Links
3 stars
An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project | Construction Physics
26-minute read
But the Manhattan Project was far more than just a science project: building the bombs required an enormous industrial effort of unprecedented scale and complexity. Enormous factory complexes were built using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of never-before-constructed equipment. Scores of new machines, analytical techniques, and methods of working with completely novel substances had to be invented. Materials which had never been produced at all, or only produced in tiny amounts, suddenly had to be manufactured in vast quantities.
My Mother, New Orleans | The New Yorker
10-minute read
Most of us feel raised by the places where we were born, but, at the risk of offending people born in every other place, I believe that people from New Orleans feel an especially filial connection to their city: born of its heat and nurtured by its oils.
I do not know whether I feel this way because of Hurricane Katrina or in spite of it. Perhaps I would feel this way regardless of whether or not the entire city had almost ceased to exist twenty years ago. But I have lost a mother, and I have almost lost a city, and I can tell you that the feeling of one is similar to the other. Neither a mother nor a city is perfect, and both are easy to hate. Until, that is, they are dying. Then it is impossible not to love them.
Original link | Archive.is link
Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis | Astral Codex Ten
27-minute read
Leister includes a number of stories like this: a nine-year-old boy avoids water after getting a heart from a little girl who drowned; a college professor began to have recurring dreams about a flash of light burning his face after getting a heart from a police officer who died in a shooting during a drug bust; a woman often feels the pain of the car accident that killed her donor. It’s possible that all these people are lying, but the phenomenon is apparently common enough that this seems unlikely. It also doesn’t seem likely that what they report is just due to a surgery-related brain injury. In many cases, organ receivers report information about their donor, including information about their name, or their cause of death, that they didn’t appear to have access to.
[...]
The relevant knowledge for evaluating these heart transplant stories is our knowledge of biology, and how human memory works. And everyone knows memories are stored in the brain, not the heart, so we ought to be highly skeptical.
They are just in the brain, right?
[...]
This leads us to the subject of our review: the synaptic plasticity and memory hypothesis.
2 stars
How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein | New York Times [gift article]
21-minute read
A Times investigation found that America’s leading bank spent years supporting — and profiting from — the notorious sex offender, ignoring red flags, suspicious activity and concerned executives.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools | The74Million
8-minute read
Twenty years ago, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina inadvertently created the conditions for one of the most remarkable education experiments in American history. Today, that experiment has quietly produced results that should be making national headlines. Instead, it’s met with a curious indifference that reveals something broken about our politics and media.
[...]
There’s no one better at parsing the data than Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Harris has spent years analyzing these outcomes with the kind of methodological rigor that usually prevents education researchers from ever saying anything definitive about anything. His team of advisors includes both reform advocates and skeptics, yet when I spoke with him, Harris offered something virtually unheard of in education research: an unequivocal conclusion. “If you look at any of the typical things that we measure — test scores, high school graduation, college going, college persistence, ACT scores — all of those things are not just better, but quite a bit better than they were before.”
The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60% of New Orleans schools were labeled “failing” by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54% to 78%. College enrollment has jumped by 28 percentage points.
[...]
But that early attention has given way to virtual silence. This silence isn’t accidental — it’s the result of a success story so politically inconvenient that it threatens the foundational beliefs of both sides of America’s education debate.
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | Astral Codex Ten
17-minute read
MIRI thinks this is pathetic - like trying to protect against an asteroid impact by wearing a hard hat. They’re kind of cagey about their own probability of AI wiping out humanity, but it seems to be somewhere around 95 - 99%.
[...]
Why do these discussions go so badly? I am usually against psychoanalyzing my opponents, but I will ask forgiveness of the rationalist saints and present a theory.
I think it’s because, if it’s true, it changes everything. But it’s not obviously true, and it would be inconvenient for it to change everything. Therefore, it must not be true.
[...]
Imagine that, some two million years before our present day, an obscure ape-god looked over their vast, planet-sized gameboard.
"It's going to take me a few more moves," said the hominid-god, "but I think I've got this game in the bag."
There was a confused silence, as many gods looked over the gameboard trying to see what they had missed. The scorpion-god said, “How? Your ‘hominid’ family has no armor, no claws, no poison.”
