“The deadly H5N1 bird flu is spreading widely, including to mammals. For the first time, it's now likely spreading mammal-to-mammal, among minks which are exceptionally well-suited conduits to humans.” [The New York Times] https://archive.is/FOMWj
“The H5N1 virus isn’t a major human threat today. Here’s what it’d take to become one.” https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/23572561/bird-avian-flu-influenza-h5n1-pandemic-eggs
Will the WHO declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern for H5N1 influenza? https://manifold.markets/NathanpmYoung/will-there-be-a-pandemic-via-zoonos (see also: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/15026/h5n1-human-to-human-transmission/)
SceneDreamer: Unbounded 3D Scene Generation from 2D Image Collections https://scene-dreamer.github.io/
SceneScape: Text-Driven Consistent Scene Generation https://scenescape.github.io/
If you get a CT scan (or an X-ray or a nuclear medicine scan) is it worth worrying about the radiation? https://dynomight.substack.com/p/scans
Sympathectomies - The New Lobotomy: “They have caused me and many others severe and debilitating changes, to consciousness and cognition.” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6o7CuxJGcnckTkg49/sympathectomies-the-new-lobotomy-2
"General intelligence is one of the most predictive psychological measures in existence... The implication that test measurement does not correlate with other aspects of performance is manifestly false." https://razib.substack.com/p/applying-iq-to-iq
The muscles of warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals are very similar, but only one is able to produce heat when at rest. It comes down to a tiny difference: the loss of a single calcium receptor that keeps ion pumps in muscle cells working all the time. https://phys.org/news/2023-01-evolutionary-loss-ryanodine-receptor-isoform.html
"Even though hunter-gatherers tend to prefer a dominant role, they make an implicit pact with one another. Each person gives up their slight chance of becoming an alpha in exchange for the certainty that no one will be alpha over them." https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/reverse-dominance-hierarchies
The systematic massacre of all children under 10 will forever be a stain on humanity https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/the-systematic-massacre-of-all-children-under-10-will-forever-be-a-stain-on-humanity-says-tfns-stuart-dowell-15611
Picogram interstellar probes: Genetically modified organisms loaded onto 0.1mm-scale solar sails could plausibly be sent by the trillions on a trip to nearby stars, with enough surviving to multiply on a planetary surface and return luminescent signals. https://universetoday.com/159393/lightweight-picogram-scale-probes-could-be-the-best-way-to-explore-other-star-systems/
“Slovakia’s new nuclear reactor Mochovce 3 is officially connected to the grid! It will provide 13% of the country’s electricity and when the next reactor is finished, Slovakia will have an almost completely decarbonized grid” https://www.seas.sk/en/press-releases/mochovce-3-grid-connection/
🔥BLIP-2🔥 demo is live! Come play with LLMs that can understand images and share your examples! huggingface.co/spaces/Salesfo… Project page: github.com/salesforce/LAV… BLIP-2 knows mass–energy equivalence! More examples in the 🧵Google announces Dreamix: a model that generates videos when given: - video + prompt (Video editing) - input images + prompt (Subject Driven Generation) - input image + prompt (Image-toVideoNoticed this nice graphic on the Demographics of Canada wiki page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograph… So entered the rabbit hole, and those arrested for homicide in 2020 were: 37% Indigenous, 25% Visible Minority, and 38% white. www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-…
Can you imagine von Neumann or Gödel working at a hedge fund or becoming an athlete instead of unraveling the nature of reality?
It's not due to some entrepreneur that we have satellite navigation, but Einstein thinking about the nature of time and space.
Unpractical theoretical research is the very foundation of our technological civilization:
1. Logic was considered a hopelessly abstract subject with no conceivable applications until Claude Shannon turned it into a trillion-dollar business that is now underlying most of our technological civilization.
2. Pythagoras could not have imagined the uses to which his equation would be put.
3. The people who formalized complex analysis did not predict its usefulness in physics, including the branches of hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, and especially quantum mechanics.
4. Number theory was considered useless until its importance for cryptography was discovered.
5. Conic sections, developed in the 2-nd century BC, had no applications until Kepler's discovery that celestial bodies move on conic sections.
6. The history of fractals traces a path from chiefly theoretical studies to computer graphics and fractal analysis.
7. The Radon transform, when introduced by Johann Radon in 1917, was useless until Cormack and Hounsfield developed Tomography in the 60s (Nobel prize for Medicine 1979).
8. Many mathematicians regarded negative and complex numbers as absurd and useless before the 15th century. For instance, Chuquet referred to negative numbers as "absurd numbers." Michael Stifel has a chapter on negative numbers in his book "Arithmetica integra" titled "numeri absurdi". And so too were complex/imaginary numbers. Gerolamo Cardano in his book "Ars Magna" calls the square root of negative numbers a completely useless object.
While Von Neumann probably wouldn't work at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, I wouldn't be shocked if he worked at one of the more nerdy/intellectual quant firms like Jane Street.