Linklist: March 24, 2024
after jumping around the web looking for newsletter-sending platforms as easy as substack, i’m back here – for now. to quote jonny lee miller’s sherlock holmes in ‘elementary’: “I make use of the tools available to me. That doesn’t mean to say I have to applaud every advance in the field.”
recommended: 2, 3, 10, 12, 13
links:
How a forgotten physicist’s discovery broke the symmetry of the Universe
Salmon in the Loop (2023)
AI ‘companions’ promise to combat loneliness, but history shows the dangers of one-way relationships
Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It. Why Is This Widely Denied? (2017)
Patent Absurdity (2021)
links with excerpts:
"When I asked Rosemary why she left physics after that, without completing her PhD, I expected a difficult conversation, but her response was pragmatic. Living in a time of food rations, housing shortages and great sacrifice, and with no time-saving appliances or childcare for their three girls, she decided that it would be best for physics if Peter kept working. She would assist him with his work from home, keep the house and raise their children — and having made that decision, that is what she did.
Rosemary’s contribution has, over time and in various publications, often been attributed to her husband or to Powell. There seems to be no maliciousness about this — Powell was meticulous in acknowledging contributions. But it does seem to be a prime example of the ‘Matilda’ effect, the phenomenon that female scientists’ contributions are often overlooked or attributed to their male counterparts.
Rosemary is by no means the only one, even in this story. Powell won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950 for the discovery of the pion using the emulsion technique, while the contributions of the technique’s inventor, Austrian physicist Marietta Blau, were overlooked. Evidence for the pion also appeared in Nature papers by Indian physicist Bibha Choudhuri, published during the Second World War; her work is even less well known than Blau’s."
"A rosier forecast was embodied in what Yeoman called “adaptive masses,” a future in which the tourism marketplace responds wholesale to customers’ growing demands for ethicality. Maybe the incipient forces of degrowth and mandated sustainability that are taking hold in some over-touristed destinations become mainstream. Yeoman was optimistically adamant that this would be the eventual trajectory. After all, if tourism’s defining characteristic is its shape-shifting versatility, surely the right confluence of consumer demand and sage policy could twist the kaleidoscope until it settles on something better.
I explained my bleaker intuition that tourism’s history suggested a gathering momentum toward meaninglessness, in which the incurious and self-indulgent side of travel was given free rein, but then the professor interjected: “Can you imagine if we stopped going on holiday?”
Yeoman is an avowed science-fiction fan; he proposed another possible future. As artificial intelligence evolves, it could reach a point of “technological singularity,” wherein experiences within a digital metaverse are sensorially indistinguishable from reality. “It would be like the Holodeck in Star Trek,” he said."
🐟 Salmon in the Loop (2023)
"One of the most fascinating problems that a computer scientist may be lucky enough to encounter is a complex sociotechnical problem in a field going through the process of digital transformation. For me, that was fish counting. Recently, I worked as a consultant in a subdomain of environmental science focused on counting fish that pass through large hydroelectric dams. Through this overarching project, I learned about ways to coordinate and manage human-in-the-loop dataset production, as well as the complexities and vagaries of how to think about and share progress with stakeholders.
Let’s set the stage. Large hydroelectric dams are subject to Environmental Protection Act regulations through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). FERC is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates the transmission and wholesale sale of electricity across the United States. The commission has jurisdiction over a wide range of electric power activities and is responsible for issuing licenses and permits for the construction and operation of hydroelectric facilities, including dams. These licenses and permits ensure that hydroelectric facilities are safe and reliable, and that they do not have a negative impact on the environment or other stakeholders. In order to obtain a license or permit from FERC, hydroelectric dam operators must submit detailed plans and studies demonstrating that their facility meets regulations. This process typically involves extensive review and consultation with other agencies and stakeholders. If a hydroelectric facility is found to be in violation of any set standards, FERC is responsible for enforcing compliance with all applicable regulations via sanctions, fines, or lease termination--resulting in a loss of the right to generate power."
