A Sense of Doubt blog post #2881 - The Next Hodge Podge - The Open Door
This is my laziest hodge podge ever. I have accumulated this one for months. I was going to add a bunch of twitter posts, but I will do that in the next one.
There's good stuff here, but it's not my usual curation and composition.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/19/jan-6-panel-urges-trump-prosecution-with-criminal-referral/
FUCK YEAH!
https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/10/24/2245259/math-scores-fell-in-nearly-every-state-reading-dipped-on-national-exam
Not surprising.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/10/17/0048245/scientists-baffled-after-a-black-hole-burps-a-stars-energy---three-years-later
Scientists Baffled After a Black Hole 'Burps' a Star's Energy - Three Years Later (npr.org)
Researchers made the discovery when they used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico — to check in on some two dozen black holes where stars had been shredded after coming too close to them. That is, the material in the star was pulled apart, or "spaghettified." Such happenings are called tidal disruption events, or TDEs....
"There's a point when you get too close to a black hole that you can no longer escape the black hole — that's called the event horizon. But this material never crossed that boundary, according to our best estimates," Cendes explains. In other words, the star got close enough to the black hole to get shredded — but not to fall into that point of no return.
But that's not what's unusual about it. Mashable picks up the story, noting it's a black hole, at the center of a galaxy some 665 million light-years from Earth:It's the fact that this star apparently didn't sit well with the black hole for such a long time that surprised them. Researchers have been studying these events with radio telescopes for more than a decade, said Edo Berger, a Harvard astronomy professor and co-author. "There was radio silence for the first three years in this case," Berger said in a statement.
"And now it's dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous ... ever observed."
The discovery suggests that delayed outflows of light from a black hole after swallowing a cosmic object could be happening more often than thought.
Tolkien Fans React to Amazon's $465M Series 'The Rings of Power'
Amazon's new $465 million series — a prequel to the Lord of the Rings — drew more than 25 million viewers on just its first day, according to Reuters, "a record debut for a Prime Video series."
The Independent shared reaction...
US Environmental Lead Says Advanced Nuclear Technology Critical to Decarbonize US and Japan
A surprise from the Associated Press. The head of America's Environment Protection Agency "said Friday that advanced nuclear technology will be 'critical' for both the United States and Japan as they step up cooperation to meet decarbonization goals." ...
How Shady Ships are Spoofing Their Locations with Fake GPS Coordinates
Slashdot reader artmancc writes: Like aircraft, many of the world's ocean-going vessels are required to have transponders that broadcast their location. The information is public and can be seen on websites such as AIS Marine Traffic. But according to a...
An Apple Watch for Your 5-Year-Old? More Parents Say Yes.
"Across the United States, parents are increasingly buying Apple Watches and strapping them onto the wrists of children as young as 5," reports the New York Times: The goal: to use the devices as a stopgap cellphone for the kids. With the watch's cellu...
Attacks on Linux Servers Rose 75% Over Last Year, Warn Security Researchers
"There's been a big rise in ransomware attacks targeting Linux," reports ZDNet, "as cyber criminals look to expand their options and exploit an operating system that is often overlooked when businesses think about security." According to analysis by cy...
Fishing at Sea Created at Least 75% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Ocean Cleanup project has an announcement....
75% to 86% of plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch "originates from fishing activities at sea." Plastic emissions from rivers remain the main source of plastic pollution from a g...
14-Year-Old Cracks Australian Coin's Code - in One Hour
So Australia's foreign intelligence cybersecurity agency marked its 75th anniversary by collaborating with the Australian mint to release a special commemorative coin with a four-layer secret code. The agency's director even said that if someone cracked a...
How Ukrainians Infiltrated Internet-Connected Security Cameras, Exposed Russian Bases
The Financial Times tells how the head of a Ukrainian cybersecurity company recruited dozens of "high-level Ukrainian hackers" and borrowed a Starlink internet satellite for "the large-scale infiltration of internet-connected security cameras to s...
