Readings
Plans for NASA’s SPHEREx telescope seem to be focused on looking at galactic history: https://phys.org/news/2022-03-nasa-cosmic-mapmaker.html
Understanding cell specialisation and organelle regulation took another step forward, with a successful transplant of mitochondria between cells. The point is not that we have a practical application for this, but rather that it confirms that the cellular machinery at that level is functionally interchangable. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-technique-transplants-mitochondria-cell.html
It’s worrying to see that microplastics, the result of human industrial activities and already known to be present all over the place, have been found in human blood. It’s unclear what the effects are, and it may be difficult to find ways to prevent such contamination if we find that these things are a problem. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-scientists-microplastics-blood.html
Progress on weaving sensors into fabric, for health tracking: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00691-6
It’s important that scientific studies declare funding, because of the possibility of explicit directed content bending, the possibility of unintentional efforts to please, and the dangers of selective publication; it’s worrying when we see a lot of studies in a region with inadequate ethical controls: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00835-8
Unprompted Thoughts
I feel there’s a broader lesson to be learned about how the human body fights many kinds of illness - with things like fever which can be very dangerous to the body itself, and with many apparent symptoms of disease actually being the effects of the autoimmune response. And with much modern medicine finding ways to dampen that response, yet knowing that when someone is immune-compromised they’re a sitting duck for many diseases that are not dangerous to the rest of us. The dynamics of that system are complex (hoping that’s not the only lesson).
Many places I’ve worked, when facing the need for account/group/identity management, looked into third-party solutions and eventually found the cost to learn and install them was too much so they wrote their own small thing, which eventually grew up into a big thing. An earlier me would have regretted this; I’m coming to think it’s not a bad thing because of an easy-to-underappreciate feature - that code one writes (or participates in writing) is much easier to work with than code one doesn’t. That, and friction within an org is usually much less than that outside. I think it’d be misguided to want to live in a world where most code is written in a centralised place and reused elsewhere - the effort that goes into configuring that can exceed the benefit of not having lots of reimplementation of the same thing, and it’s empowering to have local code-level experts on things often used.
Why don’t we have redundant brains? I initially got on this topic because of a reply to wondering why we don’t have redundant hearts; while I think there are very good reasons brains are not redundant, they’re interesting to spell out; the problem is that what brains do is control. Having redundancy in control means potential conflict in control - more risk of either hesitation in peril or miscoordination (even when walking) because of a lack of unitary planning. With three brains, things may get worse because of the possibility of action loops when when one requires two of three for a short-term actions; repeated times when agreement cycles between different pairs of actions as three plans have momentary overlaps. Without a system of resolving conflict, multiple brains don’t work well, and any such system may have failure states (e.g. each brain has a set priority and only inaction can be overridden - might fail if brain damage causes one brain to always want to act in a nonsensical way) that mean there is no effective redundancy.
The recent controversy over Supreme Court Thomas’s wife’s involvement in the insurrection attempts at the end of Trump’s presidency reminds us of how thorny society finds the relationship between spouses can be with regards to the rest of society; we have some recognition (no compelled testimony, insider trading concerns) that spouses act as a unified social unit rather than our norm of treating people entirely as individuals, but no firm norms on situations like this (I think were these statements by Thomas it’d be right to want him to resign and look for ways to oust him).
Current Events
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues ; it has thankfully stalled and Russia has announced it never intended to go further. Along the way, Biden made a (in my view ill-advised) statement that Putin cannot remain in power; while I don’t find it outrageous to believe, it’s not helpful for current events. In the weeks to come I hope we see Ukraine’s forces go on the offensive and retake their occupied cities; it would be a travesty if the country were pushed into negotiations where they would lose land from the invasion overall.
North Korea has demonstrated their long-range strike capabilities with an ICBM launch, which is worrying as their internal media and government composition is pretty far from norms or being fact-based.
Okta, a company and service that other companies use as part of their authentication model (they’re a SAML provider), recently was hacked, leading to a lot of nervousness from their clients.
NVIDIA announced their next GPU architecture, Hopper (named after Grace Hopper); I haven’t yet seen whether this will target consumer graphics cards or be CUDA-only (like Volta)
The EU is considering a bill called the Digital Markets Act, which would have some antitrust regulations and limit ability of platform providers to have exclusive app stores. I’ve been trying to track the bill’s contents, but from what I’ve found so far it sounds largely reasonable - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/eu-to-regulate-gatekeepers-in-crackdown-on-google-apple-amazon-facebook/
Reviewlets
Star Trek:Picard (season 1, TV show) - Having now seen the entire first season, I think the show represents a maturing of the ideas of TNG; having moved from exploring principles through thought experiments to having a deeply human exploration of age and meaning. It’s interesting, not so long after The Good Place, to see another show tackle these issues.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (video game) - As expected, the writing is bad and the characters annoying. Now with some obnoxious woke gender-stuff. And The gameplay? Quite good. The game engine is improved since Borderlands 3 (despite some UI annoyances around menus). The game’s a bit buggy too, but it’s almost exactly what I expected it to be and that’s a game where I’ll try to ignore the characters and focus on the gameplay and some parts of the world flavouring.
Razer’s Sneki Snek Slippers - These are cute and are very effective at both keeping feet warm and cushioning one’s steps. They’re not available in XL (and my feet are that size) so there’s a certain strain in getting them on for me; I also worry based on how they feel that they may not be that durable (the inner cushioning under the feet feels a bit mushy), but if they last they’re pretty cool (probably moreso for people with smaller feet than mine)
Marvelous Land of Oz (book) - This is second in the Oz series; there’s a tendency with sequels that don’t focus on the same characters to suffer from undercharacterisation (probably because books probably often come from dreams and our dreams usually have a focus that’s some version of ourselves); the character Tip is not as interesting as Dorothy, but Baum is making up for it with a more colourful world. So far I’m enjoying it (not very far in)
Amusements
Very cute baby fox at a fox sanctuary:
A reminder that context means a lot for how a language sounds (although I think the creator overstates her point - the sounds in German still are a bit harsh):
On the making of Army of Darkness, a kickass comedy-horror film from decades past:
Review of armors from the Witcher series:
Recent Music
Danny Elfman and Trent Reznor - Native Intelligence - I’ve enjoyed Elfman’s music for decades; Reznor hasn’t generally been on my radar, but it’s always interesting to hear two great artists collaborate and what kind of style emerges. The quieter moments of the song are in my view the most interesting parts
Babymetal - Megitsune - I can’t understand most of the lyrics, but I find the J-Pop metal fusion genre interesting (Japanese idol culture is pretty weird though)
The Either - Dew - This feels like a modernised classical Japanese music piece