Weird science

From Nature, a story about which I am unsure how to react:

Hundreds of thousands of human neurons growing in a dish coated with electrodes have been taught to play a version of the classic computer game Pong¹.

In doing so, the cells join a growing pantheon of Pong players, including pigs taught to manipulate joysticks with their snout² and monkeys wired to control the game with their minds. (Google’s DeepMind artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms mastered Pong many years ago³ and have moved on to more-sophisticated computer games such as StarCraft II⁴.)

The gamer cells respond not to visual cues on a screen but to electrical signals from the electrodes in the dish. These electrodes both stimulate the cells and record changes in neuronal activity. Researchers then converted the stimulation signals and the cellular responses into a visual depiction of the game. The results are reported today in Neuron.

Intelligence in a dish

The work is a proof of principle that neurons in a dish can learn and exhibit basic signs of intelligence, says lead author Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “In current textbooks, neurons are thought of predominantly in terms of their implication for human or animal biology,” he says. “They’re not thought about as an information processor, but a neuron is this amazing system that can process information in real time with very low power consumption.”

I'm betting the cells in a dish would also be easily persuaded to vote for Trump.   

 

Catholic disgrace, continued

Why would this upset him?:

What, his clear discomfit with Putin actually losing the war isn't enough to mark him as a disgrace?    

Update:  he admires Right wing trolls:

Old time commenter JC likes to mouth off in public, and chose db's "new catallaxy" as the forum in which to continue.   But if he had any real moral character, he would tell db (who he increasingly disagrees with) that his views are disgusting:

 

Stand up, JC, you coward...
 

Update 2:

 Dover beach also linked to the Revolver news story, with the title:

Love Him or Hate Him, the War Against Alex Jones Is a War Against Us All

Conspiracy believing paranoid conservatives just hate to see any conspiracy promoting and defaming  moron being punished, economically or legally.   

Dover beach and Currency Lad just illustrate daily how detached from reality and morality conservative Catholics have become.   True disgraces to their religion. 

Update 3:   Well, I guess that makes all OK, then:

He's quite the moron...

Ross sees a problem (but has no solutions)

I don't think there is too much to disagree with in Ross Douthat's column about the unresolved conflict within the Catholic Church that kicked in post Vatican II.

Except - I would say that I get the feeling his inclination is to blame Vatican II, whereas I think the current internal conflict is an inevitable result of the effect of the science revolutions starting from Darwin  making there way slowly through society.   (Vatican II was barely 100 years after The Origin of the Species, after all.)

A coherent president

Further to my wish that American journalists should stop ignoring the Right wingnut meme that Biden is a babbling, dementia riddled puppet - yes this interview was pre-recorded, but Biden comes across as smart and reasonable:  

 

In comments following, there are still some wingnuts claiming "he probably has an earpiece and is repeating words fed to him". They have become detached from reality. This needs to be pointed out by the mainstream press, often.  

Doesn't fit the Trumpy narrative

Yeah, I've read something like this quite a few times recently:

 If MAGA leaders are truly concerned about violent crime, they might look inward. Earlier this year, the centrist Democratic group Third Way crunched the 2020 homicide figures and found that per capita homicide rates were on average 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than by Joe Biden. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates have been reliably red states for the past two decades. Republican-led cities weren’t any safer than Democratic-led cities.

Among the 10 states with the highest per capita homicide rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee — most were in the South and relatively rural. The findings were broadly consistent with other rankings of states (and counties) by violent crime.

This isn’t the fault of Republican leaders, of course, any more than Democratic leaders are to blame for crime in blue states. The South, for reasons sociologists debate, has been more violent than the rest of the country for centuries. But those who are truly worried about violent crime should consider decamping to blue America. Living in a Republican state is much more likely to get you killed.

Sometimes I wonder if dedication to hyperbole causes permanent brain damage

 

Quite a few people make the following point in response: 

Update:  oh look, gullible Adam is impressed too:

Yet, as calmer people are pointing out (my God, this comes from one of the new Catallaxy blogs):

And yeah, the link is to a Nature story from Feb 21 pointing out that:

As countries roll out vaccines that prevent COVID-19, studies are under way to determine whether shots can also stop people from getting infected and passing on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccines that prevent transmission could help to bring the pandemic under control if they are given to enough people.

Preliminary analyses suggest that at least some vaccines are likely to have a transmission-blocking effect. But confirming that effect — and how strong it will be — is tricky because a drop in infections in a given region might be explained by other factors, such as lockdowns and behaviour changes. Not only that, the virus can spread from asymptomatic carriers, which makes it hard to detect those infections.

As some comments note in the thread after Adam's tweet:

Noah tries to counter

Right wingnuts are 100% committed to a belief that Black Lives Matter led to several cities being laid to waste, and that Democrats endorsed the destruction.  As with the "Obama was a disastrous President" narrative, it's difficult to not see underlying racism in the fanciful exaggeration they have convinced themselves is obviously true.  Anyway, I agree with Noah, as I do on many things:

So, how bad was that dinosaur killing asteroid?

