Links for 2022-02-22
Translation of Putin's address to the nation pertaining Ukraine: “Ukraine was completely built and created by Lenin. he was its architect, including his orders on including Donbas in the Ukrainian soviet republic by force. "now the Ukrainians destroy Lenin monuments and want decommunization. You want decommunization? We can show you what REAL DECOMMUNIZATION means in Ukraine.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495819596422688779.html
Dendrites may help neurons perform complicated calculations https://news.mit.edu/2022/dendrites-help-neurons-perform-0217
The Elusive Hunt for a Robot That Can Pick a Ripe Strawberry: It's a tricky, delicate task that combines machine vision and robotics. Progress has been slow, but entrepreneurs and farmers continue to invest. https://www.wired.com/story/elusive-hunt-robot-pick-ripe-strawberry/
MicroRNAs are deeply linked to the emergence of the complex octopus brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.15.480520v1
A new era of transparent warfare beckons. Russia’s manoeuvres are a coming-out party for open-source intelligence. [economist.com] https://archive.is/cTXvk
Sloane’s Gap: Do Mathematical and Social Factors Explain the Distribution of Numbers in the OEIS (The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences)? https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=jhm
A post that examines “simulation arguments” – i.e., arguments that we should assign significant probability to living in a computer simulation. https://handsandcities.com/2022/02/18/simulation-arguments/
British man called "Uncle Bob" is only foreigner in small Chinese town in Hainan. https://youtu.be/6r3oqB8dl90
"Should I tell Daniel about the colleague I’d spoken with just a few weeks earlier, who’d told me...that he was getting out of academia because he’d concluded that it's now virtually impossible for a white male to get a tenure-track position in his field?" https://quillette.com/2022/02/17/a-student-sleuth-found-evidence-that-our-university-practices-reverse-racism-heres-why-i-advised-him-not-to-publish-it/
Suppose you could go back in time and trace out the evolution of Homo sapiens and primates. Do you expect there to be a cutoff that partitions the beings that come before and after this discontinuity into qualitatively different categories such that you would eat or enslave the former but not the latter?
You can vote here.
Note that academics are not being asked to explain the relevance of their research to climate change but "sex, gender, and diversity." The former would at least make some sense under the premise that it is an existential risk.
Germany fact of the day: 88 percent of German industrial companies see the skyrocketing energy prices as a major or even existence-threatening challenge for the future. Roughly 20 percent are thinking about relocating company shares or parts of their production and jobs abroad. 13 percent are already doing so. 6 percent are considering relocating the whole company abroad.
But have no pity, Germans repeatedly voted for this. It's mostly self-inflicted.
Dominic Cummings in March 2019: “The most secure bio-labs routinely make errors that could cause a global pandemic and are about to re-start experiments on pathogens engineered to make them mammalian-airborne-transmissible.”
Dominic Cummings in November 2021: “The situation with Russian troops is very very worrying, is not remotely being properly covered by MSM.”
The infamous hockey stick figure was published in 1999. A new paper just made an INCREDIBLE reconstruction.