Linklist: July 12, 2021
🎶 What did ancient languages sound like? – "Once we temper our expectations and narrow our focus, however, the problem turns out to be a fascinating forensic exercise. In the case of Classical languages like Greek and Latin and Sanskrit, we have an unbroken tradition which provides the sort of foundation lacking for many other ancient languages, such as Hittite or Egyptian, which were lost completely and then deciphered by modern scholars. Because we write English with a form of the Latin alphabet, there is information encoded in a familiar writing system, and such information about pronunciation was passed down from generation to generation in both formal and informal educational contexts. Occasionally ancient writers described what their native language sounded like. This type of linguistic analysis is far more sophisticated in the Sanskrit tradition, but we find important information among Greek and Roman authors too. Consider the sound represented by the letter rho in ancient Greek. Plato says the following about it: ἑώρα γὰρ οἶμαι τὴν γλῶτταν ἐν τούτῳ ἥκιστα μένουσαν, μάλιστα δὲ σειομένην, “for he saw, I think, that the tongue in [rho] is not still at all, but shaking rapidly” (Cratylus 426e). And Dionysius of Halicarnassus says: τὸ δὲ ρ τῆς γλώττης ἄκρας ἀπορριπιζούσης τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ πρὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν ἐγγὺς τῶν ὀδόντων ἀνισταμένης, “and rho [is pronounced] by the tip of the tongue blowing out the breath and rising to the palate near the teeth” (On Composition 14). Based on these descriptions most scholars think it was a trilled r-sound like we find in Italian and Spanish. We can augment that base of knowledge with tools from modern linguistics. The study of phonetics provides insight about the mechanics of sound production in language. We realize, for instance, that it is common across languages for word-final nasal consonants (M and N) to weaken and disappear, such as we find in Latin, or for the first of two consecutive aspirated consonants to lose its aspiration, such as we find in Greek and Sanskrit."
👽 What if the truth isn’t out there? – "Getting to the bottom of the UAPs and investigating whether there’s intelligent life elsewhere is important, and it’s probably worth devoting government resources toward solving the mystery. But I also worry that belief in the extraterrestrial hypothesis is a kind of wishful thinking. If it’s wrong, and a Great Filter is in our future, that suggests our species is in immense danger. It would mean there are many, perhaps millions or billions, of civilizations like ours around the universe, but that they without fail destroy themselves at some point after they reach a certain level of technological sophistication. If that happened to them, it’ll almost certainly happen to us too. If the extraterrestrial hypothesis is wrong simply because we’re the only species that has even gotten this far, that’s alarming for a different reason. It implies that if we screw up, that’s it: The universe would be left as a desolate compilation of stars and planets without any thinking creatures on them. Nothing capable of empathizing or acting morally would exist anymore. Skeptic though I am, there is a part of me that wants the objects in the sky to be aliens because the alternative is so dismal. I want to know what these objects really are because the stakes are high enough that we need to get this right. But in a way, our current state of relative ignorance can be a bit of a silver lining — there’s comfort in the thought that we don’t know the answer yet, and that we can’t quite close the door on the possibility of life beyond Earth."
👩🏽🔬 Why ex post peer review encourages high-risk research while ex ante review discourages it – " Peer review is an integral component of contemporary science. While peer review focuses attention on promising and interesting science, it also encourages scientists to pursue some questions at the expense of others. Here, we use ideas from forecasting assessment to examine how two modes of peer review -- ex ante review of proposals for future work and ex post review of completed science -- motivate scientists to favor some questions instead of others. Our main result is that ex ante and ex post peer review push investigators toward distinct sets of scientific questions. This tension arises because ex post review allows an investigator to leverage her own scientific beliefs to generate results that others will find surprising, whereas ex ante review does not. Moreover, ex ante review will favor different research questions depending on whether reviewers rank proposals in anticipation of changes to their own personal beliefs, or to the beliefs of their peers. The tension between ex ante and ex post review puts investigators in a bind, because most researchers need to find projects that will survive both. By unpacking the tension between these two modes of review, we can understand how they shape the landscape of science and how changes to peer review might shift scientific activity in unforeseen directions."
⌚ The long history of ‘Bombay Time’ and resistance to colonial rule – "Until the mid-19th century local timekeeping was tied to the rising and setting of the sun. Until the early 1880s Bombay mostly followed this local solar time, or, appropriately, “Bombay Time.” But with the onset of the railways and telegraph from around the 1850s, it became expedient, even imperative, for colonial India to have a single uniform time. “Madras Time” was chosen as the default. The city of Madras (Chennai) lay roughly halfway between Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay. As Rajendra Aklekar, journalist and author of A Short History of Indian Railways explains, the Madras observatory ran the telegraph service used for synchronizing railway station times. So the colonial government advised that the region adopt this “Railway Time,” which was about 30 minutes ahead. This first attempt to impose a single time on Bombay in 1870 was unsuccessful, and a second attempt by the colonial government in 1881 also met with opposition. The city resisted, with many people (as well as the university and the high court) using Bombay Time, even as the railways and some government offices used Madras Time. The imposition of a single time for Bombay was, from the outset, a thorny, charged issue that rankled the city’s pride and resurfaced repeatedly over a century. Bombay University was one of the arenas in which this battle unfolded. In April 1883, at a meeting of the University senate, the 40 or so attendees, including city officials, judges, and professors, debated: What time should the newly minted clock tower keep?"
