Category: Economics

Odor, Dive, Michelin, Starship, History, Biomass

Post author By
Post date December 13, 2021

Researchers at Firmenich established the primary chemical components of the aroma of sewage and then determined which odorant receptors they activate. Then they tested perfumery ingredients against these sewage-linked receptors. To their surprise, they found hundreds that blocked them. “One of the big contributions that our team has made, in the last few years, has been to show that, actually, blocking of receptors seems to be about as common as activation of receptors,” Ben Smith, a research director at Firmenich who has worked on the company’s receptor program, told me. Perfumers often find that the addition of a new ingredient mysteriously causes a fragrance to go “flat.” Blocking is almost certainly why.

Among the more effective blockers were several lily-of-the-valley–type ingredients. Firmenich designed a fragrance around two of them. When mixed with latrine scent—the company concocted its own for testing purposes—the perfume kept its white floral aspect, while the sewage seemed to fade away. Bill Gates reported the finding on his blog. “I took a whiff of the future of sanitation,” he wrote, “and it smells pretty good.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/the-odor-of-things-solving-the-mysteries-of-scent/

Alenka starts her Vertical Blue dives with a 100 meter-plunge and completes it easily. A few days later, 103 meters. Then a meter deeper. If she can manage 105 meters, she will equal Zecchini’s world record. On the live internet stream of the dive, the commentator remarks on Alenka’s “perfect control, perfect technique” after she comes up.

Hirose and Zecchini also reach 105 meters. Each diver has another two dives to go deeper. But a voice in Alenka’s head tells her to pause.

https://onjustonebreath.com

There is no menu at Bros. Just a blank newspaper with a QR code linking to a video featuring one of the chefs, presumably, against a black background, talking directly into the camera about things entirely unrelated to food. He occasionally used the proper noun of the restaurant as an adverb, the way a Smurf would. This means that you can’t order anything besides the tasting menu, but also that you are at the mercy of the servers to explain to you what the hell is going on. The servers will not explain to you what the hell is going on.

https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

Starship is Still Not Understood

If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.

Here’s how this all happened.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/how-this-all-happened/

Our planet supports approximately 8.7 million species, of which over a quarter live in water.

But humans can have a hard time comprehending numbers this big, so it can be difficult to really appreciate the breadth of this incredible diversity of life on Earth.

To fully grasp this scale, we draw from research from “The biomass distribution on Earth,” by Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo to break down the total composition of the living world, in terms of its biomass, and where we fit into this picture.

https://nautil.us/issue/108/change/all-the-biomass-on-earth

View and Listen

Challenges coming up with the launches of numerous satellites in the fields of astronomy

https://overcast.fm/+JXrQLL0ko

Mattress: a tool for modern self-improvement that’s as mysterious and necessary as sleep itself.

https://lnns.co/Bsf6jYuiUbr

Economics Environment History Science Technology

Mattresses, Tombs, Nickel, 52, Algorithm, Machines

Post author By
Post date December 6, 2021

Inspiration comes – not surprisingly – from the Netherlands. The sea has been a threat in the Low Countries since long before climate change. The Dutch built their country partly at the bottom of the sea, drained it with windmills, and surrounded the new land with dykes. The Dutch coast has fine-grained, sandy soil that offers little resistance to the friction of the water. Currents, waves, and propellers of ships scour the bottom and can easily lead to the collapse of dykes, banks, quays, locks, and abutments.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/11/fascine-mattresses-basketry-gone-wild.html

It might go without saying, but for as long as humans have lived, we have also died. Our answers to the question of what to do with our earthly remains have evolved alongside religions and beliefs. Prehistoric humans buried their dead, sometimes with weapons or animal heads to offer some protection — against wild beasts, perhaps, or spirits — in the beyond. Some placed cadavers on mountaintops instead, trusting the elements, and scavengers, to scatter them (this practice persists in Tibet and in some parts of China and India). The first architect, the Egyptian Imhotep, is known for his mortuary constructions. Methods of interment have changed throughout the ages.

A Death Full of Life

Originally built as a resource colony by prisoners in the Soviet Gulag, Norilsk has been a metal making center for 80 years. Norilsk Nickel outlasted communism, embraced capitalism, and now aims to ramp up production to sell the high-purity metals needed for batteries and other technologies of the 21st century clean energy economy. The company’s ambitions coincide with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin for greater development in the Far North, which he maintains can be accomplished sustainably.

