SCIENCE and things like that

[GreenGoo]

The real crime is how these billionaires achieved their billions. It's possible some of them earned their money through smart and ethical behaviour, but most, including Gates, have done things that Smoove or any federal employee would be immediately fired for.

The point being, it's super easy to be a philanthropist after you've squeezed billions out of society first. I don't have any opinion about the video in question. In fact I haven't bothered to watch it, but defending Gates seems misplaced.

In any case, I can't bring myself to care much about potentially unfair criticism directed at billionaires. They seem to be doing alright in any case.

[Jaymann]

My favorite part was when she initially read Atlas Shrugged she considered it satire.

[LordMortis]

My favorite part was when she initially read Atlas Shrugged she considered it satire.

Mine too.

[disarm]

The real crime is how these billionaires achieved their billions. It's possible some of them earned their money through smart and ethical behaviour, but most, including Gates, have done things that Smoove or any federal employee would be immediately fired for.

The point being, it's super easy to be a philanthropist after you've squeezed billions out of society first. I don't have any opinion about the video in question. In fact I haven't bothered to watch it, but defending Gates seems misplaced.

I only 'defend' Gates because he's one whose current behavior I actually know a little about.

If you watch the video, you would see that she's someone who is taking a lot of comments by billionaires out of context just to make her own angry point. For example, she shows multiple clips of Bill Gates with a woman who is clearly a math savant and they're being asked to solve large-number math problems quickly in their head. The woman comes up with the answer almost instantly and Gates just stands there saying "You're right" or "That's it!" like he knew the answer just as quickly and is confirming. When I watch the clip, I see him trying to be funny because he clearly can't do what she can, but that woman (and a lot of people commenting on the video) treat it like he's seriously trying to fake knowing the answers and be a jerk.

I won't deny that Gates and others have done some pretty ruthless things to get where they are now, but that doesn't negate more positive behavior now. Success, money and fame can sometimes change people for the better (or not in the case of a certain richest man in the world).

[GreenGoo]

Ok.

[Kraken]

Have you ever wished your electronics could perform at the speed of thought? Maybe reconsider that. Human thought is far slower than your internet connection.

In our digital age, few things are more irritating than a slow internet connection. Your web browser starts to lag. On video calls, the faces of your friends turn to frozen masks. When the flow of information dries up, it can feel as if we are cut off from the world.

Engineers measure this flow in bits per second. Streaming a high-definition video takes about 25 million bps. The download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps.

Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the human brain: just 10 bps. They titled their study, published this month in the journal Neuron, “The unbearable slowness of being.”

“It’s a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” said Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the study. “If you actually try to put numbers to it, we are incredibly slow.”
...
In 2018, a team of researchers in Finland analyzed 136 million keystrokes made by 168,000 volunteers. They found that, on average, people typed 51 words a minute. A small fraction typed 120 words a minute or more. Dr. Meister and his graduate student, Jieyu Zheng, used a branch of mathematics known as information theory to estimate the flow of information required to type. At 120 words a minute, the flow is only 10 bits a second.

“I was thinking, of course there must be faster behaviors,” Ms. Zheng recalled. She suspected that championship videogame players might have a higher information flow when they are competing. “You can look at them on YouTube, and their fingers are so fast that they’re just blurred on the videos.”

Though gamers move their fingers quickly, they have fewer keys to choose from than a typist does. And so, when Ms. Zheng took a close look at the performance of gamers, she ended up with the same estimate for their rate of information: 10 bits per second.

Counterpoint:

Britton Sauerbrei, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University who was not involved in the new study, questioned whether Dr. Meister and Ms. Zheng had fully captured the flow of information in our nervous system. They left out the unconscious signals that our bodies use to stand, walk or recover from a trip. If those were included, “you’re going to end up with a vastly higher bit rate,” he said.

But when it comes to conscious tasks and memories, Dr. Sauerbrei said, he was convinced that very little information flows through the brain. “I think their argument is pretty airtight,” he said.