"We anticipated that phrases such as “spooky and enigmatic”, would be commonly used, but in fact these phrases occurred in only 23% of the talks. Additionally, when mentioning quantum technology, most scientists did their best to explain difficult concepts in quantum physics such as “superposition” or “quantum entanglement”, while non-scientists more often than not just introduced the topic without explanation.
However, we found that the risks associated with quantum technologies were widely omitted in public communication. Both scientists and non-scientists were happy to discuss the benefits of quantum technologies but were reluctant to say much about the downsides. Indeed, the positives were discussed some six times more than the negatives – 34% of talks framing quantum in a positive light while just 5% were negative."
"Next time you get a fine for speeding, I suggest you try the following line of defense. First, you explain to the judge that a speed limit of 50 km/h in densely populated areas is a convention. It could just as easily have been set at 51 km/h, or 49 km/h. There is no bright line at 50 km/h that prevents all accidents, because the number of deaths due to speeding is a continuous variable. Tell the judge that you believe it is better if drivers ignore speed limits, and instead drive in a thoughtful, open, and modest manner. Tell the judge that, surely, God loves 51 kilometers per hour nearly as much as 49 kilometers an hour. I strongly suspect the judge will roll their eyes, and instructs you to pay the fine.
And yet, when it comes to statistics, these are exactly the arguments statisticians bring forward to criticize current rules in science that exist to regulate when scientists can make claims based on tests. They will argue against dichotomous decisions, and in favor of being “thoughtful, open, and modest” (Wasserstein et al., 2019). Statisticians are like drivers. They deal with individual studies, like drivers deal with their own car. Driving one kilometer faster or slower feels like an arbitrary choice, just as how making a claim based on p < 0.06 or p < 0.04 is arbitrary for a statistician. And in the individual world of drivers and statisticians, there is no logical argument to treat driving 51 km/h at this time and on this street differently from driving 49 km/h.
Philosophers of science are like the government."
💑🏾 AI ‘companions’ promise to combat loneliness, but history shows the dangers of one-way relationships
"In his 1845 autobiography, Frederick Douglass described a tragic occasion when an enslaved man, asked about his situation, honestly replied that he was ill-treated. The plantation owner, confronted with testimony about the harm he was inflicting, sold the truth-teller down the river. Such cruelty, Douglass insisted, was the necessary penalty for someone who committed the sin “of telling the simple truth” to a man whose emotional calibration required constant reassurance.
To be clear, I am not evoking the emotional coercion that enslavement required in order to conflate lonely seniors with evil plantation owners, or worse still, to equate computer code with enslaved human beings. There is little danger that AI companions will courageously tell us truths that we would rather not hear. That is precisely the problem. My concern is not that people will harm sentient robots. I fear how humans will be damaged by the moral vacuum created when their primary social contacts are designed solely to serve the emotional needs of the “user.”"
"According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, addiction is “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.” However, that’s not what the epidemiology of the disorder suggests. By age 35, half of all people who qualified for active alcoholism or addiction diagnoses during their teens and 20s no longer do, according to a study of over 42,000 Americans in a sample designed to represent the adult population.
The average cocaine addiction lasts four years, the average marijuana addiction lasts six years, and the average alcohol addiction is resolved within 15 years. Heroin addictions tend to last as long as alcoholism, but prescription opioid problems, on average, last five years. In these large samples, which are drawn from the general population, only a quarter of people who recover have ever sought assistance in doing so (including via 12-step programs). This actually makes addictions the psychiatric disorder with the highest odds of recovery."
⚖️ Patent Absurdity (2021)
"If there is one legal issue that ought to be taught to all software engineers, it is, "Don't read patents!" I am sure that the company lawyer pointed out that had you not read the patent and violated it, the penalty would be much lower than if you had read the patent, and accidentally violated it. It is trivially easy to accidentally violate a software patent because, of course, lawyers write such patents to be overly broad, and thereby set traps for the unwary coder.
It is, alas, long past the moment when we could have avoided these problems by not allowing software patents at all, for, just like inviting a vampire into your home, once you invite in the lawyers, they will suck you dry. As we've seen over the past 30 years, the only people who profit from software patents are those who weaponize them for profit, and those who abet them (i.e., lawyers). The real value of software patents comes not from protecting the intellectual property of "the little guy"—a fictitious character devised by patent lawyers to justify their billable hours—but from being weaponized into portfolios that various large companies can use to manipulate both the market and their competitors."
