Links for 2022-04-03
"Inside the Virus-Hunting Nonprofit at the Center of the Lab-Leak Controversy" (moral mazes, self-regulation, normalization-of-deviance & gain-of-function research) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy
MIRI's April 1st post: “It's sad that our Earth couldn't be one of the more dignified planets that makes a real effort, correctly pinpointing the actual real difficult problems and then allocating thousands of the sort of brilliant kids that our Earth steers into wasting their lives on theoretical physics.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
Rice and maize yields boosted up to 10 per cent by CRISPR gene editing https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7985
Ultrasound-activatable engineered bacteria for cancer immunotherapy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29065-2
Vector calculus and PDEs! Powerful and beautiful intersection of math and physics. How to encode physical conservation laws as partial differential equations. https://youtu.be/Jt5R-Tm8cV8
Vetocracy, the costs of vetos and inaction https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/vetocracy-the-costs-of-vetos-and-inaction/
Can You Make a Hollow Metal Sphere So Big That It Floats? [Wired] https://archive.ph/L1UwQ
The Far Future and Using Atomic Precision for the Next Level of Technology, Christine Peterson (Foresight Institute), Gaia Dempsey (Metaculus), Robin Hanson (George Mason University), Adam Brown (Stanford), Chris Kemp (Astra) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT7qlYPMYY
AI on its way to replacing humans in hypersonic weapon design: Chinese study https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3171533/ai-its-way-replacing-humans-hypersonic-weapon-design-chinese
A comprehensive meta-analysis of human assortative mating in 22 complex traits. Spousal correlations are substantial for educational attainment, IQ, political values, religiosity, and drinking/smoking/drug usage behavior. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.19.484997v1
Unity’s impressive new ‘Enemies’ short shows off a remarkably realistic digital human https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/21/22985286/unity-enemies-short-remarkably-realistic-digital-human
Pluto has giant ice volcanoes that could hint at the possibility of life https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/29/world/pluto-ice-volcanoes-scn/index.html
“The complete victory of the Japanese military surprised international observers and transformed the balance of power in both East Asia and Eastern Europe, resulting in Japan's emergence as a great power and a decline in the Russian Empire's prestige and influence in eastern Europe.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War
Harvard's War Against Its Superstar Black Professor https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/harvards-war-against-its-superstar?s=r