Linklist: December 13, 2021
"TO CLAIM, AS THE AGE OF AI DOES, that this book fills a âgapâ in âbasic vocabulary and concepts for an informed debate about this technologyâ requires erasure of an extensive journalistic and academic literature. Acknowledging these writings would undermine the authorsâ grand prognostications, the hazy image of AI as all-powerful and (largely) beneficial, and the Big Techâfriendly political agenda this book is working to bolster.
Selling this agenda, in other words, requires some willful ignorance. References to race, gender, and labor are largely absent even as the co-authors explore historical terrain where racism, patriarchal power, and colonialism are central. For example, the authors celebrate the Dutch East India company and the stock exchange where its shares were traded as an example of a positive network effect, without remarking on its genocidal colonial practices, or its role in the Dutch slave trade.
The bookâs erasure of white supremacy, colonialism, and slavery from its historical overview is mirrored in the minimal engagement with the extensive research that has exposed how AI replicates and amplifies racialized, gendered, and other forms of inequality. Thereâs no mention of the AI-powered wall at the United Statesâ southern border, or police and law enforcement use of AI to hunt and track protesters, or the exploitative use of AI to control workers by companies like Uber and Amazon, even though these harmful and oppressive applications of AI are by now well documented.
The book also fails to mention climate change, or the significant climate costs of large-scale AI systems. To acknowledge climate would tear a hole in its narrative, suggesting an existential threat not coming from China and the mythical specter of Chinese dominance."
đ Anthocyanins
"As the chlorophyll wanes, now is the heyday of the xanthophylls, carotenoids and anthocyanins. These contain carbon rings and chains whose electrons become delocalized⌠their wavefunctions resonating at different frequencies, emitting photons of yellow, orange and red! Yes, itâs fall. Iâm enjoying it.
I wrote about two xanthophylls in my May 27, 2014 diary entry: I explained how they get their color from the resonance of delocalized electrons that spread all over a carbon chain with alternating single and double bonds.
I discussed chlorophyll, which also has such a chain, in my May 29th entry. I wrote about some carotenoids in my July 2, 2006 entry: these too have long chains of carbons with alternating single and double bonds.
I havenât discussed anthocyanins yet! These have rings rather than chains of carbon, but the basic mechanism is similar: itâs the delocalization of electrons that makes them able to resonate at frequencies in the visual range. They are often blue or purple, but they contribute to the color of many red leaves."
"The Whole Earth Catalog was created in 1968 by futurist Stewart Brand, who noticed that many of his friends were moving out of the city to join communes in âwildâ places like New Mexico and Northern California. Many members of this âback-to-the-landâ counterculture were distrustful of dangerous bureaucratic technologies (see: the Cold War, Vietnam). Instead, they sought âto change the world by establishing new, exemplary communities from which a corrupt mainstream might draw inspiration,â writes Turner. So, Brand created a publication meant to help these individuals âconduct [their] own education, find [their] own inspiration, shape [their] own environment, and share [their] adventure with whoever is interested.â
Inside each edition, one could find reviews of small-scale technologies, photos, drawings, and essays. Contributors came from all walks of life. As the magazine grew in popularity, writers and readers included everyone from bohemians to scientists to suburbanites. The Catalog âestablished a relationship between information technology, economic activity, and alternative forms of community that would outlast the counterculture itself and become a key feature of the digital world,â writes Turner.
But as the communes collapsed, the magazine started to lose popularity. In 1985, about 15 years after the Catalog stopped publication, former commune member Larry Brilliant approached Stewart Brand with the idea to put items from the Catalog online. Brilliant wanted to test a cutting-edge computer conferencing system, and hoped to appeal to the same audience that loyally read the Catalog. Brand agreed to manage the system, but did not want to post items from the Catalog. He wanted users to post their own conversation topics. Thus, the WELL was born."
"This article aims to summarize the background of well-known and not so well-known Soviet rocket engines, the history of their development, their main characteristics, and the rockets they flew on."