"I live under its shadow. I suspect most of you do too. It is the great mountain of small things. Every year, it grows a little taller, a little more imposing, a little more daunting. The higher it gets, the bigger the shadow it casts: a malignant darkness that pervades our lives, one that becomes ever more difficult to breach. So much so that it has become the norm for many of us to live entirely in the gloom. We no longer ask why it has come to this, even though we barely glimpse the light that warmed us in the past. Here, we stand trembling, our energy for innovation sapped, our motivation to focus on research drained. Tell me, have you had a great thought lately? I rest my case. The mountain of small things makes transformative research far less likely to happen. It's shadow smothers our aspirations.
How has it grown so formidably, this mountain? I have, from time to time, trained my old set of binoculars to inspect its substance. The most curious thing is that where one might expect rocky outcrops or cascading waterfalls, there is instead paper, or its digital counterpart. Yes, the mountain is paperwork, sheafs and sheafs of it. Here, there are forms to fill, reports to write, statements of compliance with policy to sign, annual training to perform, appraisal documents to upload, research protocols and ethics applications to complete and much, much more. Once you have appreciated this, you understand why we can no longer cross the shadow’s edge: why the mountain of small things simply gets bigger and bigger over the years."
"In the age of machine learning, cryptocurrency mining, and seemingly infinite data storage capacity enabled by cloud computing, the environmental costs of ubiquitous computing in modern life are obscured by the sheer complexity of infrastructures and supply chains involved in even the simplest of digital transactions. How does computation contribute to the warming of the planet? As information technology (IT) capacity demands continue to trend upward, what are some of the ecological obstacles that must be overcome to accommodate an ever-expanding, carbon-hungry Cloud? How do these material impacts play out in everyday life, behind the scenes, where servers, fiber optic cables, and technicians facilitate cloud services? This case study draws on firsthand ethnographic research in data centers—sprawling libraries of computer servers that facilitate everything from email to commerce—to identify some of the far-reaching and tangled environmental impacts of computation and data-storage infrastructures. It surveys a range of empirical accounts of server technicians to illustrate on-the-ground examples of material and ecological factors that permeate everyday life in the Cloud. These examples include air conditioning and thermal management, water cycling, and the disposal of e-waste. By attending to the culture of workplace practice and the behaviors and training of technicians in data centers, this case study reveals that the Cloud is not fully automated, nor is it hyperrational; emotion, instinct, and human judgment are enlisted to keep servers running. This case study closes with a speculative vignette that scales up from various local impacts to a planetary framework, sketching some of the particular ways that computation contributes to climate change and the Anthropocene."
"Spring came late to much of the northern hemisphere in 1784. One reason we know this is because of records made by Robert Marsham of Stratton Strawless in Norfolk, England, in which he noted that his hawthorns began to leaf on April 22, fully two months later than in recent previous seasons, and the latest by far in all the forty-eight years he had been keeping records. The anomaly was due to an eruption of the Lakagígar volcanic fissure in Iceland that past June, which had led to a hot, cloudy summer followed by an extremely hard winter in much of Europe.
In 1736, while still in his twenties, Marsham embarked on his lifetime project of recording what he was to call his “Indications of Spring”. He noted down the dates of biological events related to the indigenous flora and fauna, and made more general observations too. During the exceptionally cold winter of 1739–40, for example, he wrote that many of his trees split apart and the urine froze in his chamber pot. In Norwich and surrounding areas, there were food riots “for which some were hang’d at ye next Assizes”. As a prominent landowner, Marsham served for much of his long life on local assizes juries, and, fearful of revolutions like those in America and France, played his part in handing down these harsh sentences.
Although most of his journals and letters have been lost over time, “Indications of Spring” has survived because, after a half-century of assiduous data entry, he presented his accumulated findings to the Royal Society. To Joseph Banks, the society’s president, Marsham wrote: “As I know of your boundless curiosity, I think it possible that an imperfect Calendar of some few articles of Spring, many years past, may afford you some amusement.” The calendar was published in the society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions, the following year as a tabulation on three foldout pages."