Microsoft Investigates Bug That Mistakenly Flags Chromium-Based Apps as Malware
Windows' "Defender" software is supposed to detect malware. But its Microsoft team is now investigating reports that it's mistakenly flagging Electron-based or Chromium-based applications — as malware.
"It's a false positive, and your comp...
Instagram Removes Pornhub's Account
Variety reports: Instagram has suspended Pornhub's widely followed account on the social platform. Before the sex site's account was removed from Instagram, Pornhub had 13.1 million followers and more than 6,200 posts.
Reps for Met...
US Life Expectancy Falls Again In 'Historic' Setback
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the co...
USB4 v2 Will Support Speeds Up To 80 Gbps
The next generation of USB devices might support data transfer speeds as high as 80 Gbps, which would be twice as fast as current-gen Thunderbolt 4 products. From a report: The USB Promotor Group says it plans to publish the new USB4 version 2.0 specifi...
California Lawmakers Extend the Life of the State's Last Nuclear Power Plant
Citing searing summer temperatures and expected energy shortages, California lawmakers approved legislation aimed at extending the life of the state's last-operating nuclear power plant. From a report: The Diablo Canyon plant -- the state's largest sing...
How Twitter's Child Porn Problem Ruined Its Plans For an OnlyFans Competitor
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult ...
Many Developed Countries View Online Misinformation as 'Major Threat'
Nearly three-quarters of people across 19 countries believe that the spread of false information online is a "major threat," according to a survey released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. From a report: Researchers asked 24,525 people from 19 c...
AI-Generated Artwork Wins First Place At a State Fair Fine Arts Competition
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair's fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. "I won first place," a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of t...
Scientists Break the Direction of Time Down To the Cellular Level In Mind-Bending Study
A new study looks at interactions between microscopic neurons in salamanders to understand how the "arrow of time" is biologically generated. Motherboard reports: The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends to move from order to disorde...
The Slow Death of the Traditional Business Card
Traditional business cards -- dropping off for years -- might finally be folding given the Covid-19 pandemic, as many professionals worked from home, switched jobs and attended conferences and meetings virtually. From a report: Even now, with in-person ...
US Officials Order Nvidia To Halt Sales of Top AI Chips To China
Chip designer Nvidia on Wednesday said that U.S. officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms' ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition and h...
Someone Hacked Largest Taxi Service In Russia, Ordered All Available Taxis To the Same Location
According to Twitter user @runews, someone hacked the largest taxi service in Russia, Yandex Taxi, and ordered all the available taxis to an address on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The tweet includes a video showing the traffic jam that this caused in the middle o...
THIS WEEK → Beyond hyperanthropomorphism ⊗ Mars is irrelevant to us now ⊗ A machine for thinking: How Douglas Engelbart predicted the future of computing ⊗ AI and the limits of language
A YEAR AGO → A favourite in issue No.186 was Technological Lessons from the Pandemic by Z.M.L.
Quick note: I seem to have gotten around the Gmail sp!m issue, and actually hit some open rate numbers last week that I hadn’t in a while. Beyond the filtering issue, styles were also stripped away, which made the newsletter look a bit shit. You can have a look at properly styled No.230 and No.231 on the website and this one should be back to normal, thanks for your patience.
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Two of the featured articles below are, roughly, about the ‘intelligence’ in ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ Both are, in different ways, about the words we use for what, in the hope of better ‘placing’ what is actually there, so that we can better think of the potentials and dangers. Those reflections around language are important and there are a few good ones around, including those two but also The model is the message from before my summer break. I tend to use the term ‘synthetic’ quite a bit, and that use overlaps with some of their arguments, so I thought I’d recap some ideas here before we get to the articles. Btw, my preference for ‘synthetic’ is very similar to Bratton’s in Planetary sapience.
