A remarkable compendium of information at odds with the present fashionable pessimism, Goklany’s The Improving State of the World reveals that, contrary to popular belief, it is the poorest who are enjoying the most dramatic rise in living standards. Refuting a central premise of the modern green movement, it also demonstrates that as countries become richer, they also become cleaner, healthier and more environmentally conscious.
these are the best of times, ever. some good material to give balance to developmental discussions
Surfing Uncertainty isn’t pop science and isn’t easy reading. Sometimes it’s on the border of possible-at-all reading. Author Andy Clark (a professor of logic and metaphysics, of all things!) is clearly brilliant, but prone to going on long digressions about various boring scholarly debates. In particular, he’s obsessed with showing how “embodied” everything is all the time. This gets kind of awkward, since the predictive processing model isn’t really a natural match for embodiment theory, and describes a brain which is pretty embodied in some ways but not-so-embodied in others. If you want 100 pages of apologia along the lines of “this may not look embodied, but if you squint you’ll see how super-duper embodied it really is!”, this is your book.
Friston’s work has 2 primary motivations. Sure, it would be nice to see the free energy principle lead to true artificial consciousness someday, but that’s not one of his top priorities. Rather, his first big desire is to advance schizophrenia research, to help repair the brains of patients like the ones he knew at the old asylum. And his second main motivation is “much more selfish.” It goes back to that evening in his bedroom, as a teenager, looking at the cherry blossoms, wondering, “Can I sort it all out in the simplest way possible?”
and a piece on Friston:
Karl Friston’s free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself.
We have never seen such a concrete example of how the brain uses prior experience to modify the neural dynamics by which it generates sequences of neural activities, to correct for its own imprecision. This is the unique strength of this paper: bringing together perception, neural dynamics, and Bayesian computation into a coherent framework, supported by both theory and measurements of behavior and neural activities
If that is not mind-bending enough, in his new book, Jeff Hawkins extends the memory framework to the construct of “reference frames”. Everything we perceive is a constructed reality, a cortical consensus from competing internal models resident in many cortical columns, the amalgam of 1000 brains. Those models are updated by data streaming from the senses. But our reality resides in the models. “The brain learns its model of the world by observing how its inputs change over time. There isn’t another way to learn. Every time we take a step, move a limb, move our eyes, tilt our head, or utter a sound, the input from our sensors change. For example, our eyes make rapid movements, called saccades, about three times a second. With each saccade, our eyes fixate on a new point in the world and the information from the eyes to the brain changes completely.” We don’t perceive any of this because we are living in the model, which is predicting the next input to come, across all the senses. “Vision is an interactive process, dependent on movement. Only by moving can we learn a model of the object.”
“To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. We are not aware of most of the predictions made by the brain unless an error occurs.”
“Thoughts and experiences are always the result of a set of neurons that are active at the same time (about 2% of the total). Individual neurons can participate in many different thoughts or experiences. Everything we know is stored in the connections between neurons. Every day, many of the synapses on an individual neuron will disappear and new ones will replace them. Thus, much of learning occurs by forming new connections between neurons that were not previously connected.”
Sequence memory (like predicting the next note in a melody or a common sequence of behaviors): “Sequence memory is also used for language. Recognizing a spoken work is like recognizing a short melody.”
The prospect of dying for want of a kidney has concentrated Sally Satel’s mind wonderfully on how to make sure that more kidneys become available. She comes down in favor of incentive payments to donors, and suggests 4 basic models:
A forward market for cadaver organs (I like this one) in which you sign up to have your organs harvested at death, and receive a small payment on signing or a large one to your estate when you die
A centralized single compensator. Medicare or whoever pays a bounty for the kidney; and pays $15-20k a year for the immunosuppressant drugs which the recipient will need; but saves $66k per patient per year on dialysis.
Multiple compensators. As above, but private insurers and charitable foundations chip into the compensation fund.
Private contracts. The sort of market we have now, between individuals, only regulated and legal. One nice nuance, suggested by Ms Postrel’s husband, is that donors/vendors should get a year’s tax holiday, evening out the incentive between rich and poor.
2007-03-14: iran, of all places, might be the first place with an organ market. 2011-05-31:
Scott Carney’s The Red Market is a book-length investigative journalism piece on the complicated and sometimes stomach-churning underground economy in human flesh, ranging from practice of kidnapping children to sell to orphanages who get healthy kids to pass off to wealthy foreigners to the bizarre criminal rings who imprison kidnapped indigents in “blood farms” or lure impoverished women into selling their kidneys.
the trade in human flesh is brisk. 2016-12-30: Car crash victims are a major source of organ donations. What will replace them? Better stock up on those artificial organs.
a science fiction novel by Greg Egan which explores quantum ontology via the various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulations of intelligence
Making History After the Quiet War is over, a historian discovers that victory is far from simple. A novella published back-to-back with Stephen Baxter’s Reality Dust as part of the Gollancz Binaries series.
Whole Wide World Sex, surveillance, and Wreckless Eric ..A murder mystery set in near future London, where information is the universal currency, and some people will do anything to be able to control it. There are no spaceships or ray guns in Whole Wide World, just as there were none in McAuley’s earlier SF novel Fairyland, but the rigorous examination of the ramifications of a major issue on the future of our society make this novel every bit as much science fiction. And, in different ways, it is every bit as good. Whole Wide World is a major novel, and McAuley is one of our best.’
The Secret of Life There is life on Mars. Will it end life on Earth? A gripping near-future thriller for the Age of the Genome, blending the wonder of classic science fiction with the terrifying implications of biotechnology.
finite groups are the manhattan project of math. 15k pages of proof, and ongoing attempts to restate the proof so that future generations may understand it.
a new feature designed to expose LibraryThing’s excellent and varied recommendations to members and non-members alike. We put them alongside Amazon’s, which are also quite good. We are proud of our recommendations, but haven’t perfected the perfect algorithm yet. When we’ve made things as good as we can, we’re going to start offering recommended book data to libraries. But to heck with that! Let’s talk about bad recommendations. Today we introduce UnSuggester, “the worst recommendation system ever devised™.”
LT continues to introduce innovative features. i love them
Gregor J. Rothfuss 