Links for 2021-11-26
New COVID-19 variant: B.1.1.529. It might be more transmissible and escape immunity. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1463846528578109444.html
Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs: “Do psychedelics shift beliefs concerning the nature of reality? We explored this and found psychedelics tended to shift beliefs away from physicalism and towards panpsychism.” https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/psychedelics-mushrooms-metaphysics/ (paper: https://rdcu.be/cBSdM)
Fluid intelligence and the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system: “…we outline what we see as a potentially important relationship for understanding the biological basis of intelligence: that is, the relationship between fluid intelligence and the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system.” https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2021/11/fluid-intelligence-and-locus-coeruleus.html
Black Holes Slamming Into the Moon Could End the Dark Matter Debate https://www.cnet.com/features/black-holes-slamming-into-the-moon-could-end-the-dark-matter-debate/
“Listening to musical melodies activates an intriguing prediction/recognition system. When there is a pause between notes, the brain makes a prediction about the next note to come and we derive a teensy jolt of pleasure when the prediction comes true… but sometimes a different kind of pleasure jolt from puzzlement, when prediction fails!” https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/music-brain-predict
A New Theory for Systems That Defy Newton’s Third Law — In nonreciprocal systems, “exceptional points” are helping researchers understand phase transitions and possibly other phenomena. https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-theory-for-systems-that-defy-newtons-third-law/
Scientists use machine learning to predict smells based on brain activity in worms https://phys.org/news/2021-11-scientists-machine-based-brain-worms.html
Scientists Propose Jumpstarting Mars’ Magnetic Field to Make It Habitable https://futurism.com/scientists-propose-jumpstarting-mars-magnetic-field
Pascalian Medicine: “if you’d done the Insanity Wolf thing six months ago and taken twenty untested compounds, at least one of them would have worked and cut your COVID mortality by 30%” https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/pascalian-medicine
It’s OK not to start your y-axis at zero https://qz.com/418083/its-ok-not-to-start-your-y-axis-at-zero/ [Think about it this way: Start a global temperature chart at zero degree Kelvin and 4 billion years ago and it becomes completely useless. There are very good and valid reasons for axis truncation.]
NÜWA is a unified multimodal pre-trained model that can generate new or manipulate existing visual data (i.e., images and videos) for 8 visual synthesis tasks: Achieves SotA results on text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, video prediction, etc. Outperforms DALL-E in text2image. https://github.com/microsoft/NUWA [Remember: “Do not look at where we are. Look at where we will be two more papers down the line.” — Károly Zsolnai-Fehér]
An article pertaining to the most important election happening next year. https://quillette.com/2021/11/25/zemmours-final-word/ (But note this comment I received: “The timing of this post is unfortunate. Not only the pregnancy of his chief advisor Sarah Knafo was announced in French tabloids today (yes he impregnated her, indeed), but he also lost the economical and network support that the entrepreneur Charles Gave promised him. He also appears to be terribly mono-thematical… it’s basically all about the incompatibility between Islam and French Republic. This is not a presidential program, this is just intellectual stance. Macron is a political shark, backed by an elite network. He won’t let a journalist/columnist kick him out.”)