Links for 2021-10-16
In 2011, some random musician appeared on a radio show claiming that top military officials talked to him about UFOs in clandestine meetings. Pretty delusional, huh? Turns out he told the truth. High-level Pentagon brass and even the White House Chief of Staff have really been talking to him. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1443258561442746375.html
There are still no signs of a new AI winter. Machine learning is making dramatic advances across the board youtu.be/9L5NqNDZHjk
"The in-game performance of professional soccer players who had a recent COVID-19 infection drops by 6%. Performance is still 5% lower 6 months later with notable negative spillovers on team performance." https://www.dice.hhu.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Fakultaeten/Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche_Fakultaet/DICE/Discussion_Paper/368_Fischer_Reade_Schmal.pdf
More than half of COVID-19 survivors experienced postacute sequelae of COVID-19 6 months after recovery: "The median (IQR) proportion of COVID-19 survivors experiencing at least 1 PASC was 54.0% (45.0%-69.0%; 13 studies) at 1 month (short-term), 55.0% (34.8%-65.5%; 38 studies) at 2 to 5 months (intermediate-term), and 54.0% (31.0%-67.0%; 9 studies) at 6 or more months (long-term)." https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2784918
How a Vegan World Might Contain MORE Suffering youtu.be/hvDlYnCejHk [not what you expect]
People who eat meat (on average) experience lower levels of depression and anxiety compared to vegans, a meta-analysis found. The difference in levels of depression and anxiety (between meat consumers and meat abstainers) are greater in high-quality studies compared to low-quality studies. https://sapienjournal.org/people-who-eat-meat-experience-lower-levels-of-depression-and-anxiety-compared-to-vegans/
“Seemingly delusional beliefs survive not because they are rational but because the people or groups who adhere to them tend to survive better than those who don’t” https://spectator.co.uk/article/the-case-for-dodging-cracks-in-the-pavement
The properties of the photon’s source influence its wave and particle character https://physicsworld.com/a/wave-particle-duality-quantified-for-the-first-time/
“They cooled the collective motion of all four mirrors down to 77 nanokelvins, or 77-billionths of a kelvin, just above absolute zero…the next step for the team would be to test gravity’s effect on the system. Gravity has not been observed directly in the quantum realm; it could be that gravity is a force that only acts on the classical world. But if it does exist in quantum scales, a cooled system in LIGO—already an extremely sensitive instrument—is a fantastic place to look,” https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/06/mirrors-that-detect-ripples-in-space-time-were-frozen-to-near-absolute-zero/
South Pole posts most severe cold season on record https://archive.is/QT5Y8/
“Consider the parents who use IVF to raise their children’s IQ. If the children repeat the process for another generation, taking advantage of scientific advances during the interim, they could bring the total average gain in the grandchildren north of 10 points—a huge gain. That advantage could be big enough to give the grandchildren radically disproportionate representation at the highest levels of science, finance, information technology, medicine, law and business.” https://archive.ph/I1Npb [Contrary to the author I believe we should definitely start playing God. The sooner, the better.]