Month: May 2015

Wine heists

They took a little Dom Pérignon, some cabernet sauvignon from the Napa Valley estate Screaming Eagle, and 63 bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the most coveted–and expensive–French pinot noirs being made today. DRC, as collectors like to call it, runs as much as $25000 a bottle

the hijinx in the wine snobbery world always crack me up, since it is well-established that you can’t tell the difference between these hyper-expensive wines and reasonable ones

Why males?

why males? why do so many complex organisms have a whole sex which does not bear offspring? One hypothesis is that males are good for purging genetic load via sexual selection. On a genetic level all individuals carry deleterious mutations, which they pass on to their offspring. But, because of sample variance in transmission, there will be a distribution of outcomes in any given set of offspring. By chance some individuals will exhibit a higher load of deleterious alleles, while others will carry fewer alleles. If this load is correlated to traits which are visible to the opposite sex, then excess load every generation can be purged through reproductive skew

RNN unreasonable effectiveness

I took all 474MB of Linux C code and trained several LSTMs. The code looks really quite great overall. Of course, I don’t think it compiles but when you scroll through it feels very much like a giant C code base. Notice that the RNN peppers its code with comments here and there at random. It is also very good at making very few syntactic errors

Light-emitting paper

researchers developed a thin, clear nanocellulose paper made from wood flour and infused it with biocompatible quantum dots — tiny semiconducting crystals — made out of zinc and selenium. The paper glowed at room temperature and could be rolled and unrolled without cracking. The researchers are currently developing papers that emit other colors than blue.

Revisiting retirement

we’ve run out of options for economic stimulus. it is time to raise the retirement age, commensurate with huge increases in life expectancy since social security was enacted.

We investigate the options for policymakers given this shortage of traditional ammunition, including: (i) reducing the risk of recession; (ii) reverting to quantitative easing; (iii) moving away from inflation targeting; (iv) using fiscal policy to replace monetary policy; (v) using fiscal and monetary policy together in a bid to introduce so-called “helicopter money”; and (vi) pushing interest rates higher through structural reforms designed to lower excess savings, most obviously via increases in retirement age. We conclude that only the final option is likely to lead to economic success. Politically, however, it seems implausible. As a result, we are faced with a serious shortage of effective policy lifeboats.

The Galaxy from Orbit


Astronaut Terry Virts, aboard the International Space Station, shared this picture earlier today, stating this was “the view of our Galaxy from space.”

Normally, the reason you can’t see stars in high oblique photos from the space station is that the shutter speed is too fast. Fast shutter speeds are used to eliminate blur from the motion of the orbiting outpost. One exception to this rule is when astronauts use camera settings specifically to photograph features such as the Aurora and the Milky Way. The crew must use slower shutter speeds in order to capture the light of the aurora. In these cases stars also show up in the photograph. The photos are also slightly blurry because very long exposures are needed to capture these dim nighttime features.