In the Russian Arctic, One of the Most Polluted Places on Earth

The world’s second most popular electric car (after the Tesla Model 3) is the Wuling HongGuang Mini, which costs $5,000 and outsells vehicles from Renault, Hyundai, VW and Nissan. [Brad Anderson & José Pontes]
Airline Food is a programming language whose programs look like Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routines. [Jamie Large]
Early versions of PowerPoint were created by a technical team that was 43% women, compared to an average of 10% in Silicon Valley at the time. [Russell Davies — buy his book here from Fluxx friends World of Books]

View at Medium.com

Using the standard method devised more than 70 years ago by Richard Feynman, he had sketched diagrams of hundreds of possible ways the colliding particles might morph and interact before shooting out three jets. Adding up the individual probabilities of those events would give the overall chance of the three-jet outcome. But Gehrmann needed software just to tally the 35,000 terms in his probability formula. As for computing it? That’s when “you raise the flag of surrender and talk to your colleagues,” he said.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-algorithm-that-lets-particle-physicists-count-higher-than-two-20211122/

As early as 3,000 years ago we encounter interest in intelligent machines and AI that perform different servile functions. In the works of Homer (c. eighth century BCE) we find Hephaestus, the Greek god of smithing and craft, using automatic bellows to execute simple, repetitive labor. Golden handmaidens, endowed with characteristics of movement, perception, judgment, and speech, assist him in his work. In his “Odyssey,” Homer recounts how the ships of the Phaeacians perfectly obey their human captains, detecting and avoiding obstacles or threats, and moving “at the speed of thought.” Several centuries later, around 400 BCE, we meet Talos, the giant bronze sentry, created by Hephaestus, that patrolled the shores of Crete. These examples from the ancient world all have in common their subservient role; they exist to serve the desires of other, more powerful beings — either gods or humans — and even if they have sentience, they lack autonomy. Thousands of years before Karel Čapek introduced the term “robot” to refer to artificial slaves, we find them in Homer.

Surveillance, Companionship, and Entertainment: The Ancient History of Intelligent Machines

View and Listen

“A Fascinating, Sexy, Intellectually Compelling, Unregulated Global Market.” (Ep. 484)

Tales of cross-species communication. When we gaze into the eyes of a wild animal or a beloved pet, can we know what they might be thinking? Selection bias may be at work here, but just about everybody in this podcast, from whale-rescuers to dog-walkers, says “Yes”

https://overcast.fm/+ILLiNc

Economist Steve Levitt talks to cosmologist and physicist Max Tegmark, co-founder of the Future Of Life Institute, about the existential threats facing humanity

https://overcast.fm/+z2JCAn7w0

Economics History Politics Science

Nobel, Autopsy, 52, Earth, Hitler

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date December 5, 2020

Criticism on grounds of diversity is familiar and extremely fair, especially given that the recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests has prompted the discipline to reexamine its relationship with race. The Nobel Prize in Economics has only ever been awarded to two women and three non-white economists out of 86 recipients and has once again gone to two white dudes from the United States, neglecting not just the work of women and people of color within the mainstream of the discipline but also a vast array of approaches outside it—work disproportionately done by marginalized groups. Catriona Watson of the organization Rethinking Economicscalled it “disappointing” that the prize had gone to “two white men from the global north working on auction theory.” Devika Dutt, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, called it “predictable” that the prize had been awarded to “two old U.S. white men from the same Ivy League uni” adding that “we are in a moment of reckoning as regards structural discrimination” and that this prize “looks like closing ranks around the existing power structures in econ.”

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/11/abolishing-the-economics-nobel-isnt-enough

1962. On August 5, the day of her death, Marilyn Monroe showed signs of advanced rigor mortis, leading coroners to believe she died between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on August 4. The toxicological analysis determined the cause of death: acute barbiturate poisoning.

1968. U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark requested four physicians to examine photographs, X-rays, and other evidence and to evaluate their significance relating to the medical conclusions in the autopsy report pertaining to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. They concluded that Kennedy was struck by two bullets fired from above and behind him, one of which traversed the base of his neck on the right side, without striking bone, and the other entered the skull from behind and exploded its right side.

Most cities plant only male trees because it’s expensive to clear up the fruit that falls from female trees. Male trees release pollen, and that’s one of the reasons your hay fever is getting worse. [Jessica Price]
In China, ? doesn’t mean happy, it means “a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude”. Use these, instead: ???. [Echo Huang]
The hold music you hear when you phone Octopus Energy is personalised to your customer account: it’s a number one record from the year you were 14. [Clem Cowton]

View at Medium.com

The idea that the Earth itself is like a single evolving ‘organism’ was developed in the mid-1970s by the independent English scientist and inventor James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis. They dubbed it the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, asserting that the biosphere is an ‘active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis’. Sometimes they went pretty far with this line of reasoning: Lovelock even ventured that algal mats have evolved so as to control global temperature, while Australia’s Great Barrier Reef might be a ‘partly finished project for an evaporation lagoon’, whose purpose was to control oceanic salinity.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one-of-its-key-sceptics

The key to understanding the strategies pursued during the Hitler dictatorship is the concept of ‘territoriality’ – a concern with Raum, a word usually rendered not very successfully in English as ‘space’. When the term was first used by the German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, it was understood not to refer to a particular geographical location, but rather to denote the space necessary for a people to be supplied with adequate land and resources in order to permit a superior race and culture to survive. Ratzel was the first to call this kind of space ‘living space’ (Lebensraum). With this deeper meaning, the concept of ‘space’ had an essentially geopolitical character, because additional territory was regarded as the fundamental condition for the political health and economic viability of the race. The idea of space as a fundamental issue for German identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries derived in part from a continual concern with the nature of the geographical character of Germany as a very recently created nation. The Reich, founded in 1871, was an artificial construction and as such prompted uncertainty not only over the internal unity of the federal system, but also over the ‘unfinished’ character of the German nation, which had failed to incorporate all Germans (the ‘Gross- deutsch‘ solution) or to acknowledge the wide cultural and linguistic influence that Germans had historically exercised in central and eastern Europe.

https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/in-search-of-lebensraum/

View and Listen

The inside story of the DeepMind team of scientists and engineers who created AlphaFold, an AI system that is recognised as a solution to “protein folding”.

