“Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers...It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.” https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994
Characterizing Human Beings on a Molecular Level: People With Similar Faces Likely Have Similar DNA https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(22)01075-0
A polygenic score that predicts musicality and a tendency to enjoy and engage in music https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18703-w
“Can models learn new, non-trivial functions...with no parameter changes? Turns out the answer is yes, with in-context learning…” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1561249565268926466.html
“Experimental results show that BEiT-3 obtains state-of-the-art performance on object detection (COCO), semantic segmentation (ADE20K), image classification (ImageNet), visual reasoning (NLVR2), visual question answering (VQAv2), image captioning (COCO), and cross-modal retrieval (Flickr30K, COCO).” https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10442
Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of
NIH to terminate EcoHealth Alliance: “NIH official said EcoHealth Alliance had not been able to hand over lab notebooks and other records from its Wuhan partner that relate to controversial experiments involving modified bat viruses, despite multiple requests.” https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-alliance-grant-after-its-wuhan-partners-refuse-to-deliver-information-on-coronavirus-studies/
“One remarkable attempt to count the atoms in a finite amount of substance was made by Johann Magnenus, who reported in 1646 that the scent of burned incense fills a church of more than seven hundred million times its original size and that this observation can be used to arrive at a primitive estimate of an atom's size. From the ratio of the volumes of the interior of the church and the minimal amount of evenly dispersed incense that one can sense, which he estimated to be to one-thousandth of a chickpea and guessed to contain at least a million atoms, Magnenus arrived at 7.776 × 10^17 as a lower bound to the number of atoms in an incense chickpea.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3754
Often arms deliveries to Ukraine are framed in terms of supporting Ukraine to win. But the most important purpose of these deliveries is not to support Ukraine but to lower the probability of future wars of aggression by making this war very costly for Russia.
In other words, supporting Ukraine against Russia isn't about Russia or Ukraine. Pick any two countries A and B that are completely irrelevant to you. If country A knows that you will support country B when it is attacked, and vice versa, then this will lower the probability of war by raising the cost of war.
If, on the other hand, everyone knew that they can attack another country without having to fear any interference or sanctions, then this would not only raise the probability of wars in general but also the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Many more countries would attempt to acquire nuclear weapons as a means of deterrence. Consequently, the world would become a much more dangerous place.
As a concrete example, just imagine North Vietnam would have received no support from China and the Soviet Union. It would have been much easier for the United States to win the Vietnam war. This would have drastically increased the probability of future U.S. interventions elsewhere.
> If country A knows that you will support country B when it is attacked, and vice versa, then this will lower the probability of war by raising the cost of war.
this is far too simplified, as it does not account for the "school shooter" phenomenon. bully someone too many times or for too long, and they become enraged at you, committing an act so heinous you will wish you never bullied them in the first place (note: bullying is a matter of perspective)