The metaverse is misrepresented and/or largely hype. ‘Synthetic reality’ is more interesting to me. By which I mean recreations of aspects of reality, either to enhance experiences (in video games for example, or art in VR, etc.), or to enhance our ability to represent reality (like in special effects, digital twins, etc.).
Artificial Intelligence is misrepresented and/or largely hype. ‘Synthetic intelligence’ is more interesting to me. By which I mean roughly everything we currently call AI, minus the part where people believe it’s producing something akin to actual intelligence. Yes, that often turns into semantic debates, but the real tools and possibilities are more intriguing to me and powerful enough (now or in the medium term) to be worth investigation and critique, without going into megalomania and fears of Artificial General Intelligence.
Finally, ‘Synthetic media’ is kind of an intersection of both, where AI models are used to create text, images, and videos based on billions of pieces of human-made media.
Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism
Quite a long piece by Venkatesh Rao, written in more ‘academic-like’ fashion than my personal preference, meaning citing a lot of other people and ideas to ‘back up’ his argument, sometimes to the detriment of easy parsing.
Rao is proposing a thought experiment where he generously grants some validity to certain hand waving positions (which he calls “philosophical-nonsense”) about some claimed pseudo-traits about AI (“sentience,” “consciousness,” “intentionality,” “self-awareness,” “general intelligence”), and then tries to prove them by digging behind the words and trying to find concepts or data that would support those positions. Needless to say, he fails, proving his point that “hyperanthropomorphic projections” are wrong, waste our time, and promote unfounded fears.
Bear in mind, he doesn’t wave away potential dangers, he waves away intelligence-based imagined dangers. Technologies can still be dangerous, bridges do collapse, a swarm of killer drones would still kill, but not through some form of advanced intelligence.
I’m not going to try to synthesise this too much, it’s worth the effort to read in full. Two main things I’d still like to pull out though. First, he uses “the idea of there being something it is like to be an entity,” which he shortens to “SIILTBness.” “There is something it is like to be a bat. There is something it is like to be a chimpanzee. There is something it is like to be a human.” He spends a great chunk of the article wondering if there is a SIILTBness to AI? Which leads him to the naive case for fear, favourite section of mine.
Second, an argument also made elsewhere about embodiment, which we can better understand through his piece. In short, there is a width and depth of understanding (a bandwidth) to human perception of the world that, combined with the complexity of our brain, creates an understanding of ourselves as selves. If another intelligence doesn’t have that understanding, how can we use our impression of “intelligence” as a shared trait, much less one that can then be compared?
There’s a there there that the pseudo-trait terms gesture at. Our current language (and implied ontology) is merely inadequate to the point of uselessness as a means of apprehension. […]
In other words, to the extent the computer is like the brain, there should be something it is like to be a computer, and we should be able to experience at least some impoverished version of that, and going the other way, there should be something it is like for a computer to experience being like a human (or superhuman). […]
This is dragon-hunting with magic spells based on extrapolating the existence of clouds into the existence of ectoplasm. We’re using two rhyming kinds of philosophical nonsense (one that might plausibly point to something real in our experience of ourselves, and the other something imputed, via extrapolation, to a technological system) to create a theater of fictive agency around made-up problems. […]
The answer is clearly no. The sum of the scraped data of the internet isn’t about anything, the way an infant’s visual field is about the world. So anything trained on the text and images comprising the internet cannot bootstrap a worldlike experience. So conservatively, there is nothing it is like to be GPT-3 or Dalle2, because there is nothing the training data is about. […]
AI is too interesting to sacrifice at the altar of confused hyperanthropomorphism. We need to get beyond it, and imagine a much wider canvas of possibilities for where AI could go, with or without SIILTBness, and with or without super-ness of any sort.
Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now
At Farsight, a short but excellent interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on what he can contribute to discussions about the climate crisis (“Three things: the future as subject for speculation; the syncretic combination of all the fields into a holistic vision of civilisation; and lastly, narrative as a mode of knowing.”), his fictional ministry for the future, legislation options, clean energy, geoengineering, coops, and some fun chiding of the interviewer at the end.
Geoengineering is a vague term that has been demonised, so it is perhaps not useful to keep using it. Each action proposed has different costs, potential benefits, and potential dangers, so they need to be discussed individually and not as a class. […]
Mars is irrelevant to us now. We should of course concentrate on maintaining the habitability of the Earth. My Mars trilogy is a good novel but not a plan for this moment. If we were to create a sustainable civilisation here on Earth, with all Earth’s creatures prospering, then and only then would Mars become even the slightest bit interesting to us. It would be a kind of reward for our success – we could think of it in the way my novel thinks of it, as an interesting place worth exploring more. But until we have solved our problems here, Mars is just a distraction for a few escapists, and so worse than useless. […]
[N]ature? You are nature, nature is you. Natural is what happens. The word is useless as a divide, there is no Human apart from Nature, you have no thoughts or feelings without your body, and the Earth is your body, so please dispense with that dichotomy of human/nature, and attend to your own health, which is to say your biosphere’s health.
A Machine for Thinking: How Douglas Engelbart Predicted the Future of Computing
Most readers probably know about Engelbart and the Mother of all demos, but this by Steven Johnson is a good read on the topic anyway, with an overview of his life’s work and some of the ‘sceniusian’ influences and interconnections, including Bill English, Stewart ‘Forest Gump’ Brand, and how the “Bay Area tech scene lay at the unlikely intersection of three distinct cultural rivers: the intellectuals and scientists in the orbit of Stanford and Berkeley; military funding from DARPA; and the counterculture that had become such a dominant presence in Northern California during the period”.
[A] future device that Bush called the Memex, a machine for augmenting our memories and our intellect, just as telescopes and microscopes had augmented our vision. Bush described it as a kind of “mechanized file or library” where people would someday store their books and documents and correspondence, making “trails” of association between all the data, like paths beaten down through a dense forest of information. […]
“Man’s population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man’s intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.” […]
“The personal computer revolution,” he wrote in the 1980s, “turned its back on those tools that led to the empowering of… distributed work groups collaborating simultaneously and over time on common knowledge work.” It wasn’t until the rise of cloud computing and services like Slack and Google Docs that Engelbart’s original vision of collaborative software truly came of age.
AI and the Limits of Language
If you read one thing about AI this week, go back to the first feature above, but this one by Jacob Browning and Yann LeCun is also quite good if you are tracking the thinking around semantics, “intelligence,” embodiment, and the potential of AI. They say “it isn’t clear what semantic gatekeeping is buying anyone these days,” linking to ‘The mental model is the message,’ which I mentioned above, and which seems dismissive. It’s funny because in my opinion they are mostly on the same side of trying to find a way to talk about AI without getting stuck in erroneous parallels and fabulations. They aren’t saying the exact same thing, but pointing in the same direction.
[L]anguage doesn’t exhaust knowledge; on the contrary, it is only a highly specific, and deeply limited, kind of knowledge representation. […]
All representational schemas involve a compression of information about something, but what gets left in and left out in the compression varies. […]
It is thus a bit akin to a mirror: it gives the illusion of depth and can reflect almost anything, but it is only a centimeter thick. If we try to explore its depths, we bump our heads. […]
[T]he deep nonlinguistic understanding is the ground that makes language useful; it’s because we possess a deep understanding of the world that we can quickly understand what other people are talking about.
Asides
Article in French but shared here for the images. 50 ans d’images merveilleuses et terrifiantes d’une Terre en mutation. “Taken by the Landsat program, these photos are part of the longest continuous capture of the Earth from space. It is impossible not to see the devastating effects of climate change.”