🐺 The AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep – "So this happened in China. In 2019, two university students did an AI project that involved a simple ‘wolf versus sheep’ game. The senior member of the team, a Thai national studying in China, left to work in Australia after he graduated, and the project was thus abandoned. The junior member went on to teach. One day in March 2021, he told one of his students about the initial results of the experiment over text. The student was so tickled by the story, he screenshot it and shared it with his friends. Those screenshots went viral on Chinese social media and became a small sensation. The game was simple. Two wolves and six sheep would be placed at random within a game space by the computer. The wolves would have to catch all the sheep in 20 seconds while avoiding some boulders within the space. In order to incentivize the AI wolf to improve its performance, a simple point system was also programmed. If a wolf caught a sheep, 10 points were awarded. If he hit a boulder, one point was deducted. To encourage them to catch the sheep as fast as possible, 0.1 points were deducted from the wolves for every second that passed. Other abilities were given to the wolves — which direction they were facing, what was in front of them, where the sheep were, its speed, the speed of the sheep etc. and a whole bunch of other parameters meant to help the wolves in their hunt. The goal was to see if the AI wolves could, through training and retraining, figure out a way to maximize its scores. After 200,000 iterations, the researchers found that the wolves simply rammed themselves against the boulders to commit suicide most of the time."
💸 The non-innovation of cryptocurrency – "Appeals to “the potential for innovation” are always amorphous and hand-wavy rhetorical gestures towards the potential for some tech that could exist but which we don’t fully understand the implications of. However bitcoin is a technology which did not arise out of an engineering effort directed towards a specific problem or market inefficiency, but instead out of a anarchist political narrative that views democratic control of the money supply and law enforcement as the problem. Mark Carney’s description of this situation as the “Uberisation” of money is an accurate description of the problem. Private entities now wish to disrupt the global international order by issuing private money, much like we saw in the 1830s United States Wildcat Banking era, but this time on global scale. It is an attempted financial coup by the anarcho-capitalist wing of Silicon Valley to set themselves up as central bankers but without any accountability or democratic oversight. The saving grace of this situation is the technology being proposed to do this is neither robust nor particularly useful at achieving their stated political goals. Every Econ 101 student studies that a currency is four things: 1. A unit of account, 2. A means of payment, 3. A stable store of value, 4. Capacity to act as a single numeraire. Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies have none of these features, nothing is priced in it and commerce could never be done in something so unregulated and volatile without recreating an extremely convoluted system of intermediaries to manage the technical and legal shortcomings, which defeats its entire stated ideological purpose. The “digital money” narrative has even been rejected by most crypto acolytes, and those that cling to this narrative do so out of some misplaced faith that volatility and transaction speed will fix themselves through magical thinking and unspecified means or empty appeals to heterodox economic theories."
🪐 The planets with the giant diamonds inside – "The Voyager flyby did offer hints that there’s more to Uranus than meets the eye. The planet has a system of thin, dark rings, which turn out to contain large chunks—possibly the remains of a moon that was destroyed long ago. More surprising, Voyager’s instruments showed that Uranus’s magnetic field is tilted 60 degrees relative to its axis, as if your compass needle pointed to Houston instead of the north pole. There must be a huge, lopsided magnetic generator cranking away inside the planet, which leaves Hammel buzzing with questions: “What kind of internal structure can do that? Is it stable? Does it change over time?” But the reputation of the ice giants didn’t really recover until Voyager 2 reached Neptune on Aug. 25, 1989. Unlike its sibling, Neptune was a riot of activity. It seemed to be staring back at the spacecraft with its Great Dark Spot, an anticyclone storm (a hurricane in reverse, with a high-pressure eye) nearly as large as the entire Earth. The Spot was streaked with white clouds of methane ice and surrounded by smaller storms and dark bands circling the entire planet, all tinged a rich, deep blue by methane gas in Neptune’s atmosphere. Beautiful, complex, and not at all boring. The Voyager results revealed that weather operates differently on ice giants than it does here on Earth, for reasons that scientists are only starting to decipher. “Wind speeds increase as you go farther out from the sun, which is weird,” says Amy Simon, a Uranus and Neptune enthusiast at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. On Uranus, they blow at 550 mph, as fast as a jet airplane at cruising speed. On Neptune, the winds are even fiercer, averaging 700 mph and gusting to 1,500 mph around the Great Dark Spot. They manage to pick up tremendous energy, even though Neptune receives just 1/900th as much solar heat as Earth does."