10 rules for learning math

A creative masterpiece that blends in picturesque landscape and riding style.

Biographer of John Maynard Keynes discusses Keynes’s life and work

https://overcast.fm/+TSJm2x3jM

Why is food so expensive in sports stadiums? Could lowering prices benefit stadium franchisees and people?

https://overcast.fm/+YsPRzoge0

Economics History Politics Science Society Technology

Cancer, Clusters, Powell, Greyhound, Populist

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date November 8, 2020

One critical problem with traditional chemotherapies is that the rapid high doses – which are aimed at eradicating the tumour – can actually end up selecting for cancer cells that are resistant to the drugs. When the cancer grows back (as it often does), the drugs no longer work because all of the cells that remain are ones that grew back from the few resistant cells that survived the high-dose therapy. Ironically, the higher the chemotherapy dose, the stronger the selection pressure favouring drug-resistant cells (because the differential fitness between sensitive and resistant cells is higher with stronger treatment).

https://aeon.co/essays/crested-cacti-show-medicine-the-possibility-of-adapting-to-cancer

Historically, clusters have been pivotal in driving long-term US growth and for creating innovations that improve the lives of billions of people around the globe. As economists William Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud summarize, there has been a continual movement of leading tech clusters over time in the US. In the 1800s, Lowell, Massachusetts was the center for textile mills relying on water power. By the early 1900s, Cleveland, Ohio was instrumental in pushing forward the frontier on electricity and steel. Detroit, Michigan, of course, developed into the powerhouse for automobile manufacturing in the mid-1900s.

Currently, US tech clusters are the envy of the world. There are only four trillion dollar companies in the world. Two of them are based near San Francisco (Apple and Alphabet), and two near Seattle (Amazon and Microsoft). Of the global top 30 Internet firms, 14 are based in SF alone.

Clusters rule everything around me

In March, as panic over the coronavirus caused stock prices to crash and made banks and bondholders skittish about lending, the Fed acted to support the economy by flooding it with extra cash it hoped would help keep normal what could be kept normal. It cut interest rates from 1.5 percent to zero, announced it would purchase $700 billion in Treasury bonds and other assets to push down long-term interest rates, and provided liquidity to keep corporations able to borrow and banks able to lend. The Fed’s actions have saved Wall Street — the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which bottomed out at 18,214 on March 23, regained half its losses by mid-April and returned to near-record levels in early September — and have also done a great deal to reduce the pain on Main Street by keeping consumer credit available and interest rates on mortgages and credit cards low. Through its swift and sensible action, the Fed helped forestall corporate bankruptcies and prevented the job losses of the spring from being even worse. The Fed did not — and could not — fix everything that was wrong in our economy with the tools it has available. But imagine if this year had featured a new financial crisis on top of over 220,000 deaths and tens of millions of job losses, and you can see what we have the Fed to thank for.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jerome-powell-federal-reserve-profile.html

Wickman, it turns out, pretty much invented intercity bus travel—which for most Americans equals Greyhound, the company that emerged from that long-ago Hupmobile ride. “Greyhound has become generic for bus travel,” says Robert Gabrick, author of Going The Greyhound Way. “Like Kleenex for tissues.” Indeed, this classic American business icon—which, as it happens, is now owned by a British conglomerate—today has more than 7,300 employees, with estimated yearly sales of $820 million and 2,000 buses serving 3,800 destinations in 48 U.S. states and nine Canadian provinces. “I’m amazed at Greyhound’s brand recognition,” says DePaul University professor Joseph Schwieterman, an authority on intercity bus travel. “It’s an American success story.”

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/54273/100-years-dirty-dog-history-greyhound

Right-wing populism did not emerge in the United States because of Trump’s deranged charisma. Nor did it begin with the news media’s infatuation with his outrageous statements, or with Russian meddling, or with social media. Rather, right-wing populism resurged as a potent political force at least two decades before Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party—remember Pat Buchanan? And it has analogs all over the world, not just in mature democracies reeling from the loss of manufacturing jobs but in countries that have benefited economically from globalization, including Brazil, Hungary, India, the Philippines, Poland, and Turkey.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-11-06/trump-wont-be-last-american-populist

View and Listen

A documentary on the Cold War – particularly Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet lieutenant colonel who saved the world.

