Links for 2022-04-17
Python Data Science Handbook, in the form of (free!) Jupyter notebooks. https://github.com/jakevdp/PythonDataScienceHandbook
NextSense Wants to Get in Your Ears and Watch Your Brain: Born from Alphabet's "moon shot" division, the startup aims to sell earbuds that can collect heaps of neural data—and uncover the mysteries of gray matter. https://www.wired.com/story/nextsense-wants-to-get-in-your-ears-and-watch-your-brain (archived version: https://archive.ph/a2YfX)
MIT Engineers Create the “Impossible” – New Material That Is Stronger Than Steel and As Light as Plastic https://scitechdaily.com/mit-engineers-create-the-impossible-new-material-that-is-stronger-than-steel-and-as-light-as-plastic/
"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy estimates it would cost just over $24 billion to have prototype vaccines ready for each of the 26 known viral families that cause human disease" https://progress.institute/why-barda-deserves-more-funding/
Metamagical Themas, 40 Years Later — “It is difficult to translate this sentence into French.” https://lacker.io/books/2022/04/07/metamagical-themas.html
"Long Video Generation with Time-Agnostic VQGAN and Time-Sensitive Transformer", Ge et al 2022 {FB} https://songweige.github.io/projects/tats/index.html
"Habitat-Web: Learning Embodied Object-Search Strategies from Human Demonstrations at Scale", Ramrakhya et al 2022 (log-scaling of crowdsourced imitation learning in VR robotics) https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03514
Thread about how modularization may create an entirely different electronics ecosystem. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1513716660716331019.html
140 Cognitive Biases You Should Know https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lntFJVzIoWU2cYWyBJ4vF3VLNxFw9GAMnOw5MM-yx3k/edit#heading=h.mt5x2jqdj7dc
"China’s lending boom to developing countries is morphing into defaults and debt distress. Given the secrecy surrounding China’s loans, also the associated defaults remain “hidden”, as missed payments and restructuring details are not disclosed." https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/36965
Japan considered waging biological warfare upon civilian population centers in Southern California in the United States. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cherry_Blossoms_at_Night
Central Chicago was lifted 10 feet up in the 1850s and 60s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
Yes, the Media Bury the Race of Murderers—If They’re Not White https://freebeacon.com/media/yes-the-media-bury-the-race-of-murderers-if-theyre-not-white/
Thread about the cooperation of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514385422532714510.html
Reading about the Yellowstone National Park made me realize how futile environmental conservation is if it doesn't embrace rapid and vast technological progress.
All those environments and species that environmentalists try to preserve will almost definitely be wiped out by some environmental disaster such as an asteroid, supervolcano, and eventually by the sun becoming a red giant.
I guess you could take the position that mass extinctions and vast environmental destruction don't matter if humans are not to blame. Or you could limit your time horizon to a hundred years. But if you want to preserve the Yellowstone National Park for longer than a blink of an eye in geological terms we need to become vastly more technologically advanced than we are now.
Taking long-term environmental conservation seriously will eventually require us to either become proficient stellar engineers, be able to move planets to other solar systems, or be able to upload whole ecosystems.