Links for 2021-11-12
"One thing he wants to make very clear is that all the paths, even the hottest ones, show improvements in human well-being on average. IPCC scientists expect that average life expectancy will continue to rise, that poverty and hunger rates will continue to decline, and that average incomes will go up in every single plausible future, simply because they always have. “There isn’t, you know, like a Mad Max scenario among the SSPs,” O’Neill said. Climate change will ruin individual lives and kill individual people, and it may even drag down rates of improvement in human well-being, but on average, he said, “we’re generally in the climate-change field not talking about futures that are worse than today.”" https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/620605/
Space Launch Start-Up Just Used A Giant Centrifuge To Fling A Projectile Into The Upper Atmosphere — SpinLaunch plans to use its kinetic launch system to put small satellites into orbit rapidly and cheaply, and the Pentagon is interested. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43079/space-launch-start-up-just-used-a-giant-centrifuge-to-hurl-a-projectile-into-the-upper-atmosphere
“Bayesian optimisation has badly needed a book for a long time, and Roman Garnett has given us all not just *a* book, but a work of beauty in all respects. What a gift.” — Michael A Osborne https://bayesoptbook.com/
Secrets Of The Great Families: How do these families keep producing such talent, generation after generation? astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
"Combinatorial innovation and technological progress in the very long run", Matt Clancy (on hyperbolic vs exponential growth from ideas/R&D) https://www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/8f77puuw/release/7
Alexander Young: everything you want to know about cognitive genomics https://unsupervisedlearning.libsyn.com/alexander-young-everything-you-want-to-know-about-cognitive-genomics
Researchers demonstrate complete solar-powered hydrocarbon production https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/researchers-demonstrate-complete-solar-powered-hydrocarbon-production/
“Planaria exhibit an extraordinary ability to regenerate lost body parts...Planarian can be cut into pieces, and each piece can regenerate into a complete organism.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian
Quantum Sensor Breakthrough Paves Way For GPS-Free Navigation https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/11/quantum-sensor-breakthrough-paves-way-gps-free-navigation/186578/
Past megadroughts in central Europe were longer, more severe and less warm than modern droughts https://nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00130-w#Bib1
Differences between the value added of teachers of high- and low-income students are about 0.005 std dev. Diffs across Black, Hispanic, and White students are also small... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/01623737211040511
An Elementary Proof of Marden’s Theorem: “a fantastic relation between the geometry of plane figures and the relative positions of roots of a polynomial and its derivative.” https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Ford/Kalman.pdf
Can the visual brain learn to represent faces by disentangling? Novel faces can be reconstructed from as few as 12 neurons, encoding interpretable attributes like eye size or age. https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/unsupervised-deep-learning-identifies-semantic-disentanglement-in-single-inferotemporal-face-patch-neurons