Many organizations and institutions are dedicated to identifying and reducing the prevalence of social problems, from unethical research to unwarranted aggressions. But our studies suggest that even well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own efforts, simply because they view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context that they themselves have brought about. Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be 1 source of that pessimism.
Month: June 2018
25 regular places
people are constantly exploring new places. They move to a new home, find a new favorite restaurant, find a new bar, or start going to another gym, etc. However, the number of regularly visited places is constantly 25 in a given period. If a new place is added to the list, 1 of the places disappears. The pattern is the same when the researchers divide the locations into categories based on how often and how long time they spend at the location.
Ibiza
Aptly named Ibiza, the film follows 3 American girls (who struggle to pronounce Ibiza correctly the entire film) as they travel to everyone’s favorite clubbing paradise and if luke-warm rom-coms are your thing, then you’re in luck. The lead character falls in love with an EDM DJ and absolute hilarity ensues (it doesn’t). We spoke to the director Alex Richanbach, who has never even been to Ibiza, about how he made the film, his influences and his take on glamorizing drugs. This is perhaps the most awkward interview we’ve ever done.
Conservation of Threat
as the environment becomes safer we manufacture new threats. To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task — to look at a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem “threatening.” The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless. As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of “threatening” to include a wider range of faces. When they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered “threats” depended on how many threats they had seen lately.
Computation & time travel
Consider a science-fiction scenario wherein you go back in time and dictate Shakespeare’s plays to him. Shakespeare thanks you for saving him the effort, publishes verbatim the plays that you dictated, and centuries later the plays come down to you, whereupon you go back in time and dictate them to Shakespeare, etc. Notice that, in contrast to the grandfather paradox, here there is no logical contradiction: the story as we told it is entirely consistent. But most people find the story “paradoxical” anyway. After all, somehow Hamlet gets written, without anyone ever doing the work of writing it! As Deutsch perceptively observed, if there is a “paradox” here, then it is not one of logic but of computational complexity. Now, some people have asked how such a claim could possibly be consistent with modern physics. For didn’t Einstein teach us that space and time are merely 2 aspects of the same structure? 1 immediate answer is that, even within relativity theory, space and time are not interchangeable: space has a positive signature whereas time has a negative signature. In complexity theory, the difference between space and time manifests itself in the straightforward fact that you can reuse the same memory cells over and over, but you can’t reuse the same moments of time. Yet, as trivial as that observation sounds, it leads to an interesting thought. Suppose that the laws of physics let us travel backwards in time. In such a case, it’s natural to imagine that time would become a “reusable resource” just like space is—and that, as a result, arbitrary PSPACE computations would fall within our grasp. But is that just an idle speculation, or can we rigorously justify it?
SpaceX in context
Because most people see SpaceX rocket launches on a small screen or from a great distance, here’s a better sense of how enormous these vehicles are by adding them to real-world places.
Navy Yard Expansion
Currently, the Navy Yard has 60 buildings under lease. The first phase of growth at the Navy Yard will be driven by 5 cornerstone projects, encompassing 250K m2 of space either in development or just finished developing: The Green Manufacturing Building, currently home to New Lab, Crye Precision and Brooklyn Roasting Company (800 jobs), Building 77 (3000+ jobs), Dock 72, a private joint venture where WeWork will be located (4000 jobs), the expansion of Steiner Studios (2000 jobs), and Admiral’s Row site, which will be anchored by a Wegman’s grocery store (1200 jobs).
Biggest Digital Heist
Yet experts point out that even if Katana was the mastermind, he was just one guy in a crime that surely must have had many authors. Unlike the bank jobs of yore, digital heists are amoeba-like ventures that divide over and over again as the malware proliferates. “We’ve already seen the modification of Carbanak and multiple groups using it. Same case with Cobalt.” In recent weeks, employees at banks in the Russian-speaking world have been receiving emails that appear to be from Kaspersky, the security company that unearthed Carbanak. The messages warn recipients that their PCs have been flagged for possibly violating the law and they should download a complaint letter or face penalties. When they click on the attachment, a version of the Cobalt malware infects their networks. It turns out cyberheists may not die even when their suspected perpetrators are nabbed.
EV Chinese Dining
In the East Village, you can now get Hunan-inspired mifen rice noodles, Cajun-Chinese spicy crawfish boils at $30 per Kg, Hong Kong-style clay pot rice, and homey bowls of Taiwanese beef noodles — all within the same 1km radius. And most of these restaurants weren’t even here just 2 years ago.
- Han Dynasty
- Tim Ho Wan
- Mimi Cheng’s Dumplings
- The Bao
- Szechuan Mountain House
- Clay Pot NYC
- Drunken Dumpling
- MáLà Project
- Hunan Slurp Shop
- Ho Foods
Bushwick Night Market
You should come hungry to Happy Family Night Market. The 1-day Bushwick festival promises to be a vibrant celebration of Asian-American culture through food, film, discussions and more.
Let’s start with just some of the menu; so far there’ll be chicken choila with aachar and puffed rice and a vegetarian momo from While in Kathmandu. Bunker Vietnamese will serve Smallhold mushroom tempura, red wattle pork skewer, grilled corn with scallion oil and a coconut peanut topping. Randwiches will bring adobo pulled pork sliders, Shikampur-style lamb meatballs in a rich gravy, and potato-croquette-style balls with Maggi ketchup from Taj Mah Balls. Honey’s will be putting on a specialty cocktail made with umeboshi plums from Ozuké.