Propp found a fresh perspective in the early 2000s, when he and his colleagues discovered that the numbers in the Somos-4 sequence are actually counting something. The terms in the sequence correspond to structures found in certain graphs. For some graphs, it’s possible to pair up vertices (dots) with edges (lines) so that every vertex is connected to exactly one other vertex — there are no unpaired vertices, and no vertex connected to more than one edge. The terms in the Somos-4 sequence count the number of different perfect matchings for a particular sequence of graphs.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-astonishing-behavior-of-recursive-sequences-20231116/?mc_cid=6c5aee96fa&mc_eid=f83944a043
The astonishing degree to which unexpected patterns end up applying elsewhere really does suggest to me God’s sense of humor, like setting up a not-too-hard maze or scavenger hunt for little kids.
It is now firmly established that per square footage, both solar and wind resources require much more space than petroleum, and certainly much more than nuclear, to produce the same amount of energy. (I leave aside the fact that turbines and solar panels are ecologically costly to construct, and they cannot be recycled.) Climate change fighters often risk forgetting that the ultimate crisis facing the earth is not carbon emissions but eco-cide: the destruction of life, of the place and space of life. And for the sake of combatting the former, many fighters are willing to accept, or at least ignore, the utter desolation of the latter. I am not the only one to imagine the logical conclusion of that strategy: keep increasing in consumption, keep needing energy, and keep building solar panels and wind turbines until the whole earth is covered by them. That future seems all too plausible.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/01/petroleum-and-me/
A beautiful if melancholy reflection. I think that the future of climate change and energy is both far worse and better than we think – far worse because the backlash to what we currently think of as sustainable that turns out to be far from it, e.g., subjecting even the American West to rolling blackouts because we blow up our grid with too much electricity demand without acquiring new sources, and far better because we have the solutions to our energy problems – they’re just expensive and hard, and likely not any of the current options that are popular (cough, nuclear is the only feasible that we know of).
Rust was a big concern. Any exposed patches had to be brushed smooth, removing the surface oxidation before a layer of acrylic resin could be applied. And we aren’t talking about a few bits: there was rust in the interior of the bus, inside and outside the barrel stove, on the hood, and across the entire undercarriage. Compared with the graffiti preservation, Howard says, “removing corrosion underneath the bus was not delicate work, but it had to be very thorough.” The underside was coated with layers of mud dating back to the 1950s, and all that caked-on earth held moisture. Howard’s team spent ten days lying on their backs, clearing away dirt and rust with wire brushes before rolling the resin on.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/chris-mccandless-into-the-wild-bus-142-alaska/?scope=anon
There are layers of good stories in pretty much every place you look, or even little objects that cough up an interesting nuance. This one about a bus where Chris McCandless died, and its own backstory, is definitely worth a read to see how strange the last straggling bits of frontiers we have can be.
Our current estimate for the size of YouTube is 13.325 billion videos – we are now updating this number every few weeks at tubestats.org.
Once you’re collecting these random videos, other statistics are easy to calculate. We can look at how old our random videos are and calculate how fast YouTube is growing: we estimate that over 4 billion videos were posted to YouTube just in 2023. We can calculate the mean and median views per video, and show just how long the “long tail” is – videos with 10,000 or more views are roughly 4% of our data set, though they represent the lion’s share of views of the YouTube platform.
https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav
It’s arguable that we already produce far more content than even the 8 billion-plus people on the planet can consume (especially given many of those can’t even access such content). I find it more telling that we have to use the term “content”. Something in the term content conveys how little so much of what we’ve produced may matter at all – heck, digital may be far more ephemeral than paper at some point.
Over the next few months, as Esther Kutter, a graduate student studying with Nieder, analyzed the resulting data, she saw a clear pattern emerge — right around the number 4.