♽ 
The future of energy starts with rebuilding the battery. “A company called ReCell is trying to improve this process with a method called ‘direct recycling,’ which maintains the structural integrity of a part of the battery called the cathode. This should make battery recycling more energy efficient and environmentally friendly.”
I’d need an emoji for ‘fake shocked face.’ At best, carbon capture at scale happens too late for us to count on short term. Carbon capture is not a solution to net zero emissions plans. “‘Many international bodies and national government are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to net zero, and it simply won’t work,’ Bruce Robertson, the author of the IEEFA report, said.”
Very happy to finally see some good climate news coming from Oz. Australia Climate Goals Could Transform Major Polluter to Green Innovator. “Australia is finally getting serious about global warming and everyone from oil majors to billionaire mining magnates are looking for a way to capitalize on the transformation.”
Webb Space Telescope Snaps Its First Photo of an Exoplanet. “The grainy image of a “super-Jupiter” is a sign of what’s to come as the telescope’s exoplanet observations ramp up.”
Germany’s Ultra-Cheap Train Ticket Saved 1.8 Million Tons of CO2. “Germany’s three-month experiment with super-cheap public transport reduced carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to powering about 350,000 homes for a year.”
No.231
Aug 28, 2022 Read online →
This week → Entangled intelligence ⊗ Infinite images and the latent camera ⊗ The medium really is the message ⊗ Liminal Creativity
A year ago → A favourite in issue No.185 was Open Climate Now! at Branch magazine by a group of authors.
Entangled Intelligence
Doug Bierend riffing off of James Bridle’s recent book Ways of Being. In part, he opposes longtermism and transhumanism (I’d add singularitarians) to a “more than human” vision where “more” doesn’t represent an enhancement but rather a “mega-category that collects within it essentially everything, from microbes and plants to water and stone, even machines.” Bierend and Bridle favor, as I do, the latter and ask “At what point does our expanding view of the universe inspire humility instead of hubris?”
It’s somewhat besides the point of the article (read it!) but one thought formed when reading this take on longtermism; “[i]ts most extreme version represents a kind of interstellar manifest destiny, human exceptionalism on the vastest possible scale.” I started to wonder, if you skip over a few blockers and take that end goal as worthy, why does it have to imply dominating Earth and ‘conquering’ what’s outside? Beyond being wrong, isn’t that also inefficient? Wouldn’t the greatest mastery of our inventiveness and technologies be shown in equilibrium with nature? Isn’t it an even higher challenge to curtail our excesses and instead progress while respecting other life forms and the cradle of our existence? Not a big surprise, considering its proponents, but their fantasy seems not only short sighted, but lacking true ambition.
If our minds are exceptional, it is still only in terms of their relationship to everything else that acts within the world. That is, our minds, like our bodies, aren’t just ours; they are contingent on everything else, which would suggest that the path forward should involve moving with the wider world rather than attempting to escape or surpass it. […]
But technology today largely exists as a tool of capital, servicing its fundamental drive toward accumulation, competitive advantage, and private gain, and helping reinforce assumptions of human dominion over the nonhuman. […]
[T]he most effective way of charting an unfamiliar space is to explore it randomly, suggesting a kind prosaic, primordial intelligence underlying all things and a wisdom in letting the world do some of our thinking for us.
The mysterious inner life of the octopus → For more on other intelligences and a more than human perspective, octopuses are always a good place to look. “The ability to feel pain is just one of the many facets of consciousness – there is also the ability to feel pleasure, to feel bored or interested, to experience companionship, and many more. With more research, scientists may be able to devise similar scales to measure more of these different aspects of consciousness in animals.”
Infinite Images and the Latent Camera
Thanks to a quick workshop about prompt craft (thanks Dré!) and some current client work, I’ve been taking a closer look at synthetic media, and especially prompt-based image generators. This piece by Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst from a couple of months back hit the spot. They offer a parallel with the late 19th century Pictorialists and use some of their own experiments to paint a picture (pun intended) of how AI tools might evolve and be integrated in artists’ work. It’s not the first time I read or listen to their ideas and, although largely correct, they seem to too easily gloss over copyright issues and the impact on artists who aren’t as at ease with technology as they are. That being said, they are launching an organization because “non AI artists need options to see themselves thriving in (and not steamrollered by) the AI art economy.”
