Category: Uncategorized

Gentlemen, Formerly

To discover that a gentleman today only has to brush his teeth, console his crying girlfriend, and barbeque with confidence would have terrified men like William Byrd II. Aside from not becoming a true gentleman, Byrd feared more than anything that he and his kind would become irrelevant in the New Colony’s future. He feared that all he had achieved to become a true gentleman, all his Greek and social climbing and hard-won backroom dealing, would be overwhelmed by the tide of immigrants whose mashed-up social customs would swallow up him and his friends. His class of elite and educated English gentlemen wouldn’t be needed or respected. I can almost see the beads of sweat forming on his forehead as he writes about the Scots-Irish.

Victorian Calling Cards

Victorian calling cards were a social grace, with their own detailed guidance for design and use (Archive.org web view of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, by Emily Post, 1922). Calling or visiting cards ranged from basic engraved cards to rather elaborate pieces with flaps and frills, hand-tinting and transparent images, though men typically had more sparse cards. Men also could use acquaintance cards to politely declare their interest in a young lady, with text and/or illustrations.

Intelligence is exponentially hard

there’s only a runaway effect if creating intelligences is a linear problem: 2x as intelligent is 2x as hard. it is much more likely it is an exponentially hard problem.

2023-02-11: A similar argument, there may be diminishing returns to intelligence

For most problems in the universe, there are massive diminishing returns to intelligence, either because they are too easy or too hard. We are obsessed with the narrow band of things that some humans can do and others can’t, like graduate from college, or at the extremes what is feasible for a genius of 160 IQ but not a regular smart person at 120, like write a great novel or make a discovery in theoretical physics. But the category of things that either all humans can do or no humans can do is probably larger than the one of things that some humans can do and not others.

Europe is scientifically illiterate

This explains a lot of the GMO / nuclear paranoia in Europe.

In 15 European nations, including Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the scientific literacy rate was between 10 and 19% US scores very highly in Adult Science Literacy. The bad news is that global scientific literacy is shockingly low. Among the 34 nations tested in 2005, the SLR rose above 30% in only one nation, Sweden, whose SLR was 35%. For the United States, the good news is that in all of Miller’s results since the beginning of testing in 1988, the US scored above nearly all other nations. In the 2005 tests, for example, the US ranked second with an SLR of 28%.

The author of a 2009 study concluded that “the college and university general education requirement to take at least a year of science courses (fairly unique to US universities, where “breadth requirements” are emphasized) makes a major contribution to the civic scientific literacy of US citizens,” and that the surprisingly high US SLR is a result of the positive impact of these college-level science courses for non-science students.

To be clear, America is the only major country that requires college students to complete a full year of science. As a result, science literacy of US adults is higher than in other developed nations.

House of cards loves deep web

Watching some house of cards. deep web, lol

So how believable is the whole House of Cards storyline? There are no egregious technical howlers, thanks to the technical advice of Internet activist Gregg Housh, whose participation can be seen part of a trend toward better technical accuracy since the days of Sneakers and Independence Day (in which the remarkably hackable alien computer features a giant status dialog that reads “UPLOADING VIRUS”). The Fifth Estate had more detail, but on purely technical terms, House of Cards holds up pretty well. As for the actual storyline, let me put it this way: It’s just as believable as House of Cards’ politics.

Iceland is sequenced

Researchers have sequenced the whole genomes of 2500 people from Iceland. They have genotyped ~120k Icelanders. They can impute whole genome sequence down to variants with less than 0.1% frequency.

On the plan to sequence all icelanders, to find patterns of disease.

In the trove of data, Decode found rare mutations that dramatically increase the risk for Alzheimer’s, gallstones, atrial fibrillation, and liver and thyroid diseases—mutations that appear to be the result of “knocked out” or missing pieces of DNA. Perhaps most intriguing is the detective work that lies ahead. Decode identified 1171 knocked out genes, present in nearly 8% of the 104K people studied. The next step is to work backward—in the opposite direction one normally goes in genetics research—and cross-reference these knockouts with medical records and phenotypical data and try to determine the impact of these mistakes in nature.

The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears

If a single celled micro-organism is more complex than our simulations of neurons, that makes me suspect that our simulations aren’t yet right. Or, finally, consider 3 more discoveries we’ve made in recent years about how the brain works, none of which are included in current brain simulations. First, there’re glial cells. Glial cells outnumber neurons in the human brain. And traditionally we’ve thought of them as ‘support’ cells that just help keep neurons running. But new research has shown that they’re also important for cognition. Yet the Blue Gene simulation contains none. Second, very recent work has shown that, sometimes, neurons that don’t have any synapses connecting them can actually communicate. The electrical activity of one neuron can cause a nearby neuron to fire (or not fire) just by affecting an electric field, and without any release of neurotransmitters between them. This too is not included in the Blue Brain model.