HuShifang

I suppose Ukraine invaded itself, too?

Andrew Ng, I believe. He mentioned this in an Economist podcast interview, where IIRC he also said he doesn't expect AGI to emerge for several centuries.

And, as an aside, brother to the planetary scientist David Grinspoon.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grinspoon

EDIT: Peter has his own Wikipedia page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Grinspoon

Good question. A follow-up: What's the best low(er)-digitalization EV (ideally BEV, but alternatively PHEV)? Something with more tactile/analog UI and a minimum of "entertainment" accessories?

I think this is the key here: conceptually, there may be some cognitive shear around the word "plane." In the near-term VTOLs aren't going to be airliners or, for that matter, flying cars. Cessnas and helicopters, though...

Not the parent commenter, but as someone who skips breakfast, it's actually not that difficult, particularly if you drink coffee (which IIRC has recognized appetite-suppressing properties). Just drink it black, and be sure to drink water as well. (Tea might be an option too, but especially in black teas, the tannins in it may make your stomach queasy absent some milk or carbohydrates -- which would defeat the purpose of skipping breakfast.)

Thanks for bringing VOTE to my attention -- I'd followed Engine No. 1's work regarding Exxon, and didn't realize they had rolled out an ETF. While it was probably more their ability to persuade BlackRock et al that carried the day with Exxon, I'm glad to give them just a few dollars' more clout...

Not a native speaker, but at least in a Beijing accent, I wouldn't say that "Chen" rhymes with "fun." "Cheng" or "Zheng," or "Feng," sure, "fun" works as a comparison. "Chen," "Zhen," etc. would rhyme more with "pen" or "hen."

Typora UI emulation is one of the devs' top to-dos, and I've found they move remarkably fast on these things, so stay tuned... (EDIT: Fair point re: open source, though I find the use of Markdown and easy exportability mitigating.)

"Long 龍" is Mandarin Chinese for "dragon"

Here I thought this was going to be a literally true headline, i.e. a report on a taste test of a new cell-ag product wherein preserved tissue samples from the 1948 chickens were used for the cell line that was cultured into the reporter's meal. It'd be a happier story, too.

(One of the chickens who contributed tissue for Eat Just's cultured chicken product lived out his life at an animal sanctuary near the Bay Area. But due to the breeding practices referenced in the article, it was, sadly, a short life.)

Does anyone have recommendations for educational Go software, akin to the various quasi-gamified chess learning and training platforms emerging lately (PlayMagnus et al)? I'm not sure I have the mental bandwidth right now to work through books independently, but would love an app or other service I could spend a free minute or two on here and there.

I'm aware of Baduk Pop (https://badukpop.com/) but haven't tried it yet; there's also SmartGo (https://www.smartgo.com/) but it's Windows/iOS (with a MacOS version in the works) and I'm mainly using Linux and Android.

From my own casual investigations, Wheelock is considered a perfectly good textbook (particularly for people with lots of experience learning languages, e.g. grad students in the humanities), but also a bit "traditional," focusing more on learning grammatical rules and less on developing an intuition for the language. Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata is at the other, "immersion"-oriented end of the spectrum.

Yup. They're really into the medieval aesthetic there -- the Hall of Graduate Studies was built in the 1930s IIRC, and they splashed the stone walls with acid and purposefully cracked some of the stained glass windows to make it all look that much more Oxbridge-y....

I completely agree with the point here -- people should have the freedom to work a bit less and "live" more (however they define that, be it parenting, pursuing hobbies, or what have you) without fear for their livelihood.

I would offer one amendment: in the US at least, disagreement on this theme is probably one of the major dividing lines between liberals and progressives (and their fellow travelers). Liberals (like Elizabeth Warren, who has labeled herself a progressive but is generally liberal in her policy positions) prioritize free child care and other policies that would make outsourcing childcare less financially onerous, freeing people to work more; progressives and their fellow travelers (like Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang) prioritize paid family leave, UBI, and other policies that would minimize the need to outsource childcare in the first place by allowing people to work less.

I was wondering about this too. Elsewhere on their site they discuss recoloring marble busts of the caesars, so they may not be unaware of this...

