Month: August 2014

Feudalism is back

it’s coming back everywhere (see banksters), but it is farther along in some places:

You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.” If you have money, for example, you can easily get a speeding ticket converted to a non-moving violation. But if you don’t have money it’s often the start of a downward spiral that is hard to pull out of

Media is self-obsessed

between the endless navel-gazing with stupid “tweets” and this:

When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.” The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.

i’m surprised they’ve held on so long.

Hypocritical culture

you’d hope this hypocritical society would have moved on, but you’d be quite wrong.

She tried public appearances. She tried being reclusive. She tried leaving the country, and she tried finding a job. But the epic humiliation of 1998, when her affair with Bill Clinton became an all-consuming story, has followed Monica Lewinsky every day. She critiques the culture that put a 24-year-old through the wringer and calls out the feminists who joined the chorus.

Suffering in fundamental physics?

a really fun paper, mind expandingly strange:

This essay explores the speculative possibility that fundamental physical operations — atomic movements, electron orbits, photon collisions, etc. — could collectively deserve significant moral weight. While I’m personally doubtful about this, I suggest reasons to keep an open mind on the topic. In practice I might adopt a kind of moral-pluralism approach in which I maintain some concern for animal-like beings even if numerically, simple physics-based suffering dominates. I also explore whether, if the multiverse does contain enormous amounts of suffering from fundamental physical operations, there are ways we can change how much of it occurs and what distribution of “experiences” it entails. An argument based on vacuum fluctuations during the eternal lifetime of the universe suggests that if we give fundamental physics any nonzero weight, then almost all of our expected impact may come through how intelligence might transform fundamental physics to reduce the amount of suffering it contains.

Predicting mutations

soon it may even be possible to make evolutionary forecasts. Scientists may not be able to predict what life will be like 100 million years from now, but they may be able to make short-term forecasts for the next few months or years. And if they’re making predictions about viruses or other health threats, they might be able to save some lives in the process.

a procedure to predict influenza mutations every year with 90% precision, helping to produce the right vaccines for that season.

We can analyze any mutation, even those that haven’t been identified yet. This allows researchers to predict whether a novel mutation is likely to be dangerous or harmless — in essence, performing a screening test

and another one

10 years of work at Johns Hopkins has yielded a computer program that predicts, with far more accuracy than current methods, which mutations are likely to have the largest effect on the activity of the “dimmer switches” (which alter the cell’s gene activity) in DNA — suggesting new targets for diagnosis and treatment of many diseases.

Massive imagenet progress

Accuracy improved to 43.9%, from 22.5% last year, and the error rate fell to 6.6%, from 11.7%. Since the Imagenet Challenge began in 2010, the error rate has decreased 4x.

mind-boggling progress in just 1 year. for comparison, humans have ~97% accuracy on these tasks. you can see them here

21th Precinct Art Show

Let loose an all-star crew of graffiti writers and street artists inside an abandoned NYPD precinct and… well, exactly what you would expect to happen, has, in fact, happened.