limbicsystem

That's actually what prompted the submission. I was amazed :)

From this map you might think that the UK is currently depending (96.5%) on fossil fuels. But it's not quite that bad: https://grid.iamkate.com/

The real eye-opener (for me) on the latter display is the emissions per kwh over all time - dropped steadily from 500g in (only!) 2012 to a steady 150g or so recently. Encouraging!

Never mind space elevators - we could build useful sky hooks right now (and Mars might be the best place to do it...) https://youtu.be/dqwpQarrDwk

Recommend two nice books on this: the ancestor's tale by Richard Dawkins and Otherlands by Thomas Halliday. Both absolute page turners!

But the human visual system is insensitive to high resolution yb and red/green information so you can essentially down sample those layers to almost nothing before you even start. That's a fundamental trick which is also used in another way by jpeg but presumably not by this RGB algorithm.

Never mind signal, what would Apple do if the UK government forced them to compromise E2E crypt? Someone hasn't thought this thorough properly...

Author here: Yup - that's a great paper (published just after the Frontiers piece). There >are< some other organisms that have more than three photoreceptors and seem to use them for 'proper' color vision though: many birds and fish (and perhaps some women).

Where is the energy coming from?

But oddly the most recent one as well https://xkcd.com/2723

I wonder if we should tolerate hypocrisy a little more? I always liked this section from "the diamond age" https://www.likevillepodcast.com/articles/2020/8/14/our-obse...

I'll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/_fb33PrnxtA

Or this! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30641309/

Vision science: Foundation of vision

https://foundationsofvision.stanford.edu/

We made this once:

https://www.vischeck.com/daltonize/

But no one seemed particularly interested. Let me know if you are...

My bet would be 'reading'. Reading is essentially a type of synesthesia that we force onto children which turns external symbols into sound (at least initially). My interpretation of Jaynes is that he posits a direct 'voice' from the fast pattern matching systems of the brain (this, in turn possibly a maladaptation to the emergence of language earlier in our rescent evolution). Perhaps reading disrupts this pathway or teaches us to regulate it much more tightly? A prediction of this might be that voice hearing could be far more prevelant in illiterate people that we suspect.

I thought UK cinema tickets actually dropped in price quite a bit recently. As a counterexample, still in a small city in the UK, Vue has seats today for 'The Rise of Gru' for £7 per seat - in a nice venue with reclining seats. And you can bring popcorn from the next-door supermarket for £2 per bag. The only downside is that you would have to watch 'The Rise of Gru'...

Came for this comment - was not disappointed

Very odd to me to see these two stories (late PhD and 'ed') next to each other in HN. Last night I discovered my great aunt's old notebook from her schooldays and posted it on Insta.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb3Y6M1sYW-/?utm_medium=copy_lin...

She was, to my knowledge, the oldest person to get a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (starting in her retirement and getting it in her '70s). In the late 1990s she explained to me how she would go in to the University computer labs and write her thesis using 'ed'. Even then I was impressed :)

That thing about seat belts - really? https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/seatbeltbrief/index...

I think of the USS Nimitz. Everything on that ship is (presumably) there for an excellent military reason. Yet it has probably never been attacked directly and it clearly has an important role in maintaining status and prestige. The two things are correlated, not independent.

I agree. But I don't understand the reference to the Princess and the Pea?

It's more complex than that. The Quebec paper suggests that there may be an association between the introduction of low-cost, universal Pre-K education and poorer life outcomes in some groups later on. Even with the 'natural experiment' that happened in Quebec it's still hard to prove causality.

But the authors explicitly say that high quality Pre-K programmes targeted at relatively deprived groups are beneficial. The take-home might be 'state-run, large-scale Pre-K programmes might be good for you if your home life already sucks but might be worse than the best quality care you could receive at home' (and even then I think you'd have to qualify the finding by measuring the potential positive effects on maternal incomes). They also say that the effects probably don't translate to Europe.

And... they offer the suggestion that you could significantly improve Pre-K education by focusing on (and measuring) 'non-cognitive' development. That seems like a good thing to try...

Three things occur to me: 1: I think there is a reason for a cutoff. To take the AI case: I have no doubt that any AI worth its salt could suffer. But that AI will (probably) be build from transistors and I think that it is meaningless to consider the suffering of a thermostat. So there's a cutoff somewhere - maybe it isn't that 'hard' but some things are on one side and some on the other. Flies, I think, are more like thermostats and I value each one of them at very close to zero. But you are right, possibly not >exactly< zero and that eps might add up in some way. Would destroying a billion thermostats be ethically problematic?

2: Scott Alexander has written on this recently and it covers much of the same ground that we are covering here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-will-not-eat-the-bug...

3: Some time ago I seem to remember the Swiss Government discussing a proposition to recognise the 'dignity' of insect and plants. Dignity was held to be a property distinct from suffering and I think part of the argument was that it was somehow mutual: damaging life in any form was harmful to the dignity of both the damager and the damagee. I have some sympathy with that idea. In other words, we should care about the bugs because we care about ourselves.

Disclosure, I do a lot of scientific work with Drosophila and this is something that I mull over from time to time as I slaughter them in their thousands...

Pain != consciousness though and while I agree that in principle we should strive to reduce total pain, I also think there is a strong nonlinearity in how much we should weight nervous systems of different complexities. I would say the UK legal cutoff for lab animals (where we care about vertebrates and octopuses but not invertebrates) is about right. It is a complex issue - the presence of an isolated, active, nociceptor (or even thousands of them) isn't of concern to me. But somehow the conscious readout of them is...

No. What is weird about this is that octopuses are already included in animal rights legislation and have the same protection as vertebrates. It's like these MPs haven't even bothered to check... Edit: I should have read TFA. It's actually about commercial fishing more than labs. I have some sympathy with the octopus bit. But I have a hard time getting too protective of lobsters.

Old computer systems are fascinating from many points of view: The article discusses the software used to wring the last drop of performance out of hardware that we would probably now consider to be inadequate for running a disk controller. It's super cool that many of these systems are now available as emulators! I was a little surprised that the author only got twice the performance of the DtCyber in an emulator until I saw that they were emulating on an 800MHz P3 :)

In addition, visiting these old devices IRL is pretty instructive: one thing that always strikes me when I visit the Computer Sheds in Yorkshire (http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/ - an absolute gem BTW) is the enduring problem of thermal management. Up close, those old mainframes are basically huge air conditioning systems with some chips attached. My understanding is that managing heat is >still< the ultimate factor limiting performance (otherwise we could just stack up silicon in 3D)...

I'm not sure I detect either ignorance or 'malicious thought' in the parent post. It is clearly true that much of modern Yoga practise in the west >is< influenced by other cultures (the Swedish / British keep fit programmes of the 1920s for example). It can also be true that Yoga has deep cultural roots that extend far into the distant past. The parent does not 'reduce' Yoga to certain body poses - you are both effectively agreeing with each other that it is a malleable system that has modernised (significantly) over the past 100 years or so. I would love to know what a C19th Hatha Yoga practitioner from those illustrations would make of the explosion of different styles that have evolved today. I would hope that they and, say, Tim Senesei or Adrianne Mishler might be able to have an interesting (and respectful) conversation.

Kind of like this? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

In the UK, vertebrates + octopuses.

I have a nasty feeling that a war will one day be fought between people who believe these two opposing viewpoints (nod to Iain Banks..). If you think there's something other than just the meat and the programme, there is not reason to engage in the most horrific torture of billions of copies of the silicon-bound brains. And if you think that meat and code is all that there is, there is almost no possible higher motivation than stopping this enterprise. It's the asymptote of ethics.