"This mixture of unrepentant self-mythologizing and rapacious greed makes the company especially dangerous in health contexts. McKinsey played a starring role in nearly every American covid fuck-up, and profited handsomely from their fatal bungling:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/15/3-frauds-in-a-trenchcoat/#failing-up
But when it comes to pharma, things get especially bad. McKinsey once advised the opiod-pushers of Purdue Pharma that they could goose their sales by paying bonuses to pharma distributors based on the number of fatal overdoses in their sales territories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-opioids-settlement.html
So it makes sense that if Congress wants to know how the inability to afford medicine is turning into a leading cause of American deaths, they would start by investigating McKinsey. But even so, what they found was shocking.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21112003/abbvie.pdf
The advice that McKinsey gave to pharma giant Abbvie isnât just a playbook for gaming the system to impoverish the sick and enrich the shareholders, itâs also a manual for a disinformation campaign meant to distort the public discourse over pharma prices."
"On an industrial park about an hourâs drive toward the South China Sea coast from Ho Chi Minh City sit giant mounds of raw metal shrouded in black tarpaulin. Stretching a kilometer in length, the much-coveted hoard could be worth about $5 billion at current prices.Â
In the esoteric world of aluminum, those in the know say the stockpile in Vietnam is the biggest they have ever seen â and thatâs in an industry that spends a lot of time building stockpiles while analysts spend a lot of time trying to locate them. But as far as the increasingly under-supplied market is concerned, itâs one that may never be seen again.
Why itâs unlikely to move anytime soon involves Vietnamâs customs authorities. How its existence has become so significant, meanwhile, opens a window on a ubiquitous, yet erratic commodity at a time when makers of everything from car parts to beer cans are competing for more of it as they emerge from the coronavirus pandemic and China throttles supply.
While there used to be millions of tons of aluminum at ports from Detroit and New Orleans in the U.S. to Rotterdam in Europe and Malaysiaâs Port Klang, market watchers say the stockpile 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Vietnamâs biggest city is likely the only notable one left.Â
To put it in perspective, itâs equivalent to the entire annual consumption of India, the worldâs second-most populous country, said Duncan Hobbs, a London-based analyst at commodities trader Concord Resources who has been covering metals markets for 25 years."
"Late on Friday evening, Renaissance mathematicus friend and star historian of medieval science, Seb Falk, posted a couple of paragraphs from an Oberserver newspaper interview with the physicist and self-appointed science communicator Michio Kaku, from April this year. The history of science content of those paragraphs was so utterly, mindbogglingly ludicrous that it had me tossing and turning all night and woke from his deep winter sleep the HISTSCI_HULK, who is now raging through my humble abode like a demented behemoth on speed. What was it that set the living history of science bullshit detector in such a state of apoplexy? I offer up the evidence:
How much, do you think, would Isaac Newton understand of your book?
I think he would appreciate it. In 1666 we had the great plague. Cambridge University was shut down and a 23-year-old boy was sent home, and he saw an apple fall on his estate. And then he realised that the laws that control an apple are the same laws that control the moon. So the epidemic gave Isaac Newton an opportunity to sit down and follow the mathematics of falling apples and falling moons. But of course there was no mathematics at that time. He couldnât solve the problem so he created his own mathematics. Thatâs what we are doing now. We, too, are being hit by the plague. We, too, are confined to our desks. And we, too, are creating new mathematics.
This paragraph is, of course, the tired old myth of Newtonâs Annus mirabilis, which got continually recycled in the early months of the current pandemic and, which I demolished in a blog post back in April 2020, so I wonât bore you with a rehash here. However, Kaku has managed to add a dimension of utter mind shattering ignorance"
"Almost since computers have existed, programmers have tried creating software which can play chess. The father of modern computing, Alan Turing, was the first recorded to have tried, creating a programme called Turochamp in 1948. Too complex for computers of the day to run, it played its first game in 1952 (and lost in under 30 moves against an amateur).
Since then, the software has improved significantly, with Deep Blue created by IBM famously defeating GM Garry Kasparov in 1997 â a landmark moment in popular culture where it seemed machines had finally overtaken humans. Chess software (now known as âchess enginesâ) continued to improve, and became capable of assessing and evaluating the best lines of chess to be played.