Probably even worse than you imagined, according to a pair of stories on Science Daily.  First, wouldn't it shake your confidence to feel the planet quaking for weeks after the impact?:

66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs. New evidence suggests that the Chicxulub impact also triggered an earthquake so massive that it shook the planet for weeks to months after the collision. The amount of energy released in this "mega-earthquake" is estimated at 1023 joules, which is about 50,000 times more energy than was released in the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004. ...

The rocks exposed on the coast of Gorgonilla Island tell a story from the bottom of the ocean -- roughly 2 km down. There, about 3,000-km southwest from the site of the impact, sand, mud, and small ocean creatures were accumulating on the ocean floor when the asteroid hit. Layers of mud and sandstone as far as 10-15 meters below the sea floor experienced soft-sediment deformation that is preserved in the outcrops today, which Bermúdez attributes to the shaking from the impact. Faults and deformation due to shaking continue up through the spherule-rich layer that was deposited post-impact, indicating that the shaking must have continued for the weeks and months it took for these finer-grained deposits to reach the ocean floor. Just above those spherule deposits, preserved fern spores signal the first recovery of plant-life after the impact.

As for the tsunami, another story notes:

"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master's thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore....

Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 4.5-kilometer-high (2.8-mile-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.

Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the point of impact, a 1.5-kilometer-high (0.93-mile-high) tsunami wave -- ring-shaped and outward-propagating -- began sweeping across the ocean in all directions, according to the U-M simulation...

According to the team's simulation:

• One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.

• Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.

• Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.

• By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines.

For the current study, the researchers did not attempt to estimate the extent of coastal flooding caused by the tsunami.

However, their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America's Pacific coast.

 

 

What a nightmare for the parents

Noted in The Guardian:

A nurse murdered seven babies and attempted to kill 10 others by poisoning them on a hospital neonatal unit where she was a “constant malevolent presence”, a court has heard.

Lucy Letby, 32, fatally injected newborns with insulin, air or milk during night shifts when she knew their parents would not be present, a jury was told.

One of the babies was just 24 hours old when Letby allegedly injected him with air, killing him just 90 minutes after she came on shift. The nurse tried to kill his twin sister the next day, it is alleged.

The court was told that Letby, who was trained to care for the most seriously ill babies, developed an “unusual interest” in the parents of some of her 17 alleged victims and in some cases tracked them on Facebook.

Sounds like something you would read in fiction, but I don't want to see Netflix making money off it either.   

About that Florida advice

As I expected, plenty of valid sounding criticism is coming out about that Florida Surgeon General's "study" about mRNA vaccines and cardiac arrest.

Here's one article.  Here's another.  I didn't realise the Surgeon General was always a contrarian on virtually everything to do with COVID.   

But as I said before - in the Right wing information bubble world, the damage is already done.

AI as your friend, and doctor?

Odd, but I'll give it a go:

A new chatbot start-up from two top artificial intelligence talents lets anyone strike up a conversation with impersonations of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes. Registered users type in messages and get responses. They can also create a chatbot of their own on Character.ai, which has logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing.

“There were reports of possible voter fraud and I wanted an investigation,” the Trump bot said. Character.ai features a disclaimer at the top of every chat: “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!”

Character.ai’s willingness to let users experiment with the latest in language AI is a departure from Big Tech — and that’s by design. The start-up’s two founders helped create Google’s artificial intelligence project LaMDA, which Google keeps closely guarded while it develops safeguards against social risks.

In interviews with The Washington Post, Character.ai’s co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas said they left Google to get this technology into as many hands as possible. They opened Character.ai’s beta version to the public in September for anyone to try.

“I thought, ‘Let’s build a product now that can that can help millions and billions of people,’” Shazeer said. “Especially in the age of covid, there are just millions of people who are feeling isolated or lonely or need someone to talk to.”

In other AI news, which I'm not sure I like the sounds of (a pun there, actually): 

The National Institutes of Health is funding a massive research project to collect voice data and develop an AI that could diagnose people based on their speech.

Everything from your vocal cord vibrations to breathing patterns when you speak offers potential information about your health, says laryngologist Dr. Yael Bensoussan, the director of the University of South Florida's Health Voice Center and a leader on the study.

"We asked experts: Well, if you close your eyes when a patient comes in, just by listening to their voice, can you have an idea of the diagnosis they have?" Bensoussan says. "And that's where we got all our information."

Someone who speaks low and slowly might have Parkinson's disease. Slurring is a sign of a stroke. Scientists could even diagnose depression or cancer. The team will start by collecting the voices of people with conditions in five areas: neurological disorders, voice disorders, mood disorders, respiratory disorders and pediatric disorders like autism and speech delays.

I wonder how far this will go in future - visit the AI doctor online with a frog in the throat, and end up admitted to a psych ward?

A deeply unimpressive Metaverse

A reporter for the New York Times has an article up "This is Life in the Metaverse", and boy, it may not have been the intention of the writer, but for me, it only helps confirm all of the scepticism about what a bad idea it is.  I will gift the article so you can read in full.

The culinary workplace - does it have to be that way?

Because it has been getting favourable comments on Twitter, I decided to watch the first episode of The Bear, which is on Disney Plus in Australia.

