Category: Uncategorized

Galaxy Full of Planets?

there are 40B earth-like planets in the habitable zone in the galaxy.

2014-12-05:

the number of biotic planets in the Milky Way is between millions and billions, and the corresponding distance to the nearest biotic world is 10-100 light years. the likely distance to the nearest civilizations detectable by SETI is of the order of a few 1000 light years

this is a very accessible paper on the Drake equation (which may well achieve a cultural status similar to e=mc^2 this century)

1% of the stars in the Milky Way could have earth like planets (smaller rock like planets) Another study shows the Milky Way is twice as big as previously thought. So instead 100b stars there could be 200b and of those 1% or 2b could have earth like worlds around sun like stars.

Brain Compression

The visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences similar to methods used for video data compression.

we have now demonstrated that the visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences

2015-03-13: That’s clever visual cortex hacking.

“These GIFs use depth of field and graphic elements to achieve their effect, just like many classic paintings. The white lines define the plane where the screen is, creating a mental division between background, midplane and foreground. Combined with the camera’s depth of field blur, it tricks our brain into thinking that things are popping out of the screen.”


2022-02-18: Visual Stability

Despite a noisy and ever-changing visual world, our perceptual experience seems remarkably stable over time. How does our visual system achieve this apparent stability? Here, we introduce a previously unknown visual illusion that shows direct evidence for an online mechanism continuously smoothing our percepts over time. As a result, a continuously seen physically changing object can be misperceived as unchanging. We find that online object appearance is captured by past visual experience up to 15 seconds ago. We propose that, because of an underlying active mechanism of serial dependence, the representation of the object is continuously merged over time, and the consequence is an illusory stability in which object appearance is biased toward the past. Our results provide a direct demonstration of the link between serial dependence in visual representations and perceived visual stability in everyday life.

Against bespoke software

most businesses are deluding themselves thinking they are unique snowflakes, commission crappy “bespoke” applications, and then wonder why nothing works. they’d be better served by general purpose tools like google docs: they’d not be locked in, and their employees would gain generalizable skills, not be trained monkeys that only know how to press buttons.