🏝️ Can today’s technology tackle climate change? Who cares? (2010) – "engineer with turbine modelLet’s ponder the real questions.One of the most heated arguments among climate policy analysts is over the following question: “Do we currently have the technology we need to tackle climate change?” For brevity’s sake, I refer to it as the “enough technology” debate. The way it usually breaks down is, those who say we don’t have the necessary technology focus on innovation and the need for “breakthroughs.” Those who say we do have the necessary technology focus on deployment — accelerating the adoption of today’s tech. For the amount of attention it gets, you’d think that settling this debate is the crucial first step in developing a policy plan or a political strategy. You’d think the “enough technology” question must be answered before anyone can move forward. But as I see it, pretty much nothing hinges on the answer. Indeed, I find the whole debate baffling and confounding. The latest outbreak has come in the wake of a report from a panel of energy analysts in California that spent the last two years digging in to what it would take for the state to meet its ambitious climate goal (reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, even as its population grows from 37 million to 55 million and demand for energy doubles). It released its report earlier this year: California’s Energy Future—The View to 2050. It’s a fascinating read with some important insights; for instance, it totally rejects the use of biofuels for passenger vehicles (we need to save them for hard-to-electrify stuff like freight trucks and planes)."
🪞 Why introverts didn't actually 'win' lockdown – "Shokrkon points out that extraverts may have had bigger friendship groups before the pandemic, and – even if they could not see them face-to-face – would have been able to enjoy some of that social support remotely, through Zoom or WhatsApp. “These strong friendships that they had before the pandemic, were perhaps the most important thing that helped them get through the difficult situation,” she says. As an extravert herself, she says she was quick to organise events – such as group games online – that created a sense of connection. “The extraverts [still] found a way to connect with people.” Introverts, in contrast, may have had less social capital to start with, and then struggled to find new ways to maintain those relationships. Posts across social media platforms suggest that, as many countries reduce their social distancing guidelines, many introverts have been pleasantly surprised by their increased opportunities to meet people face-to-face. This is entirely to be expected, say Gubler and Schlegel. “People continuously shape their environment to match their needs or their personality, and we can therefore expect that both introverts and extraverts will be able to return to post-lockdown life with the degree of social interaction that feels comfortable to them”. “And many individuals are probably happy to replace rather exhausting Zoom meetings with actual social interactions.” Shokrkon agrees. “Extraverts will probably be more excited about Covid-19 restrictions being lifted,” she says. “But I'm absolutely sure [that introverts] want to have the option of choosing whether to go to parties and social gatherings or not.” Many organisations are encouraging their employees to continue working remotely, at least part of the time. This may make the transition easier, says Shokrkon – rather than immediately returning to all the face-to-face meetings and busy office chatter that they would have endured previously. “Introverts should use this period to readjust and to make their way slowly back into their social life.”"
⚙️ Quantum coherence and classical yet quantum materials – "Because I haven't seen this explicitly discussed anywhere, I think it's worth pointing out that everyday materials around us demonstrate some features of coherence and decoherence in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics allows superposition states to exist - an electron can be in a state with a well-defined momentum, but that is a superposition of all possible position states along some wavefront. As I mentioned here, empirically a strong measurement means coupling the system being measured to some large number of degrees of freedom, such that we don't keep track of the detailed evolution of quantum entanglement. In my example, that electron hits a CCD detector and interacts locally with the silicon atoms in one particular pixel, depositing its charge and energy there and maybe creating additional excitations. That "collapses" the state of the electron into a definite position. This kind of measurement is a two-way street - a quantum system leaves its imprint on the state of the measuring apparatus, and the measurement changes the quantum system's state. One fascinating aspect of the emergence of materials properties is that we can have systems that act both very classically (as I'll explain in a minute) and also very quantum mechanically at the same time, for different aspects of the material."
📑 Review papers and the creative destruction of the research literature – "Scientific knowledge is ever-expanding. As new ideas and discoveries are created, it is increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of everything being discovered and published. Scientists often turn to summaries to make sense of it all. Review articles are a common means of curating the knowledge amassed on a topic. On the one hand, it is reasonable to think that scientific review articles will bring welcome attention to the research they summarize. After all, if a review’s main purpose is to identify the central works in a field—to separate the wheat from the chaff—then the articles they highlight ought to become more visible and more highly esteemed as a result. On the other hand, some argue just the opposite: scientists may cite the review itself in place of the articles reviewed, and reviews may therefore ‘poach’ attention away from the very research they are supposed to highlight. It is fair to ask, then: do reviews promote the articles they cite, or do they poach the attention those articles would otherwise have received? In a recent article, co-authored with Daniel A. McFarland and published in the American Sociological Review, we use a corpus of nearly six million scholarly articles to show that this seemingly simple question has a surprisingly complex answer. Yes, reviews do, on average, draw attention away from the articles they cite. But they do so selectively, boosting the popularity of a small selection of the articles they cite. In fact, the way that reviews guide scientists’ attention may be a central part of their role in the production of scientific knowledge more generally."