[Jaymann]

But we run circles around computers when it comes to choosing which pictures have a traffic light in them.

[Kraken]

But we run circles around computers when it comes to choosing which pictures have a traffic light in them.

Speak for yourself. I usually fail CAPTCHAs on the first try. There's a nonzero chance that I'm a robot.

[Isgrimnur]

Ok - this is very cool - not so much for the science but because of the cooperation. How we keep areas screwworm free...

Texas officials warn of infectious, parasitic worms that ‘screw into flesh’

The New World Screwworm was recently detected in Mexico, and the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife is asking people in South Texas to watch out for animals affected by the screwworms.
...
The CDC said screwworms are most common in the tropics and subtropics, but recent cases have appeared in Central America for the first time in years. Mexican authorities told the United States Department of Agriculture in November of a positive detection of New World Screwworm in a cow, according to the Texas Animal Health Commission.

[Jaymann]

You gotta love Roger Penrose. "Incomplete is a polite way of saying it's wrong."

[Holman]

Have you ever wished your electronics could perform at the speed of thought? Maybe reconsider that. Human thought is far slower than your internet connection.

[...]
In 2018, a team of researchers in Finland analyzed 136 million keystrokes made by 168,000 volunteers. They found that, on average, people typed 51 words a minute. A small fraction typed 120 words a minute or more. Dr. Meister and his graduate student, Jieyu Zheng, used a branch of mathematics known as information theory to estimate the flow of information required to type. At 120 words a minute, the flow is only 10 bits a second.

“I was thinking, of course there must be faster behaviors,” Ms. Zheng recalled. She suspected that championship videogame players might have a higher information flow when they are competing. “You can look at them on YouTube, and their fingers are so fast that they’re just blurred on the videos.”

Though gamers move their fingers quickly, they have fewer keys to choose from than a typist does. And so, when Ms. Zheng took a close look at the performance of gamers, she ended up with the same estimate for their rate of information: 10 bits per second.

I'm sure I'm missing some crucial SCIENCE, here, but:

Typing speed seems like an odd choice of proxy for "the speed of thought," as it is limited by manual dexterity, keyboard design, eyesight, etc. If nothing else, notice how much more quickly you can read than you can type. And notice how you can "render" a visual scene in memory at least as quickly as any GPU.

[Blackhawk]

Not to mention typing skill and experience.

And it doesn't seem to account for the hundreds of other things that the brain is processing while typing. If they're going to include muscle impulses as part of the information flow, they should be including all of the other conscious and unconscious impulses that the brain is sending out to the body, from respiration to staying upright in the chair. Plus observing and processing the sights around you, the sounds, the physical sensations, and a slew of other sensory inputs. Now add in the fact that we don't have perfect focus, so we're not just thinking about the task at hand.

It stood out to me that they compared typing to championship gaming, but only looked at keystrokes, ignoring the observation, calculation, active memory, and decision making involved.

[Punisher]

Have you ever wished your electronics could perform at the speed of thought? Maybe reconsider that. Human thought is far slower than your internet connection.

[...]
In 2018, a team of researchers in Finland analyzed 136 million keystrokes made by 168,000 volunteers. They found that, on average, people typed 51 words a minute. A small fraction typed 120 words a minute or more. Dr. Meister and his graduate student, Jieyu Zheng, used a branch of mathematics known as information theory to estimate the flow of information required to type. At 120 words a minute, the flow is only 10 bits a second.

“I was thinking, of course there must be faster behaviors,” Ms. Zheng recalled. She suspected that championship videogame players might have a higher information flow when they are competing. “You can look at them on YouTube, and their fingers are so fast that they’re just blurred on the videos.”

Though gamers move their fingers quickly, they have fewer keys to choose from than a typist does. And so, when Ms. Zheng took a close look at the performance of gamers, she ended up with the same estimate for their rate of information: 10 bits per second.

