Category: Uncategorized

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.

RL introduction

The most accessible introduction to RL I’ve seen

This is a long overdue blog post on Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is hot! You may have noticed that computers can now automatically learn to play ATARI games (from raw game pixels!), they are beating world champions at Go, simulated quadrupeds are learning to run and leap, and robots are learning how to perform complex manipulation tasks that defy explicit programming. It turns out that all of these advances fall under the umbrella of RL research. I also became interested in RL myself over the last ~year: I worked through Richard Sutton’s book, read through David Silver’s course, watched John Schulmann’s lectures, wrote an RL library in Javascript, over the summer interned at DeepMind working in the DeepRL group, and most recently pitched in a little with the design/development of OpenAI Gym, a new RL benchmarking toolkit. So I’ve certainly been on this funwagon for at least a year but until now I haven’t gotten around to writing up a short post on why RL is a big deal, what it’s about, how it all developed and where it might be going.

Beeeeees

“One theory was that the queen was trapped in my car and the swarm were following,. But they couldn’t find the queen anywhere so I’ve no idea if that was right. Apparently bees can swarm at this time of the year and it is a very strong instinct for them to follow the queen. I still don’t really understand why because they couldn’t see the queen anywhere. Perhaps they just like the heat of my car. It is possible the queen had been attracted to something in the car – perhaps a sweet or food in the car. ” The swarm of around 20K had followed her and were sat around on the boot of the car.


The level of eusociality required for this is breathtaking.
2022-12-02: How eusociality may have evolved

Ant pupae—which are equivalent to the chrysalis stage of the butterfly—produce a milklike substance derived from molting fluid that is eaten by both adult ants and larvae. Typically, when insects molt, they secrete a fluid that’s simply resorbed by the animal when the molt is complete. But in ants, this nutrition-rich substance serves as a kind of “metabolic currency” within the colony and may have played a role in the ants’ evolutionary transition from a group of loosely cooperating individuals into a truly integrated superorganism

Vegan Scam

“I worked hard, this was my passion. This was all I ever wanted. Why would I throw it up in flames? I have nothing now. I have no apartment. I have no money. Why would I torture myself like that? Talk to my friends. They will tell you this is not me.” Her carefully cultivated public persona hid some deeper demons. “She’s thrown stools, grapefruits and phones at me. She would leave cryptic notes with big kitchen knives stuck into vegetables. She punched me in the head and cut me with her ring.”

Baby sideshow performers

Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s, and though he died in relative obscurity, he was one of the great champions of this lifesaving technology and is credited with saving the lives of 1000s of the country’s premature babies.

this is a great example why the fight against luddites is always one of the most important