Month: November 2019

Into the Abyss

Within 2 months of Mackey’s inspection, the Lyubov Orlova and its crew would be abandoned in the harbor by the vessel’s owner, as lawsuits and liens piled up. In fact, it would be nearly 3 years before the Lyubov Orlova would leave St. John’s Harbor. When it finally did, the vessel, named for a Soviet movie star, was described in international headlines as a “cannibal rat-infested ghost ship” drifting on a crash course toward Britain. But the Lyubov Orlova never made it across the Atlantic; it’s believed to be rotting somewhere at the bottom of it. The Lyubov Orlova’s journey from cruise ship to ghost ship left financial hardships, a humanitarian emergency and a political controversy in its wake.

The Google Squeeze

1 answer, perhaps, lies in Google’s behavior itself: unlike traditional monopolies, it is hard to argue that Google’s product isn’t getting better. Sure, OTAs need to pay to play on the hotel module, but the hotel module is a genuine improvement over 10 blue links. The same can be said of the other areas where Google gives answers instead of options. I absolutely get the argument that this might be an unfair extension of Google’s search dominance, but the possibility of stifling innovation, both directly and also its incentives, are worth consideration.

Minecraft Earth

That unlocks a class of experiences that have never been seen in a mobile AR game: coordinated actions that can happen only if multiple real people do things in the right order, standing in the exact right place. Like, say, an Adventure in which 4 people have to stand on pressure plates in the various corners of the space, thus triggering the reveal of a secret underground dungeon. You thought the Pokémon Go phenomenon of groups of people all pointing their phone in the same direction was weird? Wait until you see the Minecraft Earth version: half of them are spinning in a circle, 3 are squatting and making digging motions toward the ground, and a few others are all jumping around. Even better—they’re all talking about it. ”You can perfectly coordinate how to mine out an area or find hidden treasure if you’re with strangers, without talking, but social interaction around the common goal is a core part of what makes Minecraft Earth a different sort of multiplayer.”

Suing to Save the World

the young activists of Juliana v. United States have grown ever more empowered, both within the courtroom and without. “I think that’s really important because something we harp on a lot is that it’s not just about us 21 plaintiffs, or even just about these last 4 years. What we’re doing is indicative of a wider movement and a wider change that’s happening with just young people stepping up to governments and stepping up to people in power.”

Dopamine fasting

The name — dopamine fasting — is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more of a stimulation fast. The purpose is so that subsequent pleasures are all the more potent and meaningful. “Any kind of fasting exists on a spectrum,” Mr. Sinka said as he slowly moved through sun salutations, careful not to get his heart racing too much, already worried he was talking too much that morning.

Mapping the Ocean Floor

One of the most amazing things to find unexpectedly is often a wreck. There are tons of those around, we don’t know where they are, and we often find them unexpectedly. We’ve found seamounts—4000-meter-high seamounts that we find when we think nothing is there, and these have impacts on biodiversity and circulation. We find all kinds of interesting structures on the seafloor that we just don’t understand yet. And again we find it looking at it now through a new lens of high resolution.

Steppingstone principle

The steppingstone principle goes beyond traditional evolutionary approaches. Instead of optimizing for a specific goal, it embraces creative exploration of all possible solutions. By doing so, it has paid off with groundbreaking results. 1 system based on the steppingstone principle mastered 2 video games that had stumped popular machine learning methods. DeepMind reported success in combining deep learning with the evolution of a diverse population of solutions. The steppingstone’s potential can be seen by analogy with biological evolution. In nature, the tree of life has no overarching goal, and features used for 1 function might find themselves enlisted for something completely different. Feathers likely evolved for insulation and only later became handy for flight. If we want algorithms that can navigate the physical and social world as easily as we can — or better! — we need to imitate nature’s tactics. Instead of hard-coding the rules of reasoning, or having computers learn to score highly on specific performance metrics, we must let a population of solutions blossom. Make them prioritize novelty or interestingness instead of the ability to walk or talk. They may discover an indirect path, a set of steppingstones, and wind up walking and talking better than if they’d sought those skills directly.