A mesmerizing video on Monsoon – a result of 30,000+ miles, hundreds of thousands of time-lapse frames captured and 60+ days chasing

Conversation on Space exploration – The final economic frontier?

https://www.politico.com/video/2020/10/28/space-the-final-economic-frontier-096908

An interesting conversation with Fahmi Quadir, known as the assassin of Wall Street on short selling.

https://lnns.co/4p1XscAMamk

Nathan Myhrvold, a computer scientist and physics student of Stephen Hawking speaks about his interests

https://overcast.fm/+gDgAIqzTE

Economics History Politics Society

Fama, Xi, Skepticism, Long-live, Mystery

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date October 24, 2020

Every day we hear a story about the movement of stock prices. But the story is different each day. So basically, these stories are made up after the fact. But when we look at it systematically, we don’t see a big effect of Fed actions on real activity or on stock prices or on anything else. That’s why I use to say that the business of central banks is like pornography: In essence, it’s just entertainment and it doesn’t have any real effects.

https://themarket.ch/english/inflation-is-totally-out-of-the-control-of-central-banks-ld.2476

It is unusual that Xi “does not perceive his power to be completely consolidated, even eight years in,” said Sheena Greitens, a professor of public affairs who studies Chinese approaches to security at the University of Texas at Austin. Xi may be launching this campaign to prepare for 2022, when he will transition into an unprecedented third term, she said.

But a political system prone to crackdowns can turn suspicious and brittle, with everyone afraid to point out problems or admit mistakes. It is what allowed the initial cover-up of a virus spreading in Wuhan last winter, at the cost of thousands of civilian deaths. When things go wrong, however, Xi has used a classic technique: punishing local officials while keeping the emperor free of blame.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-10-22/china-xi-jinping-mao-zedong-communist-party

Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you’ll face a force more powerful than other people’s skepticism: your own skepticism. You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid that?

This is a difficult problem, because you don’t want to completely eliminate your horror of making something lame. That’s what steers you toward doing good work. You just want to turn it off temporarily, the way a painkiller temporarily turns off pain.

http://www.paulgraham.com/early.html

Institutions can be mapped across the pace layers diagram as well. Take Apple Computer, for example. They’re coming out with new iPhones every six months, which is the fashion layer. The commerce layer is Apple selling these devices. The infrastructure layer is the cell phone networks and chip fabs that it’s all built on. The governance layer—and note that it is governance, not government; they’re mostly working with governments, but they also have to work with general governing systems. Some of these companies are hitting walls against different types of governments who have different ideas of privacy, different ideas of commercialization, and they’re now having to shape their companies around that. And then obviously, culture is moving slower underneath all of this, but Apple is starting to affect culture. And then there’s the last pace layer, nature, moving the slowest. At some point, Apple is going to have to come to terms with the level of environmental damage and problems that are happening on the nature pace layer if it is going to be a company that lasts for hundreds or a thousand years. So we could imagine any large institution mapped across this and I think it’s a useful tool for that.

The Data of Long-lived Institutions

The notion of weaponizing microwaves dates back to the Cold War, when, in 1961, an American biologist named Allan Frey discovered that irradiating a human head with microwaves could produce the sensation of sound—even in deaf ears, even from thousands of feet away. Playing with the frequency and intensity of the microwave beam could produce a range of different sensations in a person. In 2018, Frey told the New York Times that the Soviets took immediate notice of his work and flew him to Moscow, where they squired him around secret military facilities and asked him to give lectures about the effects of microwaves on the brain.

https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-microwave-attacks

View and Listen

Simple equation creating complex behaviors and the Feigenbaum constant

Making the New York Subway map

Why hasn’t space tourism taken off by Richard Branson

A Dog’s world-view by cognitive scientist and dog devotee Alexandra Horowitz

https://overcast.fm/+WaLHgXLug

An absolute pitch by Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin and musician Jacob Collier

https://overcast.fm/+HhSexJo-0

Economics Geopolitics History Science Society

Predictions, Creativity, Noses, Alaska, Pill

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date October 17, 2020

There is a better way, one that would allow the United States to make decisions based not on simplistic extrapolations of the past but on smart estimates of the future. It involves reconciling two approaches often seen to be at philosophical loggerheads: scenario planning and probabilistic forecasting. Each approach has a fundamentally different assumption about the future. Scenario planners maintain that there are so many possible futures that one can imagine them only in terms of plausibility, not probability. By contrast, forecasters believe it is possible to calculate the odds of possible outcomes, thereby transforming amorphous uncertainty into quantifiable risk. Because each method has its strengths, the optimal approach is to combine them. This holistic method would provide policymakers with both a range of conceivable futures and regular updates as to which one is likely to emerge. For once, they could make shrewd bets about tomorrow, today.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-13/better-crystal-ball

The atomic bomb marked the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. The creativity of Manhattan Project scientists and engineers has been abundantly celebrated by later commentators, not so much in the immediate aftermath: the word ‘creativity’ doesn’t appear in the official Smyth Report (1945) on the Project. And the only invocation of the notion of genius is deflationary and morally exculpatory: ‘This weapon has been created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labour of thousands of normal men and women.’ But the new atomic world was just the institutional and cultural environment in which creativity emerged, flourished and was variously interpreted.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-creativity-become-an-engine-of-economic-growth

Ancient Egyptians were an African people who created a distinctive, stable, and long-lasting civilization in the Nile Valley by at least 4400 BCE. They believed that images — objects representing the human form, rendered in stone, metal, wood, clay, or even wax—could be activated to host a supernatural power. This power could be either divine or the soul of a deceased human who had become divine at death. The occupied image was a meeting point between the supernatural and the terrestrial. It was also a physical body enabling such powers to act in our material world. Without an image, supernatural forces could not intervene in events on earth.

Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?

When the hapless JFK is assassinated in 1963, it seems that America may be on the losing side of history. The USSR has put a man in space, extended its influence in Latin America and it also has a large nuclear arsenal in the American SSR. The explosion of the Apollo 11 rocket on the launchpad in 1969, killing everyone on board, set against a background of civil unrest and the disastrous war in Vietnam, becomes a bitterly potent symbol of a nation that has lost its way. A year later Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, becomes the first man to walk on the moon.

Alaska could have ended history

Advocates of psilocybin-assisted therapy tout it as the solution to the burgeoning mental health crisis. But, like MDMA, psilocybin is far from a culturally neutral drug, carrying both the shame of Schedule 1 status and a checkered social history. It too may need to build the kind of politically heterogeneous coalition of supporters that MDMA-assisted therapy enjoys.

But to generate a breadth of appeal, one challenge stands out: psilocybin seems to make people more liberal. Scientific reports associating psychedelic use and liberal values stretch back as far as 1971, and although these findings have been replicated more recently, a noncausal explanation is readily available. Those with conservative attitudes tend to look more disapprovingly on illicit drug use, making them less likely than liberals to try a psychedelic drug in the first place.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-if-a-pill-can-change-your-politics-or-religious-beliefs/

View and Listen

Story of blood transporter in Nigeria

Inventing a mechanical basketball hoop – an ingenious work of engineering creativity

Morgan Freeman narrates a mini-doc about the ocean’s newest species: plastic

Sound designer Al Nelson and paleontologist Julia Clarke talk about how the cries of dinosaurs were created for the Jurassic Park films

https://overcast.fm/+HhSdPhwEk

An interesting discussion on Life and works of Alan Turing.

https://overcast.fm/+IPNyeaXDQ

Four hundred years ago Galileo Galilei’s scientific findings were rejected because they didn’t fit the prevailing beliefs of the time. His story is disturbingly relevant today. Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio talks about its relevance.

Economics Environment Science

Defense, Tongue, Vending machines, Chick, Fear

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date October 11, 2020

An injured plant also produces traumatic acid, known as the “wound hormone,” which stimulates cell division to close up a laceration in much the same way that blood clots in an animal’s wound. These responses happen within minutes of attack: Plants begin patching themselves up while still fighting off invaders. A plant must therefore constantly decide how to divide its resources between defense and regeneration.

http://nautil.us/issue/90/something-green/when-plants-go-to-war-rp

Cats do have a highly developed sense of savory taste—dubbed umami in Japanese (delicious savory taste)—and this makes sense because they are consuming protein all the time. What would it be like to eat meat with a cat’s tongue? It’s impossible for science to say for certain, but one can imagine for a sensory system specifically tuned to taste savory flesh, it must be delicious.

On the other hand, you would never want to eat a salad with a cow’s tongue because cows eat grass all day—something they would never be able to do if they were actually able to taste it the way we do. Unlike humans, with our dozens of bitter receptors, cows are highly insensitive to bitter foods. They still detect it, but apparently not so well.

https://neo.life/2020/10/taste-2-0-is-here/

It is estimated that roughly ⅓ of the world’s ~15m vending machines are located in the US.

Of these 5m US-based vending machines, ~2m are currently in operation, collectively bringing in $7.4B in annual revenue for those who own them. This means that the average American adult spends ~$35 per year on vending machine items.

What makes the vending industry truly unique is its stratification: The landscape is composed of thousands of small-time independent operators — and no single entity owns >5% of the market.

The economics of vending machines

The encouraging feature of chicken sexing is that the process, although mysterious, is quickly learned. As a result, knowing what the brain does when it accurately determines the sex of a bird could soon bear on how soldiers distinguish friend from foe in combat, how doctors make accurate diagnoses, how bird watchers identify species on the wing, how scientists interpret seismic data, and even how kids learn to read. Industrial sexers are worth investigating because, as quickly trained experts who have to make split-second decisions, the way they learn to see chicken genitals might one day help clarify how the rest of us learn to see the world.

https://psmag.com/magazine/the-lucrative-art-of-chicken-sexing

Fear is a powerful force not just for wintering dunlins, but across the natural world. Ecologists have long known that predators play a key role in ecosystems, shaping whole communities with the knock-on effects of who eats whom. But a new approach is revealing that it’s not just getting eaten, but also the fear of getting eaten, that shapes everything from individual brains and behaviour to whole ecosystems. This new field, exploring the non-consumptive effects of predators, is known as fear ecology.

https://aeon.co/essays/fear-of-being-eaten-shapes-brains-behaviour-and-ecosystems

View and Listen

A beautiful time-lapse video of a sailing trip from Rotterdam to Amsterdam.