The data, which comprised 801 recordings of single neurons firing, showed two distinct neural signatures: one for small numbers and one for large. Above the number 4, the neurons’ firing for their preferred number grew progressively less precise, and they erroneously fired for numbers close to the preferred one. But for 4 and below, the neurons fired precisely — with the same small amount of error whether firing for one, two, three or four objects. The misfiring in response to other numbers was largely absent.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-human-brain-perceives-small-numbers-better-20231109/?mc_cid=095969a35a&mc_eid=f83944a043
Chunking and association are key components to keeping a ton of material memorized. I find it a bit facetious when people think memorization is pointless – the lag in grabbing your phone to research is always a bit more meaningful than people think plus we aren’t too far away from much info sources being suspect (if not there already).
What’s a critic to do when his subject has a billion in the bank, a servile fanbase, and an airtight preemption (“Haters gonna hate”)? I don’t know, but I cannot ignore the two shadows, one economic and the other aesthetic, which darken my admittedly limited experience with Taylor Swift. Artists have always needed money to do what they do; artists have always needed patrons. But modern production brings something more dishonest into play. In popular music culture, signaling often occurs at a superficial level—the lyrics, chord structures, rhythms, poses, glances, costumes, even the conventional address to the fans (“I love you guys!”). Convenience renders the product hypersalable and therefore remunerative; it’s far easier to buy industrial baloney than the true mortadella. When it seems that every song, every choreographed move, every gesture, every coy expression leveled at the jumbotron camera is literally calculated for a return, I begin to feel put upon, the enchantment cracks, and I’m less willing to allow the performance to affect me. My emotional defenses are raised; the “human” moments, and there were a few, run into the wall of my incredulity and I even start to question the reality of the music. The Eras Tour™ represents the pinnacle of a corporate-artistic complex. The product is synthetic inspiration.
https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/swift-going
The tired endlessly repetitive arcs of famous people going from the latest thing to tired to reinvention to the villain are about as predictable as sports leagues’ latest scrappy underdogs finally becoming the villains, e.g., the Chiefs from 2018 to their most recent Super Bowl win. I feel very old-mannish when I admit I don’t get the level of dislike or even adulation Taylor Swift gets, however, her talent/savvy is undeniable, so for that, kudos.
Localists don’t have to be nostalgic conservatives, but they often are, for the simple reason mentioned above. That people in the past lived more locally seems pretty indisputable, at least as a generalization. But we ought to think in more detail about whether and in what ways those more local lives were also better lives. Wendell Berry frequently insists on “a full accounting.” Most “progress,” he points out, seems like progress only when we leave out the costs. Surely the same must be true of the past. The past will always look better than the present to a critic of progress, because the past is where the latest costs of progress haven’t yet been felt. Well, the past needs a full accounting too. Localists, who rightly look to the past because it was more local, need not and should not look past the bad parts of those more local lives in order to show that smaller is better. If we cut the past up and use the parts we keep to win arguments, we end up with arguments full of holes. We either hold the past together, or our politics falls apart.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/01/localism-without-nostalgia/
The past is important – remembering it is even more critical. Repeating it is rarely good. You ideally want to preserve what was worth preserving, but sadly, due to human nature and our relatively small scope of intelligence, we truly find it difficult to dissociate the good from the bad and thus end up creating entirely new problems when we ditch both.
In many mammals, large areas of the cerebellum are devoted to processing sensory and motor information for parts of the body that are particularly dexterous and used in exploration: the snout in rodents, the hands in primates, the tip of the tail in arboreal monkeys.
Across animals, the cerebellum seems to be involved in both motion and sensory perception, and intriguingly, seems to be particularly enlarged in animals that use echolocation or electrosensing in the water, for spatial awareness of object locations in all directions.
This is suggestive of something like “spatial world modeling” going on in the cerebellum, and is consistent with the theory that the cerebellum’s job is anticipation and preparation.
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/what-does-the-cerebellum-do-anyway?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav
In another example of our tendency toward oversimplification and struggle to balance many concepts, an increasingly safe rule of thumb is that few body parts are for limited uses – multiple uses/optionality seems to be the primary guiding goal of all evolutionary processes.
