Links for 2021-09-27
From carbon dioxide to starch: no plants required. Chinese scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh4049
“Most observers now agree that the virus probably leaked from the Wuhan lab. The new document increases the probability that 1. The virus was engineered in a lab, 2. Daszak and his collaborators know some things about the origin of Covid 19 they do not want to tell us. While Peter Daszak orchestrated a media campaign, starting with a letter to Nature, to denounce the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, while the US government was advised by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that a lab leak was likely.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1441600953233199104.html
A new leaked document is stirring up another frenzy over the pandemic’s origins: "In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said. The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak-pandemic-origins-even-messier/620209/
"18 intelligence agencies labored unsuccessfully to reach a conclusion about the origin of SARS2 evidently failed to discover the EcoHealth proposal to DARPA" https://nicholaswade.medium.com/new-routes-to-making-covid-19-in-the-lab-f94318cad4de
Associations between individual antipsychotics and the risk of arrests and convictions of violent and other crime: Relative risks of all crime outcomes were substantially reduced during periods when patients were prescribed antipsychotics v. periods when they were not. Nationwide within-individual study of 74 925 persons. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/associations-between-individual-antipsychotics-and-the-risk-of-arrests-and-convictions-of-violent-and-other-crime-a-nationwide-withinindividual-study-of-74-925-persons/F475430B2C3DECF674178F0B9A91ECD5#metrics
Anders Sandberg on the Fermi Paradox, Transhumanism, and so much more https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/anders
“Robots Must Be Ephemeralized - in this blog post I recount how 3 years ago, I was bearish on robot research in sim. I've changed my mind completely - I now believe that sim becomes *more* indispensable as robots become more general-purpose…” https://blog.evjang.com/2021/09/ephemeralization.html
Towards Zero-Label Language Learning: a training data creation procedure (UDG), which leverages few-shot prompts to synthesize high-quality training data without real human annotations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09193
A ‘scaling law’ for language translation https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07740
New study shows that university education, especially in humanities & social sciences, makes students significantly more left-wing. Also makes them morally absolutist. Previous work had shown that student leftism was driven by self-selection, so this is a big finding. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224211041094
New CDC Study: "the portion of 5-11-year-olds who are classified as overweight or obese is now 45.7 percent, up from 36.2 percent before the pandemic." https://www.the74million.org/staggering-new-research-shows-that-child-obesity-has-soared-during-pandemic/
If you have a circle and you know its centre, you can construct anything with a straight edge that you can construct with a straight edge and compass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poncelet%E2%80%93Steiner_theorem
Straw Hat Riot: a series of minor riots, it spread due to men wearing straw hats past the unofficial date that was deemed socially acceptable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot