May 2017 Media Thread

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It's a disappointment the game is not "Torture vs Dust specks 3".

Ten Pitfalls of Community Accountability Processes

https://crimethinc.com/2013/04/17/accounting-for-ourselves-breaking-the-impasse-around-assault-and-abuse-in-anarchist-scenes

Producing fertilizer from air, using a plasma from a jacobs ladder.

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-fertilizer-air-efficient.html

"In his experiments the GA reactor in particular appeared to be the most suited to producing nitrogen oxides. In this reactor, under atmospheric pressure, a plasma-front (a kind of mini lightning bolt) glides between two diverging metal surfaces, starting with a small opening (2 mm) to a width of 5 centimeters. This expansion causes the plasma to cool to room temperature. During the trajectory of the 'lightning', the nitrogen (N2) and oxygen (O2) molecules react in the immediate vicinity of the lightning front to nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2)."

"Patil optimized this reactor and at a volume of 6 liters per minute managed to achieve an energy consumption level of 2.8 MJ/mole, quite an improvement on the commercially developed methods that use approximately 0.5 MJ/mole. With the theoretical minimum of Patil's reactor, however, being that much lower (0.1 MJ/mole), in the long term this plasma technique could be an energy-efficient alternative to the current energy-devouring ammonia and nitrate production. An added benefit is that Patil's method requires no extra raw materials and production can be generated on a small scale using renewable energy, making his technique ideally suited for application in remote areas that have no access to power grids, such as parts of Africa, for instance."

A $7,500 College Degree in 12 Months?

http://www.millionaireeducator.com/2016/03/a-7500-college-degree-in-12-months.html

"you can earn college credits via testing! Of course, colleges prefer that you never learn of this option because it’s not in their best interest to have students graduating early. The most common credit by exam options are: CLEP and DSST. As for credit hours, CLEP exams offer from 3 to 12 hours of credit while DSST exams are worth 3 credit hours each. Both exams cost $80 per test and can be taken at testing centers around the world. There is usually a $20 fee to take the exam, so budget $100 per exam. This is a key point: CLEP and DSST exams are vital to any degree hack."

"“The problem is that many dietitians around the world are telling people to have wholegrain bread when most wholegrain bread is roughly comparable to eating a bag of glucose.”

http://scepticalnutritionist.com.au/?p=1069#pq=zazP51

Discriminating between carbohydrate-rich foods: A model based on nutrient density and glycaemic index

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1747-0080.2012.01590.x/full

pushing for womens egg storage may also decrease costs for cryopreservation

For All the Single Ladies Not Ready to Have Babies, Here’s an Option

http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/for-all-the-single-ladies-not-ready-to-have-babies-heres-an-option-20170512

"egg freezing can cost up to $18,000, and storing the eggs can amount to an additional $1,000 per year. However, some fertility companies offer financing packages with low monthly payments."

Way More Americans May Be Atheists Than We Thought

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/way-more-americans-may-be-atheists-than-we-thought/

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/edzda

Student Loan Subsidies Cause Almost All of the Increase in Tuition

https://www.nber.org/chapters/c13711.pdf

article:

https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost-all-of-the-increase-in-tuition/

"With all factors present, net tuition increases from $6,100 to $12,559. As column 4 demonstrates, the demand shocks — which consist mostly of changes in financial aid — account for the lion’s share of the higher tuition."

"Remarkably, so much of the subsidy is translated into higher tuition that enrollment doesn’t increase! What does happen is that students take on more debt, which many of them can’t pay."

Mars human base may require more robots than possible to 3D print there. "In the following figure, I plot a hypothetical trajectory of a population from exploration/outpost phase to full self-sufficiency assuming limited cargo transfer capability. But every machine and human on Mars represents a future liability for the replacement of that machine and feeding of that human, a liability which has to be fully priced into the future. Scaling more quickly that technology and shipping capacity can support guarantees a point in the near future when those liabilities come due, machinery and local industrial capacity undergoes dramatic collapse, and everyone dies of suffocation."

"We have seen that a labor-cost focused approach, normalized by the requirement of "self sufficiency, ASAP", has illuminated the importance of understanding the relative cost of transportation, human labor, maintenance, and robotic labor."

http://caseyexaustralia.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-roadmap-to-industrially-self.html?m=1

Leakey gut syndrome, and autism markers

http://questioning-answers.blogspot.com/2017/05/welcoming-zonulin-into-autism-research.html

and what you eat may not have as much of an effect on your metabolism as compared to how you process sugars.

http://www.aurametrix.com/blog/let-those-who-never-smelled-bad-cast-the-first-stone

Could Parasites Be Causing Prostate Cancer?

http://thescopepopculturescience.blogspot.com/2017/05/could-parasites-be-causing-prostate.html

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pros.23362/abstract;jsessionid=25D630B3FB2A79729C84655F3DAA78DF.f04t02

ooh, an update on all the Toxo databases out there

Genomics of apicomplexan parasites.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28276701?dopt=Abstract#

and an apicomplexan news aggregator

http://www.thesynapticleap.org/aggregator/sources/18?page=2

Quantum entangled states just got more stable, and readable...

Quantum entanglement between a single photon and a trillion rubidium atoms

"The entanglement in the real and momentum space, described in the Optica article, can be used jointly with other well-known degrees of freedom such as polarization, allowing generation of so-called hyper-entanglement."