There was no place for the bison in the vision of shared life that many of the settlers brought to the plains. To the strains of the trademark Ken Burns fiddles, a percipient buffalo hunter’s voiceover speaks from the past, justifying the foreseen extinction with a vision of what would arise in its place: towns, schools, beef cattle. It is a vision to stir the heart. But the long, grim catalogue of treachery and starvation did not only despoil this country’s native peoples. It robbed each and every American now living of the America that could have been, now almost impossible to see even through conjecture. Instead of the uneasy and largely separate status quo between a dominant majority and the marginal survivors of a thoroughly lawless expansionism, which compelled its targets by hook and crook to take up smaller and smaller territories while mounting sustained assaults on their languages, traditions, families, pieties, and food systems, imagine an America that was the organic product of different peoples—communities with truly different ways of life—learning from each other, negotiating with and accommodating each other, doubtless clashing violently with each other at times, but also integrating with and building around each other in unpredictable ways over the span of an enormous continent.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/where-the-buffalo-roamed
Bring back the bison, especially as the world rewilds and the coming demographic crisis means the wild things are going to come back anyway.
The key takeaway from the success of this approach is that safety improvements are best achieved when an honest mistake is treated as such, regardless of the consequences. This principle underpins what is known in several advanced industries as the “just culture” concept. A just organizational culture recognizes that a high level of operational safety can be achieved only when the root causes of human error are examined; who made a mistake is far less important than why it was made.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/why-you-ve-never-been-in-a-plane-crash?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav
We want to divide things into good/bad. It is extremely tempting these days given the state of our governance and elected leaders to also want to blame and shame and, for example, send all the people that inflicted the idiocy of lockdowns on us, condemning millions to misery and poverty and lonely deaths to jail or worse, ideally. But as the Supreme Court is currently debating, how do we separate the role and the person from the consequences if they are not clearly spelled out? How do we account for human fallibility? We cannot punish indiscriminately, for otherwise, no one would take any type of leadership job.
We must give sensuality and erotic desire up to holiness. But if we do, it is returned to us whole and entire, reflected in the light of divine Beauty who calls us ecstatically out of ourselves towards the transcendent (and, thus, however, counter-intuitively) more toward the essence of who we truly are. Perhaps we ought to be more like Alyosha, the young monk from The Brothers Karamazov, who gazes upon the sky, “full of quiet, shining stars” in the “fresh and quiet” night of a “luxuriant autumn,” and throws himself upon the dirt of the earth in an act of profound gratitude. “He did not know why he was embracing it,” Dostoevsky writes, “he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages.”
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/desiring-beauty-the-st-margaret-of-scotland-annual-lecture/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=285271023&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8AmeEiFORjIgxaZSmgHTxPpkTeiyaxGNaz7KWLuCoPHPl1OyUfmYeTjKIiv6R1lAN2yCuDHdHxBs-iQcBuNVJJL2uy0kySPZb7Xd2L1q3HZtWp3N8&utm_content=285271023&utm_source=hs_email
We thirst for beauty in an age of mass production and safety in dullness; we will likely break many things in rebelling against the wrong things before we realize we are breaking too much.
I think Ello’s pretty neat, and I want them to succeed.
Like I said in my post, more experimentation with online communities is a very good thing. We’ll only break away from the dominant players by trying new crazy shit, and I think it should be applauded. (And, yes, I even like the design.)
But I think taking VC was a bad idea that works against their ethos, and will inevitably lead to a much larger Series A by year’s end.
I think the intentions of the team are pure, and they genuinely believe in what they’re building. But I’m not sure intentions matter unless they can wean themselves off outside funding.
I really, really hope their revenue plan works out, and quickly.
https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav
We are still figuring out how to align incentives with scalability with preservation of certain desirable traits like open-source, lack of ads, etc.
