Links for 2022-03-30
On average, half of all service dogs fail their training. Due to this poor rate, South Korea experimented with cloning service dogs that had already passed their training. The resulting clones passed at rates much higher than average. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6167335/
“Evolution can occur really, really rapidly” — Researchers detect genetic changes in response to seasonal change. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/evolution-can-occur-really-really-rapidly/
A Systematic Review of Human Challenge Trials, Designs, and Safety https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.20.22272658v1
NVIDIA has developed techniques for training primitive graphical operations for neural networks in near real-time. https://nvlabs.github.io/instant-ngp/
NVIDIA's New AI: Enhance! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0yEOw6Zews
“While the United States has massive resources to measure or draw thousands to millions of neurons brain-wide, our consortium focuses on 1-on-1 mapping, bridging neuroanatomy and neurophysiology with single-cell precision in vivo.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29229-0
Free MIT math courses https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/
Measuring the impacts of a real-world neighborhood-scale cool pavement deployment on albedo and temperatures in Los Angeles https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac58a8
"For the first time, a completely locked-in patient has been able to communicate thanks to a brain implant. The device helped the patient, who was unable to move any muscles or even open his eyes, contact the outside world using only his brain activity." https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/for-the-first-time-a-completely-locked-in-patient-can-communicate-thanks-to-brain-implant-359819
The Value of In-Reservoir Energy Storage for Flexible Dispatch of Geothermal Power https://zenodo.org/record/6377485#.Yjw9NOfMI7c
A Conversational Paradigm for Program Synthesis: Trains up to 16B model (named CODEGEN) based on multi-turn conversation using TPU-v4, which outperforms OpenAI’s Codex on the HumanEval benchmark. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13474
One country in Europe has spent decades planning for a potential Russian attack, never letting its guard down. https://www.ft.com/content/c5e376f9-7351-40d3-b058-1873b2ef1924 [archived version: https://archive.ph/xnbYq]
“Many people have wondered how the Finns defend Finland today, so here's a very short introduction to modern Finnish defence policy - and a brief synopsis of how the Finnish military would probably fight if any hostile country decided to invade.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1504407222775914499.html
The confrontation between Will Smith and Chris Rock was a confrontation between our jungle instincts and civilization.
Some people intuitively realize that Smith's reaction was evolutionarily rational while other people realize that it was dangerous when viewed from a civilizational perspective.
Some people understand that allowing someone else to publicly shame or make fun of you without retaliation signals that you are a victim. Other people understand that honor culture is corrosive to living in a peaceful society.
Both sides are partly correct. There are circumstances, such as being a prison inmate or schoolboy, under which you must stand your ground and answer words with violence or else you will suffer. This was historically the norm. But nowadays many of us live in functioning constitutional states where one can often afford to appear weak because the system will protect you. Under such circumstances, it makes little sense to risk your health because someone spoke disrespectfully of you or your relatives.
Chris Rock could afford not to hit back after being slapped. He did not have to escalate the confrontation because he knew that he wouldn't have to suffer any consequences for appearing weak. For the same reason, Will Smith did not have to slap him in the first place.
At the end, who you believe to be less wrong depends on whether you want to live in a world in which words are violence or an alternative, more enlightened way to fight and resolve conflicts. Remember, the first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.