To return to the original idea of extending a painting to reveal more of the scene, what might it mean to be able to produce infinite worlds from a single painting or photograph? This significantly augments the capacity of what we understand of generative art, when a coherent world, or narrative, can be spawned from a single stylistic or linguistic prompt. […]
We propose a term for this process, Spawning, a 21st century corollary to the 20th century process of sampling. If sampling afforded artists the ability to manipulate the artwork of others to collage together something new, spawning affords artists the ability to create entirely new artworks in the style of other people from AI systems trained on their work or likeness. […]
Memes are a distillation of a consensual/archetypical feeling or vibe, in much the way that the “Holly Herndon” embedding with CLIP is a distillation of her characteristic properties (ginger braid and bangs, blue eyes, often photographed with a laptop), or the “Salvador Dali” embedding is a distillation of his unique artistic style.
The Medium Really Is the Message
My understanding of media studies is definitely not at a level I’d like, far from it. Which is why I’ve got the feeling some will have hands rising up at inaccuracies or missed points in this piece by Ezra Klein. Still, I quite enjoyed this overview of some of the thinking of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and Neil Postman. Klein writes about his changing opinion of the internet, the influence of social networks, the corruption of news on tv, and tech oligarchs’ blindness (and/or blatant irresponsibility) to the havoc their businesses are wrecking on public discourse.
I adored my new land. The endless expanses of information, the people you met as avatars but cared for as humans, the sense that the mind’s reach could be limitless. My life, my career and my identity were digital constructs as much as they were physical ones. I pitied those who came before me, fettered by a physical world I was among the first to escape. […]
McLuhan says: Don’t just look at what’s being expressed; look at the ways it’s being expressed. And then Postman says: Don’t just look at the way things are being expressed; look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible.” In other words, the medium blocks certain messages. […]
I have come to think the same of today’s technologists: Their problem is that they do not take technology seriously enough. They refuse to see how it is changing us or even how it is changing them. […]
We are who we are, in this moment, in this context, mediated in these ways. It is an abdication of responsibility for technologists to pretend that the technologies they make have no say in who we become.
Context collection, not context collapse → This post by Doug Belshaw, where he quotes Jenny Odell, pairs well with the above, and even with the first piece. “I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community. From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.”
Liminal Creativity → “But some people seem to be more comfortable than others in liminal spaces. They crave transformation, often changing jobs or careers, moving places, persistently looking for surprising ideas and working on new projects. Once they reach a certain level of comfort, they start searching for the next rite of passage — the next liminal space. … Roam the edge of practices, where they permeate several trends and communities, creating gateways between worlds of ideas; push the boundaries of knowledge by connecting seemingly unrelated ideas; direct your curiosity towards questions that haven’t even been formulated yet.“
Futures, foresights, forecasts & fabulations → Two Mobility Futures 0∞ “[I]s a research project that encompasses storytelling, a democratic decision making platform, a city model, and an immersive exhibit.” ⊗ Framing the future as ‘just and regenerative’: why and how. “A just and regenerative approach means strengthening the capacity of all living systems to adapt, replenish and regenerate; respecting everyone’s human rights and potential to thrive; and rewiring our economies and societies to serve both people and the planet. We describe this using a ’three horizons' framework.”
Asides
Louis-Jacques Darveau, who initiated The Alpine Review, which we first co-imagined and co-edited … 10 years ago (!!) has now made all the archives public on a really nifty and well-organized new website. If you’ve never seen the philosophical ancestor of this newsletter, you can now browse around to your heart’s content. Still holds up and, if you’ll excuse some own-horn-tooting, pay attention to the dates, some of those topics were caught pretty damned early.-
The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What does it DO!? Excellent explainer by Hank Green on some of the details, impacts, and hopes behind Biden’s recent plan. - Make way for the king of the solar system!
