Month: June 2016

Is Infinity Real?

If the physical universe cannot contain infinity (which is a wise default position to have in the absence of extraordinary evidence), there will be limits at which our infinity-laden mathematical models will fail. Our simple problems were meant to explore these limits. We may find that the infinity-based predicted outcome can still hold, but for different reasons (as in the first problem); or that the infinity-based predicted outcome is wrong, and we have to reason differently to reach qualitatively different conclusions (second and third problems).

Maybe Just Don’t Drink Coffee

Sure, just the other day, you bought some incredible single-origin nanolot coffee beans day, and that 200g bag cost as much as 2, maybe 3 avocado toasts. In fact, you bought enough to keep some at home and at work. It’s a legit varietal, like Gesha or Bourbon, from a remarkable local roaster who operates quasi-legally out of a sick loft and specializes in light—but not too light!—roasts, a respectful homage to modern Scandinavian coffee that lets you really get a sense of the bean’s terroir, down to the GPS coordinates where it was discovered during an expedition into coffee country led by a white man of great taste, and the barista said that the acidity from this coffee is “really wonderful and fruit-forward, like Hawaiian Punch micro-dosed with LSD.”

The long con

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.” There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump.

Auctioning Christie

he should be able to get at least $500 for christie.

In what some are calling a sign of its desperation to raise cash, the Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump is auctioning off New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on the popular e-commerce site eBay, campaign officials have confirmed. Christie, who is described on the site as being in lightly used but good condition, is believed to be the first sitting governor ever to be auctioned on the Internet.

CPU Neuroscience

But then the biologists tried it out. This paper details an attempt to study the 6502 chip using the tools we have available to study nematode brains and the like, and it’s titled “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor”. I’ll let the abstract speak for itself: There is a popular belief in neuroscience that we are primarily data limited, that producing large, multimodal, and complex datasets will, enabled by data analysis algorithms, lead to fundamental insights into the way the brain processes information. Microprocessors are among those artificial information processing systems that are both complex and that we understand at all levels, from the overall logical flow, via logical gates, to the dynamics of transistors. Here we take a simulated classical microprocessor as a model organism, and use our ability to perform arbitrary experiments on it to see if popular data analysis methods from neuroscience can elucidate the way it processes information. We show that the approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the processor. This suggests that current approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful models of the brain.

European Sleeper Agents

a european spin-off of the americans

The industrious life of a busy, frequent-flying Spanish consultant was a front. “Henry Frith” was an alias for a Russian spy, a so-called “illegal” who lived for 20 years under a carefully constructed “legend” — a false identity, complete with a fake history and background. He is the first “illegal” to have been uncovered and publicly named in Europe since the end of the Cold War.

Gene drives

knowing what gene drives are is crucial to understand the most important and powerful biotechnology yet.

Gene drives work in mice:

In a paper in Nature, biologists demonstrate that gene drive technology also works — at least up to a point — in a mammal: the mouse. Their findings highlight the potential, but also the significant limitations, of putting gene drives to work in the real world. For at least some time to come, these kinds of “active genetics” technologies may be more useful as laboratory tools than as instruments for remaking nature.