I'm sure I'm missing some crucial SCIENCE, here, but:

Typing speed seems like an odd choice of proxy for "the speed of thought," as it is limited by manual dexterity, keyboard design, eyesight, etc. If nothing else, notice how much more quickly you can read than you can type. And notice how you can "render" a visual scene in memory at least as quickly as any GPU.

Sure, but my memory only renders in CGA.

[Jaymann]

I have seen this study before (as I type this at the blistering pace of 13 words per minute). I think where the human mind excels is in extrapolation. You walk into a room and you do not instantly see every detail. But your mind knows what you expect to see and instantly fills in the details for you. And you can further inspect things down to the microscopic level if you have the right tools. All the while effortlessly identifying which pictures contain a bus.

[Holman]

Right.

And when you are, for example, reading or watching something about which you know a great deal, you make inferences and connections that someone less knowledgeable (or an LLM) could simply never make. Typing words you're instructed to type (which is how most speed-typing tests work) is a very poor model for what actually goes on in the human mind when such connections get made.

[Smoove_B]

I am not sure I can ever kill a mouse again:

Humans aren’t the only animals that give first aid. Some ants secrete antibiotics for their nest mates with injuries. Elephants, dolphins and chimpanzees have all been observed touching and nudging incapacitated individuals.

Now, neuroscientists at the University of Southern California have observed laboratory mice appearing to do the same for their unconscious cage mates. Their findings were published in the journal Science on Friday.

The researchers conducted a series of tests that involved presenting mice with two companions: a familiar cage mate that was under anesthesia and another mouse that was conscious and moving around. They found that the mice spent most of their time with the unconscious creature—and that they showed similar patterns of behavior when caring for it.

...

The mouse would then open its companion’s mouth and, in more than 50 percent of cases, start pulling on its tongue. The research suggests this behavior serves to open the animal’s airways or dislodge objects in its throat: When the team placed a non-toxic object in the mouth of the unconscious mouse, the tongue-pulling removed it 80 percent of the time.

I am feeling some things right now that I need to process.

[Daehawk]

If I was the drugged mouse im seriously ask to be the other one next time lol.

Man i would see this just as ive started thinking about killing all the ones in my home.

[Kraken]

How humanity's geological legacy will be plastic bags, cheap clothes, and chicken bones.

As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature.

“Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.”

Fast food containers dominate ocean plastic, but aluminium drinks cans will also be part of our legacy. Pure metals are exceptionally rare in the geological record, as they readily react to form new minerals, but the cans will leave a distinct impression.

“They’re going to be around in the strata for a long time and eventually you would expect little gardens of clay minerals growing in the space where the can was. It’s going to be a distinctive, new kind of fossil,” says the geologist Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a leading proponent of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch that reflects the impact of modern humanity on the planet, who with Gabbott has written a book on technofossils,

Another fast food staple, chicken, is also destined for immortality. Bones are well known as fossils, but while those of modern broiler chickens are fragile – they are bred to live fast, dying fat and young – the sheer volume will ensure many survive into the geological record.

At any moment, there are about 25 billion live chickens in the world, vastly more than the world’s most abundant wild bird, say Gabbott and Zalasiewicz, making them likely to be the most abundant bird in all of Earth’s history. The sudden appearance of vast numbers of a monstrous bird five times bigger than its wild forebear will certainly strike future palaeontologists.

As for cheap clothes, they're made largely of plastics, so that's kinda double-counting.

[Max Peck]

Imagine thinking that there will be future palaeontologists to study our trash.

[Kraken]

Imagine thinking that there will be future palaeontologists to study our trash.

Well on the timescale that it takes for our trash to fossilize, I presume that they aren't human.

[Max Peck]

Speaking of time scale...

A competing theory to 'dark energy' suggests the universe has different time zones

OK, well, let's go to the alternative explanation that might fit the universe a little better. Tell me about the timescape model. How does it work?

It's fundamentally different from the standard model of cosmology because it abandons this assumption that the universe is the same and uniform in every direction.

