Sapere Aude
Month: January 2021
Don’t wear a GPS ankle bracelet during cosplay
Betancur delivered that to investigators in a way few others involved in the half-assed insurrection have. Behold this galaxy brain at work. The case relies in part on location data produced by the GPS unit that the man was wearing for a prior offense.
Fauci’s gambit — which was to play a shrewd inside game to preserve an illusion, from the outside, that science and facts were safe from political contamination — had the effect of delegitimizing science and precluding the possibility of a political solution. By fudging the facts to assuage the president and moving the goalposts to manipulate the public, Fauci, however inadvertently, helped to undermine public trust in the medical response, creating openings for conspiracy and demagoguery to fill the gap. Meanwhile, by lending legitimacy to the White House’s approach, he forestalled a political showdown — one that could have seriously altered the course of the past year.
i like the approach and outlook. more people should think this way.
the philosophical questions in the video are very interesting. in a global culture, things will get blurry.
But it’s not just this flexible behavioral repertoire that’s so amazing. It’s not the fact that somehow, this dumb little spider with its crude compound optics has visual acuity to rival a cat’s (even though a cat’s got orders of magnitude more neurons in one retina than our spider has in her whole head). It’s not even the fact that this little beast can figure out a maze which entails recognizing prey, then figuring out an approach path along which that prey is not visible (i.e., the spider can’t just keep her eyes on the ball: she has to develop and remember a search image), then follow her best-laid plans by memory including recognizing when she’s made a wrong turn and retracing her steps, all the while out of sight of her target. No, the really amazing thing is how she does all this with a measly 600K neurons— how she pulls off cognitive feats that would challenge a mammal with 70M or more.
She does it like a Turing Machine, one laborious step at a time.
She’ll sit there for 2 hours, just watching. It takes that long to process the image: whereas a cat or a mouse would assimilate the whole hi-res vista in an instant, Portia’s poor underpowered graphics driver can only hold a fraction of the scene at any given time. So she scans, back and forth, back and forth, like some kind of hairy multilimbed Cylon centurion, scanning each little segment of the game board in turn. Then, when she synthesizes the relevant aspects of each, she figures out a plan, and puts it into motion: climbing down the branch, falling out of sight of the target, ignoring other branches that would only seem to provide a more direct route to payoff, homing in on that one critical fork in the road that leads back up to satiation. Portia won’t be deterred by the fact that she only has a few % of a real brain: she emulates the brain she needs, a few % at a time.
2022-06-24: Speaking of efficiency, the brain has a power saving mode.
When mice were deprived of sufficient food for weeks at a time — long enough for them to lose 15%-20% of their typical healthy weight — neurons in the visual cortex reduced the amount of ATP used at their synapses by 29%. Because the neurons in low-power mode processed visual signals less precisely, the food-restricted mice performed worse on a challenging visual task. The fact that these impairments in perception occurred long before the animal entered real starvation was unexpected.
A significant implication of the new findings is that much of what we know about how brains and neurons work may have been learned from brains that researchers unwittingly put into low-power mode. It is extremely common to restrict the amount of food available to mice and other experimental animals for weeks before and during neuroscience studies to motivate them to perform tasks in return for a food reward.
Like a flipped switch, the attitude inside online QAnon communities shifted from glee to shock and misery: “NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENED!!!”; “So now we have proof Q was total bullshit”; “I feel sick, disgusted and disappointed”; “Have we been duped???”; “You played us all”; “HOW COULD WE BELIEVE THIS FOR SO LONG? ARE WE ALL IDIOTS?”
Meanwhile, several QAnon loyalists performed medal-worthy mental gymnastics to keep their delusion alive. A few suggested that the video of Biden becoming president was a deepfake and that he was actually locked away behind bars as it played across the nation. Others posited that Biden himself had in fact been working with Trump to dismantle the deep state all along, and would be the one to sic the military on the supposed traitors. Many simply pleaded with each other to stay patient: “Q wouldn’t do this to us. He wouldn’t let us down. Don’t lose hope.”
by employing innate genetic differences between people—an inborn susceptibility to alcohol, say, or to higher cholesterol levels in the arteries—they can now mimic, at much less effort and expense, the kinds of large trials that would be necessary to determine if an HDL-lowering medicine is really beneficial. The new technique, called Mendelian randomization, is already being used by drug companies to make billion-dollar decisions about which drugs to pursue. What may worry Davey Smith and others most is that as genetic databases have multiplied, tying genes to virtually any imaginable biological or even behavioral variable, studies of cause and association have become almost effortless.
The University of Bristol hosts a platform called MR-Base that lets anyone carry out virtual experiments without collecting any new data.
“You can do these studies now, sitting at your desk, in 10 minutes. It’s just too easy. Because of the flood of studies coming out, it may very well fall into disrepute.”
interesting that there’s still advances on better mapping colors to the human perceptual system:
In an ideal perceptual color space, the distance of 2 points in the space would correlate strongly with the perception of color difference. Put another way, all pairs separated by a “just noticeable difference” would be separated by an equal distance.
As it turns out, such a thing is no more possible than flattening an orange peel, because color perception is inherently non-euclidean. To put it simply, our eyes are more sensitive to small changes in hue than small changes in lightness or color saturation.
Even so, like map projections, it is possible to make a color space that approximates perceptual uniformity and is useful for various tasks. 1 of these, a primary focus of this blog post, is smoother gradients.
I’m guessing this would be very hard to pull off today.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 