Linklist: November 12, 2023
Recommended: 2, 13, 14, 15
Links (links with excerpts below):
‘No easy answer’: the endangered owls that can only be saved by killing other owls
Exploring the space-time-stench continuum, where no nose has gone before (2021)
Sikkim Floods: How Do We Measure Non-Economic Loss And Damage?
Trying to make sense of why Otis exploded en route to Acapulco this week
A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time. Here's what it's like in a world without it
"It’s hard to say which part of the interview set me off. Was it that she had no problem with the 5k? That the Park Service had made no plans to use Sunday’s bleak milestone to educate visitors about the dangers of climate change and what we can all do to try to combat them? That instead they were encouraging people to risk their lives in what might be record-breaking heat? Or was it the fact that she’d never heard of what the Park Service had done to the Timbisha Shoshone while they were away for the summer? She had only been on the job for six months; maybe her bosses were to blame for not ensuring the staff knew the history of the park. Still, she seemed more interested in talking about preserving historic ranger housing and mining sites than the park’s historical and contemporary problems.
By the end of the conversation, I was convinced that the Park Service had turned Death Valley into a kind of junk food for heat tourists. Their mission to be stewards of the land seemed like a joke in the face of the slow violence of all the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere from the park’s air-conditioned cars and hotel rooms each summer. (Note: Only 30% of the power for Xanterra’s properties in Death Valley, possibly the sunniest place in the world, comes from solar energy.) It also didn’t help that when I left the interview, an ambulance wailed by, presumably racing to save yet another unnecessary victim of heat stroke.
This is when I started to plan my protest."
"The woes of the northern spotted owl began with widespread logging last century in Oregon and California which has since wiped out swathes of old-growth forest, the bird’s natural habitat. Today, a mere 15% of the original habitat of the northern spotted owl remains, with the result that there has been a devastating drop in numbers of the species.
Worse was to follow, however. In areas where northern spotted owls managed to cling on, a new threat arrived in the form of barred owls, which have been spreading across the United States over the past few decades and which have proved to be a more adaptable, successful species.
“Barred owls are very confident and aggressive,” said Heim “They eat all sorts of food and are bigger than northern spotted owls. They are a bit of a bully really. On the other hand, they are also beautiful birds and it is not their fault that they are so successful.”"
"Credulous, breathless coverage of “AI existential risk” (abbreviated “x-risk”) has reached the mainstream. Who could have foreseen that the smallcaps onomatopoeia “ꜰᴏᴏᴍ” — both evocative of and directly derived from children’s cartoons — might show up uncritically in the New Yorker? More than ever, the public discourse about AI and its risks, and about what can or should be done about those risks, is horrendously muddled, conflating speculative future danger with real present-day harms, and, on the technical front, confusing large, “intelligence-approximating” models with algorithmic and statistical decision-making systems.
What, then, are the stakes of progress in AI?"
"You might not think there’s much to smell in space — but, according to the odor lab’s manager, Susana Tapia-Harper, space missions are known for getting pretty ripe.
“Especially space vehicles that have been in use for a long period of time, and that don’t get a lot of fresh air over that time,” she said, “there have been reports that those kind of smell like locker rooms.”
Astronaut Scott Kelly once said that the International Space Station smelled remarkably similar to a jail he once toured — featuring similar “combinations of antiseptic, garbage, and body odor.”"
"The point seems to be, as the authors explain in the following sentence, that life and its evolution may obviously not break any laws of physics, yet cannot be predicted by these laws alone either. I think that's essentially correct although some of my more reductionist colleagues would probably take issue with it. Read Stuart Kauffman's excellent "Investigations" or our follow-up paper on this exact topic, if you want some detailed arguments on the point.
Next: does selection really explain why some things exist while some do not? Well, we can quibble about that. There is certainly a lot more to adaptive evolution than just selection. Even Darwin knew that. Again, this is oversimplified and vague, just like the following sentence, which formulates the aim of the paper as comprehending "how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint." Arguably, that's exactly what existing evolutionary theory already does, and while this paper may add an original perspective to the problems of innovation and complexification, it certainly is not the first approach to ever tackle these questions. A bit more sensitivity and charity towards preexisting efforts would definitely have been beneficial here."
"The economic impact of the latest Himalayan tsunami is likely to be in billions of dollars based on the reports of the destruction of infrastructure like dams, bridges, roads, houses, vehicles, farms, and businesses.
However, there are unquantifiable losses and damages also known as non-economic loss and damage (NELD) which include loss of lives and livelihoods, degradation of territory, farmland, cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge, societal and cultural identity, biodiversity, and ecosystem services that are critical for survival and social development of local communities."
"On March 29, 2013 we captured an adult buck (he had his first set of antlers in autumn 2012) on the Bald Eagle State Forest. We slapped a GPS collar and some ear tags on him and number 8917 was born. We followed him through 2 hunting seasons. So how did he do it?
The map below shows all 2,570 locations we collected on him during 2013. Every 7 hours from 3/29/2013 through 9/30/2013, every 3 hours from 10/1/2013 through 11/16/2013, and every 20 minutes during the rifle season (11/25/2013-12/8/2015).
The general pattern you see here is typical of bucks. There is a concentration of points (that solid blue mass in the center) where he spends most of his time throughout the year. However, you can see lots of outlier movements that, as you probably guessed, occurred during the rut.
However, I put a black circle around a location he visited to the north. This was not a rut movement. It occurred in June. But we’ll come back to that later."
"Some years back, in 2004, my father had written a letter to my brother saying that if he or my mother were to get “very sick,” neither would want extraordinary measures taken to keep them alive. “We want to live only if we have a meaningful life,” he wrote. In keeping with my father’s directive, formulated when he was “of sound mind,” my brother said we should stop the IV fluids and let my father die peacefully.
