Newsletter 23
Simulating brains & thunderstorm gamma rays
Hi everyone,
This week this humble little newsletter passed the 500 subscriber mark - so welcome to all the new subscribers!
I started it back in September to see if we could learn some things together during extended lockdowns (while experiencing - and are biased towards seeking knowledge, systems thinking, scenario planning and all sorts of other cool stuff. 500 is quite a milestone for a one person operation so I hope if you like the stuff here we can continue to grow, and I can perhaps increase my output too.
I hope you enjoy this edition!
Best wishes,
Gavin
As always you can become a paid subscriber, or share with a friend.
Reading list - the best stuff to read
🔵 Society - Facebook’s negligence
Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman have a great scoop on inside goings-on at Facebook. It’s a catalogue of errors, mishaps and outright wilful negligence. (5,200 words/19 mins by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman)
In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, “Political Influences on Content Policy.” Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that Kaplan’s policy team “regularly protects powerful constituencies” and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.
“At some point,” Pozner told BuzzFeed News, “Zuckerberg has to be held responsible for his role in allowing his platform to be weaponized and for ensuring that the ludicrous and the dangerous are given equal importance as the factual.”
🌏 Climate change - gas stoves
I loved this long read on gas stoves. The tactics used by gas companies to convince people they are safe and clean is similar, as the article says, to tobacco companies - but one twist - social media influencers. I actually didn’t realise myself just how much they pollute your home, never mind the world. (4,000 words/15 mins by Rebecca Leber)
These groups have hired prominent public relations firms to seek out influencers who emphasize—and whose presence embodies—the cool factor of gas cooking while mentioning none of the risks. In fact, in the posts I reviewed, none of the influencers appeared to have a hood over their stoves, or even to mention ventilation. I knew I had caught the industry’s attention with the story when many of the Instagram posts embedded in the piece were soon deleted, and I started receiving long, mostly unsolicited emails from the industry’s various consultants.
I’ve read lots of good criticism of Bill Gates since his book publicity started. Here’s another.
Here’s a thread too:
🦠 COVID
Nature asks if the vaccines will lead to lower transmission. The likelihood is that it will, and certainly early studies from Israel are promising.
Christian Paz points out that leaders who got COVID-19 and didn’t change their minds on the severity of the pandemic may be canaries in the coal mine for future democratic stability. (1,200 words/5 mins by Christian Paz)
Both Stuenkel and Ximénez-Fyvie told me that in their countries, there had been hope that illness would humble their leaders, encouraging them to show more empathy and exhibit a deeper understanding of the coronavirus threat.
That great humbling never happened. Part of this likely comes down to self-belief: These leaders, like most who ascend to the highest position in their country, are certain in their course of action and trust their instincts, which is how they have succeeded thus far.
TR looks at just how good the Pfizer vaccine is at stopping transmission (a more detailed analysis than the Reuters report above. (1,500 words/5 mins by Josh Mitnick and Antonio Regaldo)
Because Israel tests people fairly comprehensively, the researchers were also able to estimate that the vaccine was 89.4% effective in preventing any detectable infection at all, including asymptomatic infections.
That finding, which is new, suggests that the vaccine could strongly suppress transmission of the virus between people and could help bring the outbreak to an end, a possibility Pfizer and the Israeli researchers say they are closely watching. “Israel provides a unique opportunity to observe the nation-wide impact of an increasing prevalence of immunity on Sars-Cov-2 transmission,” the authors wrote. Eric Topol, a doctor at Scripps Research in California, who reviewed the document, says that “the blocking of infections here speaks to the vaccine’s impact on asymptomatic transmission, which we’ve been unsure about.”
🧠 AI - How do brains work and can we replicate it?
This is a very interesting read on backpropagation. (3,100 words/11 mins by Anil Ananthaswamy)
Roelfsema’s insight was that this feedback signal could enable backprop-like learning when combined with processes revealed in certain other neuroscientific findings. For example, Wolfram Schultz of the University of Cambridge and others have shown that when animals perform an action that yields better results than expected, the brain’s dopamine system is activated. “It floods the whole brain with neural modulators,” said Roelfsema. The dopamine levels act like a global reinforcement signal.
🤖 Mars - success!
You can rewatch the moment here. I’m looking forward to the full EDL video soon.
There was also a great image from the UAE orbiter too:
And here’s a deeper look at the drone that is now on Mars (1,500 words/6 mins by Jennifer Leman)
Now, it’s almost show time. Once separated from the rover, Percy’s otherworldly helo will have just 30 martian solar days (commonly called sols, which are each 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds) to conduct a series of up to five test flights, each lasting anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds. The helicopter’s most ambitious hops, nearly all of which will be choreographed by Ingenuity itself, could take it as high as a single-story building and far as 1,000 feet.
🚀 Rockets - Starship and SpaceX
SpaceX lost a Falcon 9 booster this week, the first in quite a while. It was attempting to land on a drone ship following a successful launch of 60 more Starlink satellites into orbit. Starlink services will start to go live in Europe over the coming months.
