2022-08-27
Readings
Spectrum article covering some of the tech behind MRI: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-superconducting-shields-behind-mris
The JWT found CO2 in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, which is more of a technical milestone than a “what is out there” one. Still cool. https://phys.org/news/2022-08-james-webb-space-telescope-unequivocal.html
There come times in a young science when a topic moves from “you will need to bring a lot of separate early principles together and feel out how things work” to the level of “there are larger theories that largely cover the permutations/dynamics of a field”; this is a nice story of one of those transitions in fluid dynamics: https://phys.org/news/2022-08-fluid-interaction-breakthrough-dynamics.html
One of those fun little quirks of human perception: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-left-natural-brains-faster-bottom.html
Interesting study on alcohol and the brain, plus there’s a quirk in the translation where an “und” (and) between two names didn’t get translated, well hidden between things not to be translated. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-dose-alcohol-brain.html
Interesting exploration of the problems of the music industry:
Thoughts
I’ve been thinking about the argument behind this 3Blue1Brown video, and I’m still convinced that it’s mistaken; it argues that arguing about terminology is a waste of time and we should focus on concrete problems (in the sciences and engineering) and let terms differ to approach issues at hand. I think the problem with this is that it means reinventing a lot of things unnecessarily for specific problems, in a way that bogs down all engineering with terminological fiddling. This is fine for philosophy, where the terms and their nuances (and connotations) matter to aesthetic arguments, but having many possible definitions of Pi in maths is a hinderance, particularly given the annoyance of translation (or not realising it is necessary and issues that come from that).
In a lot of the sciences, we can simplify data acquisition (or make it more powerful, in certain ways) by assuming certain things about the data and tailoring our data acquisition/instruments around that. This is often a very good idea, but it runs the risk of eliminating the possibility of being surprised by the data in ways that don’t fit that model (e.g. we know cells won’t have any organelles in this area so we’ll do much lower-res scans there to save time for what we care about - but what if there actually are rare organelles that we’d love to hear about?). More dangerously, if we forget that we’ve done this (possibly on multiple levels), we might use lack of such evidence (or statistical skew from it) as a kind of evidence that these phenomena are absent. I don’t offer a solution for this, but this should be explicitly taught in research methods and people should take steps to mark each such simplifying assumption and speculate as to what might be eliminated through these methods, perhaps delegating reevaluation to undergrads or citizen scientists, or at least tackling the issues through careful statistically-viable methods to lessen the chances of surprises of this sort (although layering of methods may have really complex statistical-reasoning implications that are beyond the state of the fields to approach)
Current Events
Ukraine - Recently the news has been around a nuclear power plant Russia has been shelling, as well as Ukraine holding its Independence Day stuff while being invaded; it’s unclear what it would take to help Ukraine regain a lot of its lost territory, with going on offense likely requiring far more resources. Germany continues to waffle on providing proper support, even though if you visit Berlin there are Ukraine flags everywhere. A successful capture of the European political classes by Russian business interests is likely to blame, with such things unfortunately only fixable on electoral scales, at fastest. Although it also remains ridiculous that, with our providing so much material support, western powers don’t just declare war on Russia and push them out, as images of concentration camps continue to be released
Angola held a general election; their existing president Lourenco was re-elected
There’s been some ongoing political stress over immigration/refugee policy, and in particular Texas sending busses of migrants to other states; as annoying as this is, I can see the reluctance to simply deal with an unending influx of new homeless that border states need to deal with; sharing that pain makes sense (although doing so more evenly would be ideal, and NYC is a particularly dumb place to send people with no resources because of the high cost-of-living; we’d probably do well to send homeless out of the area to some place where they have a shot at an affordable life. There were a lot of immigration policies the GOP was experimenting with that I agree with - making people apply for refugee status while they remain outside the border, public charge rules, rules requiring refugees to stop at the first reasonable place they reach rather than go on long treks to the US, etc. It’s a pity those ideas are tied to a party that’s considering giving up on pluralism https://www.npr.org/2022/08/21/1118460747/texas-migrants-new-york-welcome-life-tough
Reviewlets
Corporation Wars: Insurgence and Emergence (2 books) - It’s nice to see a more consistent high quality across a book series in this later Ken MacLeod series; the character of machine thinking is explored, and notably all the conflicting stances are given a certain understandability-to-sympathy. It’s hard to write non-human characters well, likewise those with really reactionary views unless the author is reactionary. I’m not done rereading the last book (and don’t remember how it ends), but it’s building nicely
Amusements
If you care about accuracy but still want amusement, ignore all the “AI did this” part of stories like this, but enjoy the product - some really interesting and pretty architectural ideas: https://www.designboom.com/architecture/ai-pharaonic-architecture-modules-abstract-expressionist-hassan-ragab-08-26-2022/
This has a certain similarity to low-hanging-fruit in terms of company ideas:
Being trapped in a lie one can’t end is one of those delicious ingredients for a good farce - some years back there was an SNL episode where someone faked a ghetto accent for several years at work over this kind of awkwardness. Here’s another pretty good one:
Recent Music
Oublie-moi - Coeur de Pirate - I found a very nice live version of this that has some fun elaborations that the album version doesn’t; this is a great song to play around with.
You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween - Muse - A bit cheesy, but fun.
Sabza Ba Naz - Niyaz - I like how the different parts of this song step over each others feet
Center of the Sun - Conjure One - Some interesting experiments with joining disparate voices together, like the wing of a butterfly
Housekeeping
I’ll be at DragonCon for the next bit and might or might not have time to do the next one or two episodes