Stockfish is the name of one such chess engine â which just so happens to be free, open source software (just like Lichess). Stockfishâs community had made it one of the strongest chess engines in the world, able to trivially beat the strongest chess players in the world running on a mobile phone, when it was pitted against Google DeepMindâs AlphaZero in 2017. Stockfish 8 (the number referring to the version of the software) was completely annihilated by AlphaZero, in what remains to be a somewhat controversial matchup.
But even if Stockfish really had been fighting with one arm behind its back, it was still clearly outclassed. Consequently, the Neural Network method of assessing and evaluating positions that was initially used in Shogi engines was eventually implemented in Stockfish, later also in collaboration with another popular and powerful chess engine inspired by AlphaZero, called Lc0 (or Leela chess Zero). The latest version of this fruitful cooperation is known as Stockfish 14 NNUE, which is the chess engine Lichess uses for all post-game analysis when a user requests it, and the chess engine we used to measure the accuracy of all World Championship games.
To help evaluate the accuracy of positions and gameplay, engines present their evaluation in centipawns (1/100th of a pawn). For example, if a move lost 100 centipawns, thatâs the equivalent of a player losing a pawn. It doesnât necessarily mean they actually physically lost a pawn â a loss of space or a worse position could be the equivalent of giving up a pawn physically.
The average centipawn loss (ACPL) measures this centipawn loss across an entire game â so the lower the ACPL a player has, the more perfectly they played, in the eyes of the engine assessing it. "
"The first-generation AirPods marked a new category for Apple. Scheduled for release in October 2016, delays pushed them to December. By looking inside, we can understand why manufacturing them was such a challenge."
followed by CT scans of airpods over the years
"Secure your laptop. Secure your smart phone. Secure your tablet. And, before I forget, secure your fish tank. Yes, you heard me. Your fish tank.
That was the lessoned learned a few years ago from the operators of a North American casino. According to a 2018 Business Insider report, cybersecurity executive Nicole Eagan of security firm Darktrace told the story while addressing a conference.
âThe attackers used that (a fish-tank thermometer) to get a foothold in the network,â she recounted. âThey then found the high-roller database and then pulled that back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud.â
Can this really be possible? It certainly can. And you can blame the Internet of Things.
Maybe you've heard of IoT, but in case you haven't it's easily explained. Itâs all about dumb, inanimate objects. And no, Iâm not talking about members of Congress. These are elevators, engines, machinery, trucks, phones, sprinkler systems, inventory and, yes, even fish-tank thermometers. These objects are being equipped with sensors and then connected back to networks, databases and communication systems. So much so that by 2025 some analysts predict that there will be as many as 31 billion connected devices worldwide."
"ProPublica gives a detailed report about a little-noticed consequence of the oil spill that led to an Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize. The ProPublica report begins:
After the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded in 2010, environmentalists surveying the damage in the Gulf of Mexico came upon a mystery. The water had oil slicks that, because of the currents, couldnât have originated from the site of the notorious accident.
With the help of satellite imagery, they figured out that oil was leaking from a different spill, a six-year-old disaster the public knew almost nothing about. In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan had swept the legs out from under a 40-story oil-drilling platform operated by a company called Taylor Energy, causing a leak that continues to this day. It is the longest-running â and by one estimate, the largest â U.S. oil spill ever recorded, a contentious saga that prompted a recent â60 Minutesâ segment.
Itâs been an environmental nightmare for the region â but a massive tax bonanza for Phyllis Taylor, the owner of Taylor Energy and the fallen rigâŚ.
The 2010 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize was awarded to Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water donât mix. The achievement is documented in the study âReview of Deep Oil Spill Modeling Activity Supported by the Deep Spill JIP and Offshore Operatorâs Committee. Final Report,â Eric Adams and Scott Socolofsky, 2005.â
𦾠Dangerous things
"This is a place to discuss biohacking, projects, and technology. This is not a place to spout religious dogma, nonsensical ideological arguments, ramblings about government mind control conspiracies, secret alien implants, etc."