8 years of time lapse video on buildings in Singapore

New advances in cell and gene therapies that offer the potential to transform medicine.

What it means to be alive? – A conversation with Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Nurse.

https://lnns.co/bROtSCA28Kh

New York during and after pandemic.

https://overcast.fm/+WaLEeIoEw

Economics History Science Society

Airlines, Weight, Vaccination, Ecology, Iceland, Babylon

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date October 4, 2020

But the true leaps in efficiency were achieved by new craft, which airlines began to request from manufacturers in the early 00s. The Boeing 787, for example, claims to burn 20% less fuel than its older sibling, the 767. Van Hooff recalled how, when KLM inducted its first 787 into its fleet in 2015, a pilot accustomed to the 747 was appointed to fly it to Dubai. “The 747 is beautiful, but it burns around 11,000 kilos of fuel per hour on a trip like this, so he was used to seeing around 100,000 kilos on his storage gauge when he got into the cockpit,” Van Hooff said. “This time, he saw 50,000. He put in a call to dispatch to ask: ‘Are you really sure this is enough?’ Of course, he knew it was. But he couldn’t get past his gut feeling that he needed more fuel.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/inside-the-airline-industry-meltdown-coronavirus-pandemic

The reason we gain or lose weight is much less mysterious if we keep track of all the kilograms, too, not just those enigmatic kilojoules or calories.

According to the latest government figures, Australians consume 3.5kg of food and beverages every day. Of that, 415 grams is solid macronutrients, 23 grams is fibre and the remaining 3kg is water.

What’s not reported is that we inhale more than 600 grams worth of oxygen, too, and this figure is equally important for your waistline.

https://theconversation.com/when-we-lose-weight-where-does-it-go-91594

A vaccine is, in essence, a trick—a sleight of hand that convinces your body to mount a counterattack to a given pathogen before that pathogen actually infects you. There are various ways to pull the trick off: vaccines can be made with a weakened virus, or a killed virus, or just a key part of the virus, or a part of the virus piggybacking on a different, benign virus, or an instruction manual for making that part of the virus yourself. In each approach, you get the benefits of an immune response without the messy business of a disease.

How to Vaccinate a Planet

Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa, more than a millennium before Vasco da Gama navigated from Africa to India. These techniques have also revealed unforeseen agricultural origins – such as the forgotten cereal, browntop millet. It was the first staple crop of South India, before it was largely replaced by crops such as sorghum that were translocated from Africa. Many people might be surprised to learn that the early farming tradition in the Mississippi basin relied on pitseed goosefoot, erect knotweed and marsh elder some 3,000-4,000 years ago, long before maize agriculture arrived in the American Midwest.

https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene

Why Iceland? Because it was founded in the late-9th century by Vikings, and when they arrived the island was uninhabited except for possibly a handful of monks who did not stay. This means it has been populated almost entirely by its original Norse inhabitants and their descendants. Iceland’s President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson acknowledged to me that this set up the conditions for the creation of a unique society because, compared to a country like the U.S., Iceland has had the benefit of developing free from the guilt of having displaced native inhabitants to do so. As a result, almost 100% of Icelanders today can trace their genes to their Viking founders. This is unusual in the western world and has given Iceland the distinction of having one of the most homogenous gene pools in the world.

Does the medieval past affect the present? In Iceland it does

We can trace the Seven Wonders back to Herodotus, an Athenian scholar who set out circa 450 BC to write a history of the then-recently concluded Greco-Persian Wars; such, that is, was his ostensible purpose. But Herodotus was, bless his heart, a curious sort, and as he traveled all over the ancient world in the course of his research he just couldn’t resist writing down all of the interesting things he saw and heard about. Thus, in addition to being a massively important historical text, the only source we have describing countless pivotal events, Herodotus’s Histories can also be seen as the world’s first travel memoir. We know that he distilled from his longer work a list of Wonders of the World, presumably the first ever of its kind, but it exists today only as a passing reference in other works; the last extant copies of it were likely burned along with the Library of Alexandria during the early centuries after Christ. His bucket list would, needless to say, make for fascinating reading today.

https://analog-antiquarian.net/2020/09/25/chapter-1-the-ancients-bucket-list/

View and Listen

Interesting video on socially awkward situations.

A millimetre makes a world of difference when calculating planetary trajectories

How COVID in US blew up

A brief history of mathematics

https://lnns.co/61SAaKDoUqO

How “Not” to Start a Sentence

https://overcast.fm/+gW90VPMi8

Economics Ethics Law Science

Breath, Murder, Edison, Island, Forecasting

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date September 19, 2020

‘The intimate relation made the students very concerned about the wellbeing of their patients,’ Kirk wrote. First-year medical students usually encountered patients only through textbooks and lectures. Now, they had their first human patients – and each student, alone, kept their patient alive. ‘They were exhilarated at every positive sign but were also very sad when things went downhill.’

