Links for 2022-01-28
The Universe's Expansion Could End Surprisingly Soon, Say Cosmologists — This new model implies that the universe might stop expanding and start contracting as soon as 65 million years from now. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-universes-expansion-could-end-surprisingly-soon-say-cosmologists
"Extremely exciting alignment research milestone: Using reinforcement learning from human feedback, we've trained GPT-3 to be much better at following human intentions." https://openai.com/blog/instruction-following/
“From May 2015 to August 2018, 52,293 non-poor but otherwise typical residents of the Karnataka region of India were randomly assigned to get free hospital insurance, an option to buy such insurance, or a control condition...they saw no net effects; people who got more medicine were not on average healthier.” https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/01/medical-doubts-oped.html
A large genetic study tracking 150,000 subjects for over a decade has affirmed the direct causal link between drinking alcohol and developing cancer. The findings particularly link oesophageal cancers and head and neck cancers with alcohol consumption. https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/alcohol-consumption-directly-cause-cancer-oxford-genetic-study/
3-D printing is coming for metal. https://www.axios.com/3d-printings-next-act-big-metal-objects-aa309c69-0840-4ef2-9156-5da298131ea5.html
The Most Powerful Exercise You Are Probably Not Doing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDhKU_z2t3Q
Would You Sleep Beside A Nuclear Reactor? The story of the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship https://youtu.be/cYj4F_cyiJI
Upcoming Advances in Material Science: In order to forge a bright future, we'll need materials stronger, lighter, and better than ever before. Advances in material science are the gateway to tomorrow's technologies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPCmrNAZnHE
The squares are kinda Fibonacci-like https://blog.plover.com/math/fibonacci-squares.html
Modal Logic and Science Fiction https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2022/01/21/modal-logic-and-sf/
"In a study comparing dropped phones and wallets in New York and Tokyo, 88% of phones “lost” by the researchers were handed into the police by Tokyo residents, compared to 6% of the ones “lost” in New York. Likewise, 80% of Tokyo wallets were handed in compared to 10% in New York." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200114-why-japan-is-so-successful-at-returning-lost-property
[Warning: I’m not a chemist. This might be incoherent bunk. Sharing because it’s an extraordinary claim.] Chemistry in Four Dimensions: “Several generations of chemists have been conditioned to accept the notorious discrepancy between the theory and practice of chemistry as the unquestionable norm. Sterically forbidden molecular rearrangements and phase transformations are routinely reported without comment, and the flow of electronic particles, postulated to rationalize the course of chemical reactions, is never subjected to critical scrutiny. In reality, practising chemists design their experiments in terms of the nineteenth-century notions of chemical affinity, never adequately explained by twentieth-century theories. The innocent belief that quantum physics explains “all of chemistry” is, like the rest of quantum theory, obediently respected as just another of its deep inscrutable mysteries.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858825_Chemistry_in_Four_Dimensions
A wooden cube with painted faces is sawed up into 1000 little cubes, all of the same size. The little cubes are then mixed up, and one is chosen at random. What is the probability of its having just 2 painted faces?
From ‘Probability Theory: A Concise Course’ by Y. A. Rozanov
[Solution]