Linklist: May 18, 2023
couple things:
do pardon the long gap
highly recommend articles 6, 7, 9, 13, 14
Links (links with excerpts below):
How anti-fatness crept into the environmental sustainability movement
The Madness in our Methods: The crash of Germanwings flight 9525 and our broken aeromedical system
'I can't change my body structure. Everybody is not going to be slim'
Nuclear energy: Not a Faustian bargain, but a near-perfect providential gift
When ‘self-correction’ meets power in the quest to uphold scientific integrity
"“The fat body is seen as evidence of food system failure,” said Virgie Tovar, a fat activist and writer. “People who are perceived as ‘hurting the planet’ become vilified and, when it comes to higher weight people, there’s already this bigotry in place that says fatness is about excess and is about overconsumption that is largely about an immoral relationship to food and food systems.”
Tovar and many other experts say that much of the way fatness is popularly conceived stems from a reliance on the body mass index (BMI) measurement system."
✈️ The Madness in our Methods: The crash of Germanwings flight 9525 and our broken aeromedical system
"On the 24th of March 2015, an Airbus A320 flying for low-cost carrier Germanwings stopped responding to air traffic control, entered a steep but steady descent, and impacted a mountainside in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. As investigators hurried to the scene of one of the worst disasters in the history of German aviation, they could not have imagined the horror of what they would learn just hours later, as they sat listening to the cockpit voice recorder for the first time. It all unfolded in the last ten minutes: in a shocking turn of events, the First Officer locked the Captain out of the cockpit, instructed the autopilot to descend to 100 feet, and then watched his plane fly into the ground as the Captain beat on the door with a crowbar and passengers screamed in terror.
The horrific discovery left investigators wondering: how could an airline pilot commit an act of such evil? And could he have been stopped? But eight years after the infamous mass murder-suicide, the industry is still at risk of taking away the wrong lessons. First Officer Andreas Lubitz hid his psychotic depression from his employer until he snapped, but instead of enacting broader exceptions to medical confidentiality, the real solution might be something completely different: to loosen, rather than tighten, the rules surrounding mental fitness to fly. As contradictory as it sounds, a deeper look at the system of aeromedical certification reveals a vindictive process that is so fundamentally broken that it destroys the careers of healthy pilots, engenders a culture of deceit, and — if not radically reformed — risks guaranteeing that the next Andreas Lubitz will also escape detection."
"Rahkeem Cornwall is routinely written about as the heaviest person to have played international cricket, and could be thought of as one of the anomalies King describes above. Cornwall, who says he comes from a family of "big-boned" people, was a sporty child who played cricket and football. He gave up the latter when he was contracted by Leeward Islands as a bowler at 20. Between December 2014 and July 2019, he played 55 first-class matches, took 260 wickets at 23.90, including 17 five-fors, and scored 2224 runs, with one century and 13 fifties. In the 2018-19 WICB regional four-day tournament, Cornwall was the leading wicket-taker, with 54 wickets at 17.68. He made his Test debut later that year and in his second Test took a ten-for. "It was such a special moment for me," he recalls. "I put in a lot of work before the series and then the results come in."
But even before Cornwall played his third Test, West Indian spin legend Lance Gibbs asked on the Mason & Guest podcast how Cornwall could only "take two steps and bowl", and questioned his rhythm. The likes of Kenny Benjamin and Curtly Ambrose came to Cornwall's defence. Cornwall, who has never had a problem with his own body, found himself having to think about how other people judged it. "I can't change my body structure. I can't say that I'm too tall or too big. Everybody is not going to be short, everybody is not going to be slim. All I can do is go out there, back myself and show my skill.""
"This complete reproduction of Elizabeth Twining’s two-volume catalog from 1868, Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants was reproduced in its entirety and enhanced with interactive descriptions, diagrams, and posters. Each of the 160 illustrations was restored from the original scans to be as colorful as the plants they depict, which involved carefully adjusting the colors and cleaning up spotting and other other markings on the scans to produce clean images without altering the underlying original illustrations. After restoration, every plant that was referenced in the original illustrations’ legends was carefully outlined to create hotspots that correspond with the accompanying descriptions. This process alone took one to four hours per image and the entire project took four months to complete."