Work continues on more iterations of the Starship and Superheavy first stage. BN1 - the first booster prototype still under construction. Expect a test firing of SN10 later this week followed by an attempt at landing it over the coming weeks. Here’s a good illustration of current prototypes:
🧐 Philosophy - progress in science
A fascinating read criticising Karl Popper and this philosophy of science. I’ve long been a fan of Popper since my earliest days as a philosophy undergrad - in particular his essay Conjectures & Refutations. Charlotte Sleigh argues that his thesis of falsification has actually undermined scientific progress - and society. (3,000 words/11 mins by Charlotte Sleigh)
The notion that science is all about falsification has done incalculable damage not just to science but to human wellbeing. It has normalised distrust as the default condition for knowledge-making, while setting an unreachable and unrealistic standard for the scientific enterprise.
I think the piece somewhat misrepresents my memory of Popper - someone who actively responded to criticism too. Some Popper fans responded critically with links too:
The Real Meaning of Falsifiability
Beyond Falsifiability: The Origins of Critical Rationalism
🌏 Society - terrorism, foreign and domestic
Jim Sciutto contrasts terrorists he came across in London with the people who invaded the US Capitol. The signs are not good - radicalisation has happened and is happening across the US and we may only be at the start. (1,400 words/5 mins by Jim Sciutto)
Five years later, Clapper tells me he sees those same trends worsening. “I wish it wasn’t true, but it is hard not to objectively observe those trends are continuing,” he said. “We have armed fanatic mobs attacking the seat of our democracy. This is what happens in unstable countries.”
🚗 Musk and Sandy
Like him or not Musk’s companies are having an impact on the world. This is an hour long chat with vehicle veteran Sandy Munroe. They discuss lots about building things - cars in particular. (50 mins)
🔬 Science - why do thunderstorms generate gamma rays?
Nature looks at Japanese scientists who are trying to answer this question. It’s a really interesting look at citizen science too, using detectors on various buildings, helped by volunteers. (3,200 words/12 mins by Elizabeth Gibney)
Scientists first saw γ-ray glows coming from Earth in 1985, when a NASA jet carrying radiation detectors raced through a thunderstorm. It picked up weak emissions emanating from clouds before a lightning flash. Then, in 1994, a probe designed to study the cosmos, NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, detected TGFs coming from thunderclouds — much brighter bursts of γ-rays that last just hundreds of microseconds. It came as a surprise, says Dwyer, because the bursts stemmed from “the one place in the Universe everyone knew no γ-rays should be coming from” — Earth.
Greek Tragedy Corner (a journey through Greek tragedy every week)
The Euripides journey continues. This week it’s the turn of Herakles. A nice discussion at the end too. (90 mins)
Documentary(s)
Next up is episode 11 of Cosmos. At the start he has a good explanation of bits (and we looked at the work of bits via its inventor Claude Shannon in earlier newsletters). Later in this episode he explores the information society and the potential for billions of humans interacted over networks. (58 mins)
Now that we’ve finished the Rome series by Simon Sebag Montefiore, we can move on to other areas. One weak spot in my history is the history of the Austro-Hungarian/Hapsburg Empire. I tended to overlook it in favour of the UK, France, Spain or Prussia/Germany. So let’s dive in.
This is a one-part long episode on the history of Vienna by Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard Joseph Koerner. (90 mins). Next week we will look again at the history of the Hapsburgs and Austria. The sheer number of intellectuals and thinkers (and a demagogue or two) who came from Vienna will always make its history very interesting.
Podcast(s)
Thanks to a subscriber recommendation I’ve been trying out the Talking Politics podcast from the London Review of Books. They are essentially monologues exploring certain thinkers. Two I’ve enjoyed:
The first is the most recent, which explores the writing of Frederick Douglass via his three autobiographies. Listening has certainly added Douglass to a list of people I need to read - one thing that struck me is how much of a first principles thinker Douglass was. Ireland also comes up in his worldview later in the episode. (44 mins)
The second is an older one that explores Hannah Arendt - someone I’ve also spent too little time reading. This explores her ideas of action, labour and work and how they interplay, juxtaposed against the writings of Hobbes. It is interesting in the context of the current technological world. (44 mins)
Still in my tabs
A first-of-its-kind geoengineering experiment is about to take its first step
The Moment Britain’s Army Knew It Was Lost
Nomadland Is a Gorgeous Journey Through the Wreckage of American Promise
And finally
I love this tool to view the Netherlands via the time each building in the country was built. In particular I zoned in on a part of The Hague I’m familiar with below. The buildings in light yellow were built after the war - 1956 - different from the older buildings to the east and south. The area was accidentally bombed by the allies in 1945 when they were targeting V2 launch sites in the park to the north (Haagse Bos). It left 20,000 people homeless, including many refugees.