New Webb images of Jupiter highlight the planet's features, including its turbulent Great Red Spot (shown in white here), in amazing detail. These images were processed by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt. -
Rechargeable aluminum: The cheap solution to seasonal energy storage?. “Aluminum, used in a redox cycle, has a massive energy density. Swiss researchers believe it could be the key to affordable seasonal storage of renewable energy, clearing a path for the decarbonization of the energy grid” 
This is probably highly unoriginal, but I’ve been on a bit of a viewing spree of James Hoffmann’s videos about coffee making. Great quality, superb explanations, fascinating obsessing over the details, and just enough self-deprecation.
Pfizer Pays Almost $120 Million For App That Detects COVID From a Cough (newatlas.com)
The trial found the system could accurately detect 92% of positive COVID cases solely from the sound of a cough. The system also recorded 80% specificity, meaning only two out of every 10 people screened received false positive results. Soon after ResApp revealed these results pharma giant Pfizer began circling, initially offering around $65 million for the technology. Now, in a formal acquisition announcement, a deal has been finalized for Pfizer to buy ResApp for a massive $116 million.
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/10/30/0056213/computing-pioneer-who-invented-the-first-assembly-language-dies-at-age-100
Computing Pioneer Who Invented the First Assembly Language Dies at Age 100 (msn.com)
"She was also credited with the invention of the first assembly language, a programming language designed to be readable by users."In 1946 she joined a team of mathematicians under Andrew Booth at Birkbeck College undertaking calculations for the scientists working on the X-ray crystallography images which contributed to the discovery of the double helix shape of DNA....
To help the number-crunching involved Booth had embarked on building a computing machine called the Automatic Relay Calculator or ARC, and in 1947 Kathleen accompanied him on a six-month visit to Princeton University, where they consulted John von Neumann, who had developed the idea of storing programs in a computer. On their return to England they co-wrote General Considerations in the Design of an All Purpose Electronic Digital Computer, and went on to make modifications to the original ARC to incorporate the lessons learnt.
Kathleen devised the ARC assembly language for the computer and designed the assembler.
In 1950 Kathleen took a PhD in applied mathematics and the same year she and Andrew Booth were married. In 1953 they cowrote Automatic Digital Calculators, which included the general principles involved in the new "Planning and Coding"programming style.
The Booths remained at Birkbeck until 1962 working on other computer designs including the All Purpose Electronic (X) Computer (Apexc, the forerunner of the ICT 1200 computer which became a bestseller in the 1960s), for which Kathleen published the seminal Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator in 1958. The previous year she and her husband had co-founded the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck.
"The APE(X)C design was commercialized and sold as the HEC by the British Tabulating Machine Co Ltd, which eventually became ICL," remembers the Register, sharing a 2010 video about the machine (along with several links for "Further Reading.")
https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/11/02/0015215/black-holes-can-behave-like-quantum-particles
Black Holes Can Behave Like Quantum Particles (space.com)
The best known example of quantum superposition is the legendary SchrÃdinger's cat, a thought experiment designed by early 20th century physicist Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate some of the key issues with quantum physics. According to quantum theories, subatomic particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until they interact with the external world. This interaction, which could be the simple act of being measured or observed, throws the particle into one of the possible states. Schrodinger, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, intended the experiment to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum theory, as it would suggest that a cat locked in a box can be at the same time dead and alive based on the random behavior of atoms, until an observer breaks the superposition. However, as it turned out, while a cat in a box could be dead regardless of the observer's actions, a quantum particle may indeed exist in a double state. And the new study indicates that a black hole does as well.The new study was published online in the journal Physical Review Letters on Friday.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2301.07 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2745 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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