Month: June 2016

Underwater Pareidolia

They believe the structures began forming as early as 5M years ago, when a hidden rupture in the seabed sent methane and other gases bubbling upward. Microbes living in underwater sediment devoured the carbon in these gases, instigating a chemical process that gave the mud the consistency of cement. Hard columns formed around the gas seeps, and marine creatures boring into the sediment gave rise to other strange “doughnut” shapes

sometimes strangely geometric shapes have an entirely natural explanation

Age of Em

the age of em is one of the most important contributions to futurism in quite some time.

It might seem odd, given that it is both awkward to define what kind of book it is – economics textbook, future studies, speculative sociology, science fiction without any characters? – and that most readers will disagree with large parts of it. Indeed, one of the main reasons it will become classic is that there is so much to disagree with and those disagreements are bound to stimulate a crop of blogs, essays, papers and maybe other books. This is a very rich synthesis of many ideas with a high density of fascinating arguments and claims per page just begging for deeper analysis and response. It is in many ways like an author’s first science fiction novel (Zindell’s Neverness, Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, and Egan’s Quarantine come to mind) – lots of concepts and throwaway realizations has been built up in the background of the author’s mind and are now out to play. Later novels are often better written, but first novels have the freshest ideas. The second reason it will become classic is that even if mainstream economics or futurism pass it by, it is going to profoundly change how science fiction treats the concept of mind uploading. Sure, the concept has been around for ages, but this is the first through treatment of what it means to a society. Any science fiction treatment henceforth will partially define itself by how it relates to the Age of Em scenario.

100x smaller Static Checkers

Modern static bug finding tools are complex. They typically consist of 100s of 1000s of lines of code, and most of them are wedded to 1 language (or even 1 compiler). This complexity makes the systems hard to understand, hard to debug, and hard to retarget to new languages, thereby dramatically limiting their scope. This paper reduces the complexity of the checking system by addressing a fundamental assumption, the assumption that checkers must depend on a full-blown language specification and compiler front end. Instead, our program checkers are based on drastically incomplete language grammars (“micro-grammars”) that describe only portions of a language relevant to a checker. As a result, our implementation is tiny— 2500 lines of code, 100x smaller than a typical system. We hope that this dramatic increase in simplicity will allow developers to use more checkers on more systems in more languages. We implement our approach in µchex, a language-agnostic framework for writing static bug checkers. We use it to build micro-grammar based checkers for 6 languages (C, the C preprocessor, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Dart) and find over 700 errors in real-world projects.

Evolutionary Biochemistry

Bloom and others are part of a growing group of scientists who practice “evolutionary biochemistry.” They seek to explain life’s tremendous diversity and determine exactly how that diversity emerged. Rather than focusing on how plants or animals adapted to different environments, however, these researchers consider diversity on a much smaller scale: Their work aims to explain how the small set of proteins that powered primitive life-forms evolved into the millions of specialized proteins that drive biological processes today.

Exploiting the genetic records, Bloom can assemble virus proteins that existed in bygone times, then reconstruct how they evolved, 1 amino acid at a time. Other researchers are analyzing modern species to resurrect the ancestral forms of biological molecules that have evolved over millions of years.

Against Historic Preservation

Repeal all historic preservation laws. It’s 1 thing to require safety permits but no construction project should require a historic preservation permit. Here are 3 reasons: First, it’s often the case that buildings of little historical worth are preserved by rules and regulations that are used as a pretext to slow competitors, maintain monopoly rents, and keep neighborhoods in a kind of aesthetic stasis that benefits a small number of people at the expense of many others. Second, a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestors ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies. Ironically, if today’s rules for historical preservation had been in place in the past the buildings that some now want to preserve would never have been built at all. The opportunity cost of preservation is future greatness.

Looking Smart at a Tech Conference

The best thing about going to a tech conference is that you can tell everyone you’re going to a tech conference. But while you’re there, it’s important you make a smart impression so people will remember you, or at least wait a few days before throwing away your business card. Here are 10 ways to do that.
2 Use the Q&A portion to promote yourself. The most important part of asking a question in front of an audience is not what question you ask, but everything you say before you ask the question to get people’s attention and make them realize you’re someone they should be talking to.
3 Don’t take notes, take sketchnotes. What are sketchnotes? Nobody knows. Just doodle in a notebook and say you’re sketchnoting. Then take a picture of your doodle and post it on Twitter. Since no one will be able to understand it, they’ll have to assume this tech conference was very complicated.

Predicting Drone Strikes

Climate change plus religious confusion plus a shit economy equals drone strikes.

climate change is very tightly woven with war and conflict. In one sense, this relationship isn’t news. Climate change causes resource scarcity — and resource scarcity is, historically, one brutally reliable trigger of war and strife. The US Department of Defense certainly takes it seriously; last year it released a report calling climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.” Another nonprofit study recently argued that a massive 2006-2011 drought in Syria, by driving rural populations into the already-stressed cities, helped accelerate the country’s human-rights catastrophe. But that map above suggests an even more intriguing and subtle finding: That climate change tracks conflict with such granularity that it even tracks drone strikes.