipartisianship in Congress; this gives me some hope for that.
- University of Austin is a new university started with a bunch of people I largely respect, aiming at least in theory to form a university that will not be captured by progressivism. I am sympathetic to the ends, but starting a Uni is very difficult and the difficulties are so strong that it’d be surprising if they succeed in making an eventually accredited actually-functioning University. Avoiding the scourge of DEI is easy. Everything else is really, really hard.
- Rittenhouse and image processing - The judge in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse got a lot of less-justified-than-ideal criticism for expressing doubt that zooming in on a video doesn’t potentially fabricate data. I say that because although the judge is openly clueless on tech, he’s not that wrong here. I spend a lot of time looking at microscopy data as part of my job. Resolution, data integrity, and various algorithms for zooming are a more complex topic than most people realise, and people should be skeptical of whether zooming in can introduce hallucinations (technical term). As before, I have no comment on the larger questions around Rittenhouse - I have not bothered to learn enough to develop much of an opinion, and at least right now I consider him neither clearly guilty of a crime nor a hero, and what little underinformed view I have is that he went looking for trouble in a dumb way, found it, and got in over his head.
Reviewlets
- Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick (book) - I’m enjoying this book a lot. The author does a good job at making the absurd feel both real and fairly fun, and it’s not predictable. All good things. Kol HaKavod.
- Displacement (Film) - Noticed this was up for free on Youtube, and I was interested enough by Courtney Hope’s acting in Control to give it a shot. It’s hard to follow, very interesting premise, feels a little too much like an amateur film project (although in some scenes this frees them to do things not in normal-film vocabulary). The physics involved is bollocks, but entertainingly so.
- FFV Pixel Remaster (game) - Seems pretty much identical to what I’d get on an emulator; they didn’t fix even the easy stuff (like avoiding 2 pages of command menus when they could just adjust the font size a bit). The music is improved. Otherwise though, if you’re cool with emulators, just go find a ROM.
Amusements
- This coverage of the original Terminator movie is really interesting.
- There were a few rules of Tetris that I never knew that, with removal of the “game speeds up” rule, make it doable to play Tetris forever. I had always assumed that pieces were largely random.
- Explained: Some cultural squabbles between the pro-NFT crowd and usual snarky internet folk (see the entire thread):
Recent Music
- Plaid Tongued Devils - “In Klezkavania” - I’ve had a tough time finding this song on music services, as the band is a bit obscure and old. I’m not sure what genre it should fit in, and the band often played with tempo and broke the 3rd wall.
- Toad the Wet Sprocket - “Dual Citizen” - By contrast, this is a band that’s still together so long after I first heard of them. They write about emotionally difficult topics, putting most of their effort into vocals and a feeling of intimacy.
- Garrison Starr - “The Devil In Me” - still in the pattern - recent releases by a band I first heard about about 20 years. The sequence of divisions in the song here is particularly cool.
- No Use For a Name - “International You Day” - The band’s songs feel like an exploration of tragedy in human relationships. More of a punk feel than the rest of the list this week.
- Aneela’s “Chori Chori” is a fun song and music video, being an Indian cover of a fairly dull and overplayed hip-hop song, “Pretender”. The situation present at the start of the video seems inescapable and probably is, but it’s maybe the most plausible escape plan (at least the first part)? I used to think a lot about this. Aneela was also once in a bubblegum band called “Toy Box” that made really fun Aqua-esque music videos.