Yup, I should have read the article -- thanks

I've read that fatty tissue in the body triggers an increase in estrogen production, and that obesity can thus trigger a vicious cycle (insofar as estrogen triggers an increase in fatty tissue). Certainly, exposure to plastics and other environmental factors might increase estrogen levels alone, but given that we know that people (everywhere, I think) are fatter than they used to be, and that this seems significantly due to their being more sedentary and having worse diets (more processed foods, etc.), isn't that a plausible simple explanation? (Or at least one worth rigorously analyzing?)

One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy, shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it's even more complicated than this, historically speaking.

This is nicely put. It reminds me a bit of David Perkins's [0] "whole ballgame" approach (i.e. the best way to learn how to play baseball is to play a few games or approximations thereof, e.g. tee-ball; you'll struggle mightily at first, but you'll ultimately benefit by having a sense of how the game as a whole works, and it provides valuable context and motivation for subsequently working on specific skills like throwing the ball, swinging the bat, etc. And the ultimate result is greater mastery than if you had started from the skills and worked your way up to playing the game piecewise.) Fast.ai's pedagogy is based in part on this principle, and (as someone inclined to go down rabbit holes) it's been a huge help to me as I go through the course and book. [1]

I'd add too, recently released personal knowledge base apps (Obsidian, Roam, et al) are very well suited to fractal learning. I partition my notes into content (summaries) and concepts (with some Zettelkasten-style ephemeral notes mixed in). When I come across new concepts, I create a stub; then I fill it in when necessary with the necessary degree of detail, adding new details, revising, and forcing myself to make my account of it coherent as I encounter different facets of the concept in different books, articles, etc.

[0]: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/resources/making-learning-whole-ho...

[1]: http://course.fast.ai/

Just to add here, the article's author is an expert on middle period (Tang-Song) China (her first book was on local deities, her second on contracts). She then shifted her focus a bit westward to the Silk Road. She has apparently shifted her focus yet again. I'm not an expert on pre-Columbian archaeology. But neither is she.

Xodo [0] has a "Reading" view (at least in its Android app) that seems to do just that. A good selection of other features too.

[0]: https://www.xodo.com/

It wouldn't be the first time GM used a "sock puppet" (loosely defined) to escape its own reputation. [0]

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Corporation

Probably a leak from one of the embargoed reporters is more likely, if it's true. Obviously we'll find out soon. But if the Earthsky.org story a fake, he certainly did a vastly better job producing the fake than he did self aggrandizing off of it.

He does seem like a bit of a "character." But maybe he had a webscraper that just happened to catch the premature post, and is just trying to self-aggrandize on a real scoop? Nasawatch [0] is saying that several sources have confirmed it to them...

[0]: http://nasawatch.com/archives/2020/09/phosphine-detec.html

If it all holds up, it means that we saw evidence of alien life for a hundred-plus years (the "unknown absorbers") before we realized it and verified it. Point being, humans can be "slow on the uptake" (and not unreasonably so, given the distances, time scales, and complexities involved).

See also the Silurian Hypothesis [0], which I think just got a lot more interesting as a thought experiment.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...

Maybe Lauret's The Design of Web APIs? [0]

[0]: https://www.manning.com/books/the-design-of-web-apis

As someone who always means to learn a bit of Latin and Ancient Greek, this is a very cool looking site -- the inflection tables and diagrams are an especially nice touch. One addition that I'd love to see (if technically feasible) would be some sort of drilling or practice mechanism, e.g. a cloze-completion generator (a la Clozemaster or Lingvist, or the I think quasi-defunct Readlang).

By the way, if you're ever considering classical languages further east, I'd call your attention to ctext.org -- it doesn't do anything particularly fancy with its UI, but it has a lot of classical / premodern Chinese texts, and classic English translations (largely Legge) of some of the major ones.

One of the major observations in Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora[0] (which is excellent, well-informed, and worth a read) is that "99.9%" self-sufficient isn't going to cut it, at least for a multigenerational interstellar mission.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)

> But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?

I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized, even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.)

I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof -- having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance, I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so any undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are" -- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct" socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present "meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.)

It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich" rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.