"What became apparent from discussions in London is that the nuclear community seems bent on making its product ever more esoteric—kind of a fantasyland, where 200 years of mundane engineering experience and judgment seem out of place. In the 1970s, New Age gurus from Baba Ram Dass to Margaret Mead told young people that their elders had not experienced the coming age, did not understand it, and therefore could not advise them on how to live in it. Experience in the dying age was declared inapplicable to the New World.
At the same time, nuclear gurus were applying the same philosophy to the Nuclear Age. Alvin Weinberg, longtime senior spokesman from Oak Ridge, did not invent this idea, but in 1971 he approvingly characterized nuclear energy as a “Faustian bargain”— a miraculous gift, but with the devil to pay if we slip up. 2 I was in Oak Ridge not long before he died, and when he heard I was there, he asked me to come to his house. He urged me to carry that message onward. “You people in Admiral Rickover’s group understand the absolute necessity for unprecedented excellence. To keep nuclear technology from slipping inexorably into mediocrity, we need to keep the Faustian threat alive.” I told him I agreed fully with the importance of maintaining the highest quality control, but that is justified on its merits and does not need support from a demonstrably false threat of a public catastrophe. Despite my respect for Weinberg’s technical wisdom and leadership in the development of reactor technology, I firmly believe that applying the Faustian myth to nuclear technology has done great harm to the field."
"Toward the end of August 1924, the orbits of Mars and Earth carried the two sister planets closer to each other than they had been in around a century. Enthusiasm for the event spread across the United States. An article in the New York Times anticipated that astronomers “may definitively solve the question whether Mars is inhabited.” The government requested five minutes of complete radio silence, on the hour every hour, across the nation over the days when the planets were closest to one another, with the hope that this radio silence would increase our chance of detecting any signals broadcast by Martians.
No message came.
As long as we have looked toward worlds that might be among the stars, we have hoped for and assumed life would be on them. Disappointment and shock greeted the news that there was no observable life revealed by the first images of the surface of Mars. Since then, we have grown accustomed to images of other barren worlds in the decades.
But could we recognize life if it is really out there? We are embedded in a living world, yet we do not even recognize all the life on our own Earth."
"Murakami, who grew up on the outskirts of Kobe, helped his parents move to Kyoto after the earthquake destroyed their home. In an essay for Granta, he reflects on the quake and the gas attack: “To me, the two events weren’t separate and discrete; unravelling one might help unravel the other. This was simultaneously a physical and a psychological issue. … And I had to create my own sort of corridor connecting the two.” It is no great leap to hear that desire of the author’s reflected in the coda to the final story, “honey pie.” Here, the character Junpei thinks, “I want to write stories that are different from the ones I’ve written so far.”
In fact, all of ATQ’s stories are suffused with Junpei’s desire: a hunger for fiction that can offer alternatives to the cycle of violence and revenge, within which characters remain trapped. How, Murakami asks, can community after the quake be structured around self-reflection rather than cruelty?"
"Welcome to the necrobiome, the ecosystem of carcasses. In the necrobiome, dead matter is not inert—it is a base unit of life: Carrion beetles pilfer, maggots feast, seeds scatter, raccoons scavenge, vultures peck, and microbes bloom. “If you zoom in to the microbial level, life is exploding. It’s multiplying, it’s diversifying,” Jeffery Tomberlin, a professor in entomology at Texas A&M, told me. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
But our understanding of decomposition largely comes from single-carcass studies. Those fundamental dynamics, experts warn, might collapse under the sudden appearance of a thousand times more carrion than an ecosystem is designed to recycle—as in the case of a mass mortality event. That could lead to carcasses mummifying instead of breaking down, pathogens seeping into an ecosystem’s soil and water, and oxygen-starved dead zones. Hypothetically, not certainly. When it comes to mass mortality events, Harley said, “there’s a lot of blank areas on our ecological map.”"