I had misgivings. It was true that life in a state of dementia would not have seemed meaningful to my father in 2004. The scientist in him would not have wanted to live without an intellectual existence.
But despite his weakened state, my father didn’t seem unhappy. Over the course of his illness, he’d never expressed a sincere wish to die. What was meaningful to my father in 2004 was very different from what had become meaningful to him in the past few months, when watching TV, spending time with his caregiver and children, and even just eating a spoonful of ice cream had clearly given him genuine pleasure."
"But the seeds of confusion were now already sown. If the (realistically-interpreted) wavefunction starts out ‘distributed in space’ and ends up at a single point then it is presumed to ‘collapse’. Whilst it is possible to find references to an equivalent phrase – the ‘reduction of the wave packet’ – in Heisenberg’s 1929 Chicago lectures, this is used to critique a purely wave description. The ‘collapse of the wavefunction’ was never part of the Copenhagen interpretation because the wavefunction isn’t interpreted realistically. The only thing that happens when an electron is detected on a screen in the context of Copenhagen is that we gain knowledge of the position of the electron.
The collapse of the wavefunction is more appropriately associated with John von Neumann’s quantum theory of measurement, included in his text Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, first published (in German) in 1932, although von Neumann doesn’t actually use this phrase. Instead he distinguishes two kinds of quantum process. Process 2 is the smooth, continuous evolution of a quantum system as described by quantum mechanics. Process 1 is the discontinuous ‘projection’ of the system into a single measurement outcome (such as a single spot on the screen). At the moment of measurement, von Neumann postulates that we abandon process 2 in favour of process 1."
"The typical satellite-derived intensity values often used to “proxy” intensity of storms that are far away from reconnaissance flights failed in this case to grasp how intense Otis was. In other words, Otis intensified so quickly that it basically outran the ability to measure how intense it actually was.
Here was the raw model output for Otis from Tuesday morning. This is what general weather forecasters would use to assess what the models assume will happen with a storm’s wind forecast. The dashed line is what actually occurred."
"How did Sam and Caroline get into taking high doses of ADHD medication? We think it was via Scott Alexander Siskind, the psychiatrist behind the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex.
Siskind occasionally writes up particular psychiatric drugs as public education. One popular piece was “Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” from December 28, 2017. [Slate Star Codex]
Siskind starts by discussing how quite a lot of his patients seek out Adderall to make them better at working in finance. He then claims that Adderall helps with concentration for finance whether you have ADHD or not.
He goes on to name a specific rationalist, Kelsey Piper of Vox — the journalist that Sam later shot his mouth off to — as someone who really should have gotten onto Adderall for greatest effectiveness in her altruism: “by my calculations, that decreased Kelsey’s effectiveness by 20%, thus costing approximately 54 billion lives.” Yeah, rationalists really do say that sort of thing as if it’s normal."
"I had fallen in love with the viola as an elementary school student. Over many hours of private lessons, orchestra rehearsals and practice, I’d built my career as a professional musician. That the many years I’d spent honing my skill as a musician could vanish in a month terrified me.
Whether we’re managing a demanding career, caring for children, or both, most of us have dreamt of not being bound to the metaphorical hourglass through which our day seems to slip. But what we actually want is more time, not the absence of time altogether. Being unaware of the passage of time felt like being trapped in a single chaotic moment that never ends. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been sick for, when my caretakers would bring me dinner, or how long my recovery might take. Without a sense of time, seconds stretched indefinitely into the future. When I asked my caretakers for food or coffee, they seemed to disappear for hours before they returned."
"We humans have had the effrontery, the hubris to think of ourselves as at the centre of the universe and the summit, even the endpoint, of evolution, but in reality we are the creation of genes, genes who are not interested in us. “We are,” as Breivik puts it, “the genes’ means of transportation—their vehicles.” Cancer arises because of how we are divided into stem and somatic cells: our bodies are “temporary cell colonies” (with the emphasis on temporary) designed by genes to reproduce and pass on the genes in stem cells. Once we have reproduced we are no use to our genes, and they have programmed our cells and us to die. All the cells in our body are evolving towards cancer cells.
Breivik works on immunotherapy and describes what has been called “the universal cancer vaccine” that activates T cells to kill almost any type of cancer cells. All types of cancer treatment—radiation, chemotherapy, surgery, or immunotherapy—are about killing cells, and, as Breivik writes, “If we just continue to kill cancer cells, we will, sooner or later, end up killing ourselves.”"
“In 2018, two American development economists, Paul Gertler and Sebastian Galiani, started a randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed at “improving revenue collection efficiency” on the debt that property owners owed on these water connection loans in Kayole-Soweto. Their argument: the problem with water supply in Kayole-Soweto isn’t any of the problems that we described above. The problem is simply that property owners aren’t paying their water bills, thus undermining Nairobi Water Company’s revenue and preventing them from supplying water. (Our finding was the exact reverse: many people stopped making payments on their connection loans out of frustration at water that flowed only a few hours one day per week, if at all.)
…
In this case, the economists, working with Nairobi Water Company and the World Bank, identified customers who were behind on their water connection loan payments, divided these randomly into treatment and control groups, and disconnected the water at treatment properties, but not at control properties. They found that disconnecting people’s water had a large positive impact on repayment rates (as one person put it during the Twitter controversy: “uh, duh?”). This is rigorous proof, they argue, that water disconnections can help improve a water utility’s revenue enforcement. The authors of this experiment don’t mention the myriad problems with Nairobi Water Company or with Nairobi’s water system more generally.”