Many of the medical students burned out and quit. ‘At worst,’ Kirk writes, ‘the patients died during the night.’ In the dark, a student couldn’t tell that their patient had died: as Vesalius had shown, a corpse’s lungs still fill and empty. The student sat beside the patient all night, compelling their inhales, breathing air mixed with their exhales – sharing air, life, in such proximity – yet the patient could slip, unseen, into death. The sun rose, light spilled into the quiet hospital room, and the student saw that they had spent unknowable time ventilating a body. The student didn’t have time to mourn the strange loss. There were always more patients who needed air.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-human-story-of-how-ventilators-came-to-breathe-for-us

In 176 BC a strange but revealing murder case came before the Roman praetor, M. Popillius Laenas. A woman, unnamed in the sources, was brought before the court on the charge of murdering her mother by bludgeoning her with a club. The woman happily confessed to the monstrous act of matricide. Her fate, then, seemed sealed when she entered Laenas’ court; but she introduced a defence that was as irrefutable as the wickedness of the killing of a parent. She claimed that the deed had been a crime of grief-fuelled vengeance resulting from the deaths of her own children. They, she said, had been deliberately poisoned by her mother simply to spite her and her own actions were therefore justified.

https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/how-get-away-murder

Edison patented his innovations, and went on tour making sure to align his name with the invention of the lightbulb as much as possible. Swan and Edison eventually sued each other for patent infringement – and Swan won. So legally, one might argue that Swan invented the commercial lightbulb. Edison’s solution was to partner with Swan, forming a joint company, and then totally buying out Swan several years later. So Edison acquired the patents for the lightbulb from others as much as he earned them himself.

Edison does get credit for popularizing the electric lightbulb, and for connecting this to public electricity generation and distribution. Once he had all the patents, his company continued to iterate and improve the technology. This is also where Biden’s “black man” comes in. He was referring to Lewis Howard Latimer. Latimer received a patent in 1882 for a process for improved production of carbon filaments for lightbulbs. Latimer then went to work for the Edison Electric Light Company. Latimer made a significant contribution to the manufacture of lightbulbs, but he didn’t “invent” the lightbulb by any stretch, and is at best a footnote on this interesting history.

Who Invented the Lightbulb?

Blowing up my island. You’re a hard-ass. I only get .501 coconuts for 1 banana. I’ve tried walking away, but we both know you will out-wait me. I’ve tried fakings skills, but you won’t bite. Because we are non-violent, I can’t coerce you. But there’s nothing wrong with hurting myself, is there? I build a machine that monitors inter-island commerce. If there is ever a trade that is not 1 coconut for 1 banana, the machine activates a bomb, my island sinks into the ocean forever, and I die. If I try to disable the machine, the bomb activates. When we next meet I say “OK. I can’t out bad-ass you. However, because of this machine, it will forever be against my interests to agree to a non-even trade. There’s no point in you waiting. Even if I did agree to an uneven trade, I’d sink into the ocean, and you’d have to gather your own coconuts!”

Blowing up your island if I threaten to blow up my island. You are smart. You are also a hard-ass. As soon as the bridge appears, you know you can out-wait me to get a good rate. You immediately realize that my only option is to build the island destroying machine described above. Before we meet, you construct a machine that monitors my island for the presence of machines. Your machine is connected to a bomb on your island. If at any point, a bomb-activating machine is constructed on my island, your bomb activates, your island sinks into the ocean, and you die. When we meet, you explain that you’re a hard-ass, and that no island-destroying machines can help me. My best bet is to accept terms that barely improve my situation at all. You win.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eLRSCC7r4KinuxqZX/comparative-advantage-and-when-to-blow-up-your-island

The Economist’s “The World in 2020”, published in late 2019, brings together experts from business, politics and science to fill 150 pages with projections for the year ahead.

Editor Daniel Franklin summarised the issue’s predictions on 2020’s economic outlook:

“Banks, especially in Europe, will battle with negative interest rates. America will flirt with recession—but don’t be surprised if disaster fails to strike, and markets revive.”

Just over two months later COVID-19 struck, the world went into lockdown and we fell into one of the largest recessions on record.

Perhaps this critique is unfair. The Economist wasn’t to know that we were on the precipice of a pandemic. So let’s review our success rate during more stable times.

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-forecasting-fallacy

View and Listen

Hamming codes – a way to overcome errors in CDs

A beautiful video on the growth of 4 different types of molds.

Some of the best, most beautiful, video microscopy in the world.

