Month: October 2014

Age Mindset

On several measures, they outperformed a control group. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. They looked younger. The experimental subjects had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride. The results were almost too good. They beggared belief. “It sounded like Lourdes”

Selfdriving dealbreakers

Are today’s challenges of making robocars dealbreakers? short answer: no

Maps are too important, and too costly

Google’s car, and others, rely on a clever technique that revolutionized the DARPA challenges. Each road is driven manually a few times, and the scans are then processed to build a super-detailed “ultramap” of all the static features of the road. This is a big win because big server computers get to process the scans in as much time as they need, and see everything from different angles. Then humans can review and correct the maps and they can be tested. That’s hard to beat, and you will always drive better if you have such a map than if you don’t.

Any car that could drive without a map would effectively be a car that’s able to make an adequate map automatically. As things get closer to that, making maps will become cheaper and cheaper.

Naturally, if the road differs from the map, due to construction or other changes, the vehicle has to notice this. That turns out to be fairly easy. Harder is assuring it can drive safely in this situation. That’s still a much easier problem than being able to drive safely everywhere without a map, and in the worst case, the problem of the changed road can be “solved” by just the ability to come to a safe stop. You don’t want to do that super often, but it remains the fail-safe out. If there is a human in the car, they can guide the vehicle in this. Even if the vehicle can’t figure out where to go to be safe, the human can. Even a remote human able to look at transmitted pictures can help the car with that — not live steering, but strategic guidance.

Quantum effects in biology

Beneath all these quantum solutions to puzzling vital phenomena, we find ourselves with a deeper mystery. Quantum coherence is an immensely delicate phenomenon, depending on those in-tune particle waves. To maintain it, physicists usually have to enclose their systems within near-perfect vacuums and cool them down to very close to absolute zero temperature to freeze out any heat-driven molecular motion. Molecular vibrations are the mortal enemy of quantum coherence. How, then, does life manage to maintain its molecular order for long enough to perform its quantum tricks in warm and wet cells? That remains a profound riddle.

living systems seem to be able to maintain quantum states without decoherence. i’m really curious what the implications for the feasibility of high qubit quantum computers are.

Destroy Red Cross

time to shut these clowns down. if you’re donating to the red cross, you might as well burn your money, for all the good that does.

IN 2012, 2 MASSIVE STORMS pounded the United States, leaving 100Ks of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks.

Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent $100Ms to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the suffering left behind by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. They believed the charity was up to the job.

They were wrong.

2015-06-03: the red cross is an utter failure and is giving nonprofits a bad name.

many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

why you shouldn’t donate to the red cross

the best charities are 100s of times more effective at improving lives than merely “good” charities

Putin says Play-Time Is Over

this will be interesting to follow.

Putin abruptly changed the rules of the game. Previously, the game of international politics was played as follows: politicians made public pronouncements, for the sake of maintaining a pleasant fiction of national sovereignty, but they were strictly for show and had nothing to do with the substance of international politics; in the meantime, they engaged in secret back-room negotiations, in which the actual deals were hammered out. Previously, Putin tried to play this game, expecting only that Russia be treated as an equal. But these hopes have been dashed, and at this conference he declared the game to be over, explicitly violating Western taboo by speaking directly to the people over the heads of elite clans and political leaders.