It's a comedy drama (with, it would seem, a heavier concentration on the drama) about a talented chef who comes home to Chicago to try to keep his recently deceased brother's "Italian beef restaurant" going.

I guess I expected all of the Kitchen Confidential-esque, working-as-a-chef-in-a-restaurant-is-high-energy, high-conflict, sometimes-high-reward, stuff.   (Ratatouille and Gordon Ramsay's shows contributed to our understanding of what type of people it attracts, too!)   But my overall feeling remains:

*  gee, there seemed to be an awful lot of people needed to run that place with the limited menu options.  That felt a bit unrealistic.  Apparently, though, the show gets reasonable marks for accuracy from people in the business.

*  Given that we have had a couple of decades of public exposure to what it's like to work in these businesses, is it is really, absolutely, unavoidable that they have to be like that?   I mean, can a restaurant be started on the basis that respect and workplace harmony are prioritised, and can it possibly survive?  

Ronny Jackson was the warning

Ronny Jackson was the warning - any doctor who goes all in for support for Trumpy politicians has dubious judgement in everything, including medicine.

Hence, my initial reaction when reading that the Florida Surgeon General was promoting an unpublished analysis about the increased risk of cardiac arrest in young men from mRNA vaccines was that this was likely to be from a badly flawed analysis.  (The warning in his Tweet "FL will not be silent on the truth" pretty much seals it, that he's acting from biased political motives.)

Early commentary indicates my reaction was probably right - although we all await more detailed analysis.   But the (likely) damage has already been done in the politicised information bubble the Right has built for itself. 

No, they don't

 

Tablet time

After many years with only an old mid sized Samsung tablet, which still has a great looking screen, but a battery that will only last a couple of hours and then take 8 hours to charge again, I went and bought my self a new, larger tablet - a relatively cheap one from Lenovo.

I have to say, the way Lenovo names its models is pretty confusing - but a 10.6 inch model with 128Gb (and room for expansion) for $327 seems pretty good value.   It makes reading books much, much easier than trying to do so on phone.  In fact, I have a theory that it will turn out conclusively in the near future that the world overall has become 20% dumber due to the atomisation of information necessary to fit it on a phone screen. 

It's still a bit tricky doing blog posts, though.  Hence my last post with the dubious quality of the resized screenshot.  I'm working on it, though...

Wikipedia and physics

A twenty minute fire in the kitchen caused by a lightning strike is nothing, according to anti-Biden wingnuts

I still get absolutely dismayed at the way wingnuts self-gaslight via social media about Biden and dementia.   (And for the record, no, I don't think it was hugely embarrassing [or, put it this way - that big a deal] that he called on someone who had  died a couple of months before the event - he dwelt on it for all of about 8 seconds and moved on, possibly even realising his mistake at the time - and as was noted on Planet America, it is also possible that the name was accidentally left on the teleprompt.)

The guy has made verbal faux pas for decades - there are compilations on the net from well before the election.    It infuriates me that clips of minor matters, such as exiting a stage in the wrong direction, is snipped out and shown as if it is proof that he doesn't know where he is, or some such BS.   It's really malicious treatment of a public figure, feeding a gullible audience, if you ask me.   

Of course he's not as sharp as a younger man, but if you actually watch his performance in delivering speeches and off the cuff commentary, there is no way an honest person can say that any person well into a dementia decline could perform those tasks as competently as he does.   

Stop believing 10 second clips and watch his lengthy performances, morons.    

And on the question of honesty, look at this hyperbole:

So thousands of wingnuts stop there and believe whoever this Schwartz is.

You have to go to the thread to read:

 

As others point out:

So people are calling him a massive liar because a fire that (apparently) took 20 mins to control in the kitchen counts as a "small" fire, and it's wrong to call that "an awful lot" of his home.

I mean, this is just ridiculous criticism or what could, at the most, be described as mild exaggeration made in an attempt at showing empathy.

And nothing like the chronic "living in a fantasy world" type of lie that comes out of the mouth of Trump as an absolute matter of routine. 

I wish there were more people speaking aggressively about the maliciousness and gullible world bubble the Right has built for themselves, with the help of social media and money grubs like Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch. 

PS:   none of this means that I necessarily think Biden should run again.  In fact I think he shouldn't, and yes, because of his age;  but he needs to be replaced by someone sharper than his VP.

A shocking week for senseless and unexpected death

First, it was the Indonesia soccer stadium deaths, and now the Thailand preschool attack, the details of which are about as bad as they could possibly be:

The attacker, a former police officer, opened fire as children were sleeping at the centre in Na Klang district in Nong Bua Lamphu province at about noon on Thursday, police and witnesses said.

Police said most of the children killed at the centre were stabbed to death. As he left the nursery the attacker drove his car towards and shot at bystanders then returned home, where he shot himself, his wife and his child.

Police identified the attacker as Panya Khamrab, a 34-year-old former police lieutenant colonel who had been dismissed from the force last year for methamphetamine possession and had appeared in court earlier on Thursday on a drugs charge.

It's so easy it is to imagine the shock of being personally affected by that....

 

I'm willing to try this...

Here's the recipe, but it's very simple.