Instead, the basis of the timescape model is that, in fact, we see in the universe around us today that there are giant cosmic structures, enormous filaments and walls filled with galaxies and galaxy clusters. And in between those filaments and walls we have giant voids of nothing.

You can imagine it like blowing air into water filled with soap. You get all the bubbles forming on the surface. This is kind of what our universe looks like today. We have galaxies forming along the edges of the bubbles and where the bubbles meet. And then in the middle there is pretty much nothing going on.

So the idea with the timescape model is that these structures will play a significant role in the evolution of our universe. And the way they work is that in general relativity, there's this idea that acceleration or deceleration changes the rate at which time passes for you. So the faster you accelerate, the slower your clock will tick.

So if we go all the way back to the early universe where it was very smooth, hot and dense, there are tiny, tiny differences in that early universe, slightly denser regions and slightly less dense regions.

This [initial] difference in acceleration between the more dense and less dense regions isn't necessarily a lot, but if you fast forward through the history of the universe and measure the cumulative impact that they have, it has quite a significant change on the time that passes in those regions.

It's to the point where for us observers sitting inside dense regions of the universe, we would find that the universe is perhaps around 14.2 billion years old. But for the very middle of these giant voids, you might find that they're 21 billion years old. So time is ticking differently for these different regions.

[Jaymann]

Right.

And when you are, for example, reading or watching something about which you know a great deal, you make inferences and connections that someone less knowledgeable (or an LLM) could simply never make. Typing words you're instructed to type (which is how most speed-typing tests work) is a very poor model for what actually goes on in the human mind when such connections get made.

Not sure where to put this, but it sort of relates to the differences between human and LLM. I 'intuitively" knew these things, but this video does a great job of putting them all together.

[Unagi]

malarky

[Jaymann]

malarky

Where's that coming from?

[Unagi]

Well, the video was kinda all over the place and touched upon a lot of various (true) things but I wasn't sure what it was trying to ever really say.

"Some theories suggest that what we experience as consciousness, the thing that makes you, you, isn't coming from your brain at all. Instead, it might be more like a signal that the brain receives rather than something it produces. This would explain certain mysteries of human experience from intuition to out-of-body experiences, to the feeling there may be more to existence than what we can see."

....had me click it off.

I mean, much of it -as you said - is stuff we knew, but that part just (and his delivery) had me kinda turned off...


Perhaps there are merits to that statement, but it sounded like the foundation for putting science behind Fortune Tellers, etc.

[Unagi]

(Quite possible I was too quick to shoot from the hip, but that was my initial reaction)

[stessier]

When the The Wisdom of Crowds fails.
VSauce is great.

[Jaymann]

This is a great video that dives into the question of why Alpha = 1/137, the perfect constant that allows the universe as we know it which is capable of supporting life. If it were off by a tiny bit, no life. It makes me think we are possibly in a multiverse where it hit just right.

[stessier]

Anyone have kids doing the egg drop experiment??

[Punisher]

What about putting it in a relatively hard and thick jelly?
What about in a newtonion fluid?

[The Meal]

Air and water are Newtonian fluids. Putting it in a hard fluid would accomplish the same thing as packing it in a hard-walled box.

[Punisher]

Air and water are Newtonian fluids. Putting it in a hard fluid would accomplish the same thing as packing it in a hard-walled box.

For the newtonian fluid thing i didn't realize that and was picturing that beige colored stuff you see when people try to walk on top of pools.
Would that make any difference?

[The Meal]

I'm not familiar with beige stuff, but if it acts like non-Newtonian fluids I'm familiar with, it'd just be like a hard-walled box for quick motions, i.e. splattered egg. The "beauty" of putting it in water is the shell and the innards move at the same speed once the casing comes to a quick stop, so assuming the shell doesn't bump into the casing, there's nothing to create cracks.

[Isgrimnur]

Oobleck

[Punisher]

Thats the stuff I meant but fie some reason I only remember ever seeing it as a beige colir.

[Blackhawk]

A lot of the oobleck you see is water and uncolored cornstarch, which is why it's usually off-white.