"So, what would the Anthropocene accomplished had it been approved? At the very outset, it is worth noting how strange it is that the Anthropocene was rejected by a popular vote. That is to say, the proposal was not necessarily rejected on the basis of ‘bad science.’ I have spoken to several members of the SQS in the run up to this vote. They acknowledge that the AWG put together a sound proposal from a scientific perspective which means that it included extensive accounts of rock sections that were sampled from across the Northern and Southern hemispheres analysed using techniques ranging from palaeontological to radio-isotopic. However, the SQS is not a purely scientific organisation. They do not simply fact-check or verify scientific truth-claims. Rather, they administer geological time and space: the past 2.58 million years of sedimentary accumulation on Earth, to be precise. Administering geological time requires more than scientific verification. It is also a legal process. Their task is constituted through interpretating evidence in such a way so as enforce normative practices of characterising the relationship between planetary time and space. They solicit testimony from sediments is subsequently verified by a committee who exercise an authority on the basis of presumed neutrality and soundness of judgement vis-à-vis existing precedent of decisions concerning previous amendments to the Geologic Time Scale.
This is a truth that is reflected in the manner with which the AWG went about their formalisation effort. On the one hand, it entailed translating artefacts into generalised truth claims. Material remnants of human activity, ranging from plastic bottles to discarded chicken bones, were cast on the register of geo-history: the palaeontological record that will appear as of obvious geological significance on the level of other Series/Epochs. It also involved an equally paradoxical translation of narrative into artefact. Nuclear weapons detonation has covered Earth in a blanket of plutonium, specifically, Pu239/240, which are otherwise incredibly rare in Earth’s rock record. To illustrate, consider a case that the AWG often cite in their advocacy for an Anthropocene Series/Epoch: dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite strike that sprinkled Earth’s surface with iridium, an element that appears practically nowhere else on Earth prior to that impact event. Pu239/240, in other words, provides a material correlate of a particular episode in human history. Significantly, for the purposes of the AWG, this example provided a way to pattern their proposal as consistent with the decision-making procedure that have characterised the formalisation of other units of the Geologic Time Scale (the appearance of iridium being a key component of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary)."
"Woodhull’s notorious reputation had not abated since 2020, so when it became clear I needed a second surgery, I wanted the best. To find it, I turned to Nancy’s Nook. But the surgeon I consulted with was booked out six months in advance. Waiting that long sounded like hell, so I ended up going with a surgeon who was available in six weeks. She was not on any fancy list—she even had some negative reviews on Google for her allegedly brusque nature—but she answered my many questions over Zoom, specialized in excision, and, most importantly, accepted my insurance. My copay would be $300. Compared to other surgeons who charge thousands for the same procedure, this affordability was almost unheard-of.
My impatience turned out to be for the best, as my surgeon determined I had DIE, that charming acronym. There was also another cyst on my right ovary, and my organs were stuck together by endo tissue like a bunch of melted candies that had been left in the car. I had “kissing ovaries,” a cute name for two organs that are meant to float on opposite sides of the body. She gave me some printout pictures of my insides, and the sight of all the tissue, lines of toffee-colored substance twisting around my organs, validated what had seemed so abstract.
After my diagnosis, I started frequenting endo forums, poring over studies, reading dozens of posts in Nancy’s Nook, and looking at the Instagram pages of providers like Sarrel and Vidali. I noticed that there was an almost dogmatic insistence on the importance of finding the best surgeon, and a belief that you could cure endometriosis if it was excised properly. Even more alarmingly, I realized that some of the people pushing this narrative in online communities were surgeons themselves. Vidali, for example, frequently posts videos where he asks people who the best endometriosis surgeon in the world is. They inevitably reply, “Dr. Vidali is the best endometriosis surgeon in the world!” While connecting with another patient online had helped me solve the puzzle of my own pain, the world of endo social media soon proved to be as uncomfortable as it was revelatory."