Using artificial intelligence, someone can make an algorithm that sounds just like you. And then they can say… whatever they want you to say.

https://lnns.co/Ew3f9PjKsmv

To what extend we don’t know overfishing.

https://lnns.co/cSXLqPjytIO

Economics Ethics Fintech Science Technology

Gold, Viruses, Tuna, Bitcoin, Law, Go

Post author By Joseph Pulikkottil
Post date August 28, 2020

The unique thing about gold is that it doesn’t get used up. The main way we consume the yellow metal is by storing it, say in vaults or by wearing it as jewellery. Compared to how we use an industrial metal like copper, this sort of usage is very safe. Copper parts in machinery, for instance, are dissipated by abrasion and wear. But gold just sits there, untouched.

Nor does gold depreciate. Unlike most materials, it is almost indestructible. Copper corrodes, steel rusts, wood rots, and concrete crumbles. But a gold coin from 200BC is still perfectly lustrous.

Nor does the yellow metal suffer from technological obsolescence. Gold keeps doing the same thing it has done for thousands of years.

And obviously we don’t eat the stuff.

https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-case-for-banning-gold-mining.html

The fact that viruses have only a tenuous claim to being alive, though, hardly reduces their impact on things which are indubitably so. No other biological entities are as ubiquitous, and few as consequential. The number of copies of their genes to be found on Earth is beyond astronomical. There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy and a couple of trillion galaxies in the observable universe. The virions in the surface waters of any smallish sea handily outnumber all the stars in all the skies that science could ever speak of.

Back on Earth, viruses kill more living things than any other type of predator. They shape the balance of species in ecosystems ranging from those of the open ocean to that of the human bowel. They spur evolution, driving natural selection and allowing the swapping of genes.

https://www.economist.com/essay/2020/08/20/viruses-have-big-impacts-on-ecology-and-evolution-as-well-as-human-health

And for what purpose? Bluefin is neither a staple nor a necessity. It’s a luxury. The person who dines on North Lake’s bluefin may want to connect to the people who caught it and the ocean it came from, but they are also buying a trophy, just as surely as Captain Jack did when he shelled out $3,000 for his charter experience. The word trophy comes from the Greek tropaion, a “monument of an enemy’s defeat.” It is, by definition, a spoil of war. North Lake’s relationship to bluefin tuna has always been adversarial. Fishermen are said to “fight” the fish, and they are celebrated as heroes when they win this unequal battle, armed with technologies that make the finding and killing ever more efficient, despite diminishing financial returns and the dwindling size of the catch. Commercial cod and lobster fishermen have also long seen themselves in competition with bluefin—hungry giants that feed on the same fish they needed to fatten up their catches.

This vision of wild creatures as targets of conquest or competition to be eliminated may have made some sense when human beings felt their everyday lives to be at the mercy of the natural world. But in the Anthropocene, the environment is often at our mercy, even when the ways we alter it ultimately harm our own species. Not only do humans en masse have the means and numbers to fish out entire species, we also have the power to change migration patterns by destroying habitat and warming ocean waters.

A Tuna’s Worth

Bitcoin has already made significant ground on gold — going from whitepaper to over $200 billion in market capitalization in under a decade. Today, the market capitalization of above ground gold is conservatively $9 trillion. If we are right about using a gold framework to value bitcoin, and bitcoin continues on this path, then the bull case scenario for bitcoin is that it is undervalued by a multiple of 45. Said differently, the price of bitcoin could appreciate 45x from where it is today, which means we could see a price of $500,000 U.S. dollars per bitcoin.

All of this does not factor in the possibility of bitcoin displacing some portion of the $11.7 trillion dollars of fiat foreign exchange reserves held by governments. Foreshadowing this, at least one publicly-traded U.S. corporation has begun holding bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. If central banks start to diversify their foreign fiat holdings even partially into bitcoin, say 10%, then 45x gets revised upward towards 55x or $600,000 USD per bitcoin, and so forth.

The Case for $500K Bitcoin

About the only existing law governing space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. But the treaty focuses almost entirely on what nation-states can and cannot do (e.g., deploy nuclear bombs, seize celestial bodies). It’s virtually silent on what private companies or individuals can do—which suddenly seems like a glaring loophole given the rise of private space companies like SpaceX, which recently transported its first astronauts to the International Space Station. These private vessels are far murkier in a legal sense.

To be sure, a clause in the Outer Space Treaty does require nations to monitor their own citizens in space, which works fine when astronauts are few. But when hundreds or thousands of people reach orbit, that will become increasingly untenable. And so far, most crimes in remote places like T-3 have involved the citizens of one country alone (e.g., one Russian attacking another).

https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/arctic-t3-murder-space.html

In the case of Korea, there are about 380 professional players certified by the Korean Baduk Association, and about 50 top players can be considered tournament players. Last year, the top player in Korea earned about $1 million US dollars from tournaments alone, while the 10th player earned about $120,000 US dollars.

The development of superhuman Go AI has impacted the professional Go world in many different ways. Here, I want to highlight three areas, one that affects both types of players, one area for tournament players, and one for teaching players.

View at Medium.com

View and Listen

Video on takeoff and flight sequences of insects spanning 8 different taxonomic orders captured at 3,200 fps! – usually ignored when we see in nature.