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-quantum-entanglement-photon-trillion-rubidium.html

https://www.osapublishing.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-4-2-272

and using the phase to communicate info of entangled photon

"quantum mechanics was found to allow for communication, even without the actual transmission of physical particles. From the viewpoint of communication, this mystery stems from a (nonintuitive) fundamental concept in quantum mechanics—wave-particle duality. All particles can be described fully by wave functions. To determine whether light appears in a channel, one refers to the amplitude of its wave function. However, in counterfactual communication, information is carried by the phase part of the wave function. Using a single-photon source, we experimentally demonstrate the counterfactual communication and successfully transfer a monochrome bitmap from one location to another by using a nested version of the quantum Zeno effect. "

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-counterfactual-quantum.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/04/19/1614560114

Health Disparities in Drug- and Alcohol-Use Disorders: A 12-Year Longitudinal Study of Youths After Detention

"Results. By median age 28 years, 91.3% of males and 78.5% of females had ever had an SUD. At most follow-ups, males had greater odds of alcohol- and marijuana-use disorders. Drug-use disorders were most prevalent among non-Hispanic Whites, followed by Hispanics, then African Americans (e.g., compared with African Americans, non-Hispanic Whites had 32.1 times the odds of cocaine-use disorder "

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2015.303032

Long-dormant bacteria and viruses, trapped in ice and permafrost for centuries, are reviving as Earth's climate warms

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up

"Still, the authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades. “We felt it was really stunning, since we are underestimating the probability of automation,”

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-parts-of-america-most-susceptible-to-automation/525168/?single_page=true

Blockchain AI "Therefore an AI DAO is a DAO that uses AI technology. Or, it’s AI technology that’s run on a decentralized processing substrate. Here’s what makes AI DAOs special over plain AIs: access to resources; the ability to amass more resources; and the possibility that humans can’t control them once they’re going."

https://blog.bigchaindb.com/ai-daos-and-three-paths-to-get-there-cfa0a4cc37b8

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/god-in-the-machine-my-strange-journey-into-transhumanism

https://aeon.co/ideas/wars-are-not-won-by-military-genius-or-decisive-battles

The Hungry Brain is as good as Scott's review of it suggests. There's a great portion at the beginning about the neuroscience of decision making that ties into a lot of stuff I've been trying to learn about regarding how reinforcement learning is implemented in the brain.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,

"the United States is shifting toward an economic and political makeup more similar to developing nations than the wealthy, economically stable nation it has long been."

https://theintellectualist.co/study-mit-economist-u-s-regressed-third-world-nation-citizens/

he parallels are unsettling. As noted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking:

"In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check."

https://mitpress.mit.edu/vanishing

daniel suarez's latest book is out, about genetic programming on adults, and the loss of trust. Not as good as his last few on AI.

Change Agent.

short article

The Hell of Defensive Editing

"Defensive editing shatters creativity and concentration. It is more concerned with the subjective responses of individual readers than my original purpose in creating my story."

http://passionatereason.com/2017/05/hell-defensive-editing/

"First I make a copy of my text on my computer. Then I set my original version in bold lettering. I read through the bold text and select my favorite parts, the ones that ring with passion or resonate with truth.

After I am done, I delete all the bold lettering, and I am left only with the parts I love. The remaining text is usually a disorganized mess. It will need new transitions and probably some rewriting to make it cohesive again, but it is much more rewarding to work with even fragmented text I love than with integrated parts I dislike. "

Agents of Shield has veered weirdly close to LW interests this season.

We've got:

1: An AI who is given bad priorities which lead it to kill its creator and perpetrate supervillainy. 2: An investigation into whether or not emulated human intelligences in a VR setting are morally 'real' enough to care about. 3: Serious consideration of how much of people's identities are their memories, and whether by changing those memories you create new people or not.

Also, earlier in the season, a rad biker with a flaming skull for a head.

Anyway, main point, AoS is radically better nowadays than when it started out. This season has been aces.

"Justice.exe is a short mobile game created by University of Utah Honors When Machines Decide Praxis Lab students in order to raise awareness around the usage and dangers of machine learning algorithms in the criminal justice system."

"students explored the increasing use of automated decision-making in society. These opaque systems operate silently in the background, with little transparency, yet make decisions that significantly impact us in virtually every facet of our life."

http://justiceexe.com/

I was recently introduced to and am now a bit obsessed with the Canadian band Marianas Trench, especially the song Masterpiece Theatre III (I and II are also great). It's a mashup of several of their other songs and it's great.

Found this oatmeal comic on the backfire effect

Ignored, Scorned…Vindicated. The maverick scientists whose heretical ideas were proven correct…

Meet 40 mavericks & heretics of science whose “crackpot” ideas were proven correct. Eventually.

infographic:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/mavericks-and-heretics/

The forgotten joys of the screen saver.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/05/23/salvation-mode/

"Decades ago, stumbling upon a screen saver in a shared living room—or perhaps finding an entire office full of them at lunchtime, cubicles lambent with workers’ judiciously chosen modules—likely signaled your own solitude. When you’re watching one intentionally, that feeling never arrives."

"The screensaver displays a cinematic slideshow of jpeg images. The cinematic motion includes zooming in, zooming out, and panning. This motion adds a suprisingly effective mood to each image. In addition, you can listen to music from a CD, from mp3 files, or from an iTunes playlist."

http://alumni.cs.ucr.edu/~gstitt/motionpicture/instructions.html

https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/04