“Their brain,” said the hominid-god.
“I infect them and they die,” said the smallpox-god.
“For now,” said the hominid-god. “Your end will come quickly, Smallpox, once their brains learn how to fight you.”
“They don’t even have the largest brains around!” said the whale-god.
“It’s not all about size,” said the hominid-god. “The design of their brain has something to do with it too. Give it two million years and they will walk upon their planet’s moon.”
“I am really not seeing where the rocket fuel gets produced inside this creature’s metabolism,” said the redwood-god. “You can’t just think your way into orbit. At some point, your species needs to evolve metabolisms that purify rocket fuel—and also become quite large, ideally tall and narrow—with a hard outer shell, so it doesn’t puff up and die in the vacuum of space. No matter how hard your ape thinks, it will just be stuck on the ground, thinking very hard.” “Some of us have been playing this game for billions of years,” a bacteria-god said with a sideways look at the hominid-god. “Brains have not been that much of an advantage up until now.”
“And yet,” said the hominid-god
AI Will Not Make You Rich | Colossus
14-minute read
Anyone who invests in the new new thing must answer two questions: First, how much value will this innovation create? And second, who will capture it? Information and communication technology (ICT) was a revolution whose value was captured by startups and led to thousands of newly rich founders, employees, and investors. In contrast, shipping containerization was a revolution whose value was spread so thin that in the end, it made only a single founder temporarily rich and only a single investor a little bit richer.
[...]
The way to invest in AI is to think through the implications of knowledge workers becoming more efficient, to imagine what markets this efficiency unlocks, and to invest in those. For decades, the way to make money was to bet on what the new thing was. Now, you have to bet on the opportunities it opens up.
Breakneck | The Pursuit of Happiness
12-minute read
If I had to summarize the book in a single sentence it would be that China’s engineering society is better at building infrastructure, housing and manufactured goods, whereas America’s lawyerly society is better at encouraging artistic and scientific creativity and protecting human rights.
The World War Two bomber that cost more than the atomic bomb | BBC
9-minute read
It was two years before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor dragged the United States into the war. But the US Army Air Corps was looking for a new bomber aircraft. What they were after was a "superbomber", capable of flying up to 2,000 miles (3,200km) at a time and at altitudes never achieved before.
The aircraft they got would go on to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ultimately bring an end to World War Two. It would also pave the way for a civil aviation boom that led to the everyday air travel we have today.
This is the story of how an aircraft that cost more than the entire Manhattan project – the B-29 Superfortress – changed the world.
The argument against the existence of a Theory of Everything | Big Think
7-minute read
Could all of this be solved by coming up with a “Theory of Everything?” Although the idea continues to fascinate many, there are some strong arguments to be made against it. Here’s why, perhaps, there isn’t a Theory of Everything out there to be found at all.
The messy reality of feeding Alaska | High Country News
7-minute read
In response to President Donald Trump’s tariff threats and talk of annexing Canada, provincial liquor authorities stripped American booze from store shelves. Canadian tourism to the United States plummeted. And British Columbia’s premier, David Eby, threatened to place tolls on commercial trucks traveling from the U.S. through B.C. to Alaska along the Alaska Highway. Doing so would further increase the state’s already high cost of living and possibly disrupt its food supply chain.
[...]
The truth is, Canada doesn’t have nearly as much power over Alaska’s food supply as Myers or I assumed. The supply chain was never just a long thin string. It’s actually more of a tangled ball of yarn, and the Alaska Highway, it turns out, is just one thread.
We Are Not Low Creatures | The Intrinsic Perspective
6-minute read
Regardless, scientifically, signs of life on Mars are absolutely no longer a fringe theory. It is no longer “just a possibility,” and it is definitely not “unlikely.” There is at least a “good chance,” or another glass-is-at-least-half-full equivalent judgement, that one of the planets closest to us once also had life.
And in this, now, I think the path is set. The light is green. The time for boots on the ground is now. Don’t send a robot to do a human’s job; the technology is too constrained. There are signs of past life on Mars, and so to be sure, we must go. We must go to Mars because humanity cannot be low creatures. We must go because a part of us belongs in the heavens. So we must go to the heavens, and there find answers to the ultimate questions of our existence.