"RR: One aim of the laboratory chemist is to make specific molecules, to engineer substances with desired properties. For them, it’s also internal: the practice is the method, as I said. There is a goal and one does not think in terms of whether it is a discipline or whether it is a bunch of methods. What happens as a part of your training is learning the important questions that need to be asked. For the chemist there are certain types of questions that are paramount, one of which can be paraphrased as follows: Given a molecule or given a property that is required (or desired) the aim of the practical scientist is ‘Can I achieve that particular property?’ Take, for example, LEDs that emit white light, or LEDs that emit red or green light. So one might want, say, a blue LED, and one can do this in many different ways. The chemist would approach the objective thinking ‘Can I make a molecule that would emit blue?’ Whereas a physicist might turn around and say, ‘Can I put enough pressure or can I somehow change the physical conditions of the system so that I can achieve the same thing?’ Meaning, the chemist would be led automatically to achieve his/her engineering of the situation by changing the molecule that they are playing around with, whereas the physicist might be more inclined to change the conditions around which the thing is operating. Of course, that distinction is blurred because today you have to ask what the material scientist is doing, and that person might like to do both. Another caricatured kind of thinking that guides, let’s say, the practical chemist is the manner in which drugs are designed. If one came up with a molecule, let us say, that could kill the flu virus, and you know that the SARS virus is similar in shape, so the chemist might start by changing the molecule around, change its shape, or what have you, and see if it can kill the SARS virus."
"It’s easy to assume that all problems are like this, but they’re not. Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters. Like music, for instance. You listen to the stuff you like the most and ignore the rest. When your favorite band releases a new album, you go “yippee!” When a band you’ve never heard of and wouldn’t like anyway releases a new album, you go…nothing at all, you don’t even know it’s happened. At worst, bad music makes it a little harder for you to find good music, or it annoys you by being played on the radio in the grocery store while you’re trying to buy your beetle-free asparagus. Because music is a strong-link problem, it would be a big mistake to have an FDA for music."
"Debates in the scientific community over misconduct or the “reproducibility crisis” are often retorted by arguments that ultimately “science corrects itself.” The whole scientific publishing enterprise relies on a high degree of trust that the various parties involved – authors, reviewers, editors – act in good faith, and when breaches happen they are eventually picked up by the scientific community. To unveil potential breaches of such trust can be a highly contentious and risky proposition, particularly when involving an eminent scientist at the very top of academia. There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the sterling record of such individuals and the institutions that anchor their success, because to call into question their previously celebrated accomplishments is to make everyone look bad. Add to this a high degree of influence over a large number of research careers and a significant scientific-commercial footprint, and the stakes are very high for many people. The canonical belief in self-correction therefore cannot obscure the fact that power arguably plays a major role in the currently spontaneous processes of review, reporting, and correction that address issues of scientific integrity."
"Language, famously, falls short: not only when inhabiting the perceptive psyche of a coconut but when inhabiting any felt experience, even or especially one’s own. It’s a painful rift between life and one’s description of it, the attempted bridging of which is the focus of a great deal of literature. This failure to describe and tendency to project isn’t typically an ethical question—is fiction, for example, not always a projection?—but through the lens of eco-criticism, it sometimes becomes one. Shading the mysteries of animal or plant consciousness with our own glee or sadness isn’t just sloppy writing; it’s a symptom of the same human-centeredness that’s responsible for the changing climate.
Why do writers anthropomorphize? And why, when I sit and behold, say, waves crashing (and why crashing?) do I feel a calm quieting of my ego—until I reach to describe that calm and can only find man-made junk, sentences gunked-up as with microplastics? (“The sea whispered in your ear,” Comitta writes. “The sea thundered like avalanches. The sea was dead silent. The sea hissed like sandpaper working on wood. The sea clinked like small change in a pocket. At its worst, the sea sounded like ghosts vomiting.”)"
"Large language models such as ChatGPT process and generate text sequences by first splitting the text into smaller units called tokens. In the image below, each colored block represents a unique token. Short or common words such as “you”, “say”, “loud”, and “always” are its own token, whereas longer or less common words such as “atrocious”, “precocious”, and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” are broken into smaller subwords.
This process of tokenization is not uniform across languages, leading to disparities in the number of tokens produced for equivalent expressions in different languages. For example, a sentence in Burmese or Amharic may require 10x more tokens than a similar message in English."