Links for 2022-02-20
"... the benefits of chain of thought prompting only materialize at sufficient model scale (around 100B parameters)." https://ar5iv.org/html/2201.11903
For the last century and a half, body temperature has decreased monotonically by 0.03°C per birth decade: "The team looked at more than 600,000 body temperature measurements taken over a span of roughly 150 years, examining data from 24,000 U.S. Civil War veterans in the from the years 1862 to 1930; readings from 15,000 people from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) study, from 1971 to 1975; and 150,000 people enrolled in the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (STRIDE) from 2007 to 2017...This finding held, even when researchers allowed for changes in thermometry methods and technologies." https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/average-body-temperature-takes-a-dip
Civic engagement systematically declines when the Internet speed rises. Time-consuming activities oriented to the pursuit of collective welfare, suffer the most from broadband penetration, while relationships with family and friends are less affected. https://voxeu.org/article/faster-internet-displaces-social-capital-uk
“I loudly used these results to call for massive cuts in education spending. Yet since the book’s publication, no one has bothered to challenge my math. Not publicly. Not privately. No one cared about my spreadsheets.” https://www.econlib.org/no-one-cared-about-my-spreadsheets/
Bayes' rule: the maths of truth-seeking — “The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had a dream. He hoped that progress in philosophy and mathematics would eventually yield a method to systematically figure out the truth. This video explores an approach to that dream that takes us some of the way there: Bayesianism.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hHA-oqpNig
Meta-analysis: Self-explanation (i.e., getting students to explain a concept, rather than just giving them an explanation) greatly enhances learning. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-018-9434-x
Projecting local and global symmetries to the Planck scale https://ar5iv.org/abs/2202.05367
U.S. Drone Maker Skydio Wins Production Other Transaction (OT) Agreement for U.S. Army Short Range Reconnaissance Program https://www.skydio.com/blog/skydio-selected-sole-platform-for-us-army-srr/
“When Tim Berners Lee talks about how he designed the web, he uses an analogy from physics, describing his process as a quest to find “fundamental laws” which can generate a desired system…” https://subconscious.substack.com/p/all-you-need-is-links?r=1a2p6
Our brains store concepts as sensory-motor and affective information https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/02/our-brains-store-concepts-as-sensory.html
"Intelligence suggests Russia intends to launch an invasion that will encircle Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Mr Johnson said." https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-60448162
Conrad Haas (1509–1576) was an Austrian or a Transylvanian Saxon military engineer from the Kingdom of Hungary, Transylvania. He was a pioneer of rocket propulsion. His designs include a three-stage rocket and a manned rocket.
"He wrote a German-language treatise on rocket technology, involving the combination of fireworks and weapons technologies...His work also dealt with the theory of motion of multi-stage rockets, different fuel mixtures using liquid fuel, and introduced delta-shape fins and bell-shaped nozzles.
Here are some of the measures any reasonable person would support who believes that climate change will literally threaten human civilization:
Immediately start building as many nuclear power plants around the world as possible. Any poor country that uses or thinks about using coal power plants will get freely build nuclear power plants instead.
Massive investment into next-generation nuclear power research.
Massive investment into geoengineering research.
Massive investment into researching how to cheaply build huge numbers of [underground] vertical farms [powered by geothermal energy] and genetically engineered crops optimized for such an environment.
If you say that climate change is an existential risk but you're not pledging to do this then you're either a liar or an idiot.
Almost no climate activist supports these measures. Indeed, many of them are more worried about nuclear waste than climate change.
What does this tell us? If they are smart, they must be liars and if they are really this stupid then they are untrustworthy.
That said, is it actually true that climate change is an existential risk? Will it threaten human civilization?
According to the IPCC, it could be bad but it's very unlikely to be an extinction risk.
If you own one of these devices, you can't get lost anymore because they know exactly where you are located on the globe and feature a detailed map of the whole world. You can restrict access to these devices by inbuild iris scanners, fingerprint scanners, and facial recognition. You can speak in one language, and the device will transcribe what you say into another language. You can even talk to it and command it to remind you of something or to look up information such as the phone number and opening hours of a business.