Magical systems thinking | Works in Progress
9-minute read
There is a better way. A long but neglected line of thinkers going back to chemists in the nineteenth century has argued that complex systems are not our passive playthings. Despite friendly names like ‘the health system’, they demand extreme wariness. If broken, a complex system often cannot be fixed. Meanwhile, our successes, when they do come, are invariably the result of starting small. As the systems we have built slip further beyond our collective control, it is these simple working systems that offer us the best path back.
My Day as an 80-Year-Old. What an Age-Simulation Suit Taught Me. | Wall Street Journal
5-minute read
At the MIT AgeLab, which works on finding ways to improve life for the elderly, a pair of researchers helped me put on their age-simulation suit. They started with a 15-pound weighted vest, tightening the straps around my body. They added more weights around my ankles and wrists, to replicate the sensation of the loss of muscle mass that accompanies aging. They pulled a blue jumpsuit up over the weights, helping me lift each leg and step into the suit without falling.
They added a harness around my waist, and a bungee cord system that attached to different body parts including the back of the ankles and my wrists. The cords reduced my ability to reach up and shortened my stride. The get-up made it even more difficult to stand without a slouch. They put a padded neck collar on to limit my rotation and goggles to distort my vision. Foam-padded Crocs on my feet challenged my balance.
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
On Working with Wizards | One Useful Thing
6-minute read
I think this process is typical of the new wave of AI, for an increasing range of complex tasks, you get an amazing and sophisticated output in response to a vague request, but you have no part in the process. You don’t know how the AI made the choices it made, nor can you confirm that everything is completely correct. We're shifting from being collaborators who shape the process to being supplicants who receive the output. It is a transition from working with a co-intelligence to working with a wizard. Magic gets done, but we don’t always know what to do with the results. This pattern — impressive output, opaque process — becomes even more pronounced with research tasks.
China is quietly saving the world from climate change | Noahpinion
4-minute read
The only way this is ever going to happen is if solar power and batteries (and other green technologies) are really, really cheap. China, India, and the rest will not adopt these technologies because Greta Thunberg tells them to. They will only switch to green energy if it’s cheaper to do so.
So if we want to save the world from climate change, the only really effective way to do this is to make green energy as cheap as possible.
Stew Kids on the Block | TASTE
6-minute read
The rise of the stewfluencer is more than a TikTok trend. It’s a way of life.
[...]
What is perpetual stew? It’s a way of cooking and a metaphor for life. A recipe and a frame of mind. The first rule: perpetual stew wastes not. The second: perpetual stew never sleeps.
[...]
TikTok’s perpetual stew community doesn’t have a leader, but everyone knows Stewtheus, a 130-day-old (and counting) perpetual stew unleashed by Zachary Leavitt, a 25-year-old content creator and perpetual stew pioneer whose account boasts 170,000 followers and whose stew is named after the mythical Ship of Theseus, which was slowly replaced over years, part by part, until nothing of the original vessel remained. Zachary has long, dark hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, a look somewhere between heavy metal bassist and high school chemistry teacher. He posts updates every day, sometimes straining his stew of grit and sometimes adding new ingredients, such as barley, okra, or parsnips. His commentary reminds me of Shackleton’s diaries, matter-of-fact and focused. Different stakes, of course.
Earth is a desert planet compared to these ocean worlds in the solar system | Business Insider
2-minute read
Earth seems drenched with water from mountaintop to ocean bottom.
But our home planet is a desert compared to some places the solar system, both in terms of its total water volume and the amount of liquid on Earth relative to its size.
Consider Jupiter's ice-encrusted moon Europa, which is smaller than Earth's moon. Scientists recently used 20-year-old Voyager data to find even more evidence that Europa has twice as much water as our planet. Even tiny Pluto may have an ocean nearly as large as Earth's.
Original link | Archive.is link
The weight of research opinion against minimum wage hikes continues to shift | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
I fear that for the next thirty years people still will be claiming that Card and Krueger showed that minimum wage hikes do not damage employment. After numerous recent revisions, many of them catalogued here, that is no longer such a plausible belief.