Philip Ball

YouTube video by HollowHead Post Industrial Blues

Mood.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLiM...

🚨 New paper "social scale."

"On the Manifest Naivete of Techno-Optimists: A Review of 'More Everything Forever' by Adam Becker" (@adambecker.bsky.social) for The American Journal of Biological Anthropology

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Black and white illustration featuring a forest setting with central hippo like creature, hedgehog in the foreground and birds flying overhead

Illustration from Tove Jansson's book 'The Moomins and the Great Flood' (1945) #Womensart

Should biology put complexity first? The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing dama…

Great perspective by @philipcball.bsky.social.

Elementary genetics teaching (HS/college) focuses on Mendelian traits (single gene => single trait). However, it is now clear that polygenicity and pleiotropy are the norm. Curriculum must change accordingly.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

(Truth is that I'm pretty certain there's not much on those disks that's worth too much effort - just those old graphics files.)

Thanks - I might look into such things, though I'm a Mac user.

And thank you for that lovely review of Alchemy by the way, which I discovered on looking at this.

Back in the 1980s-2000s, there was an organization called
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility that worked to oppose irresponsible and dangerous uses of computers in warfare. Maybe it needs a reboot, in our new age of AI.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute...

Wow, that's cheap! But I guess these will all be Freehand files in an obsolete format no app I possess will now read.

😅Our house is already that, and it's not a very big house.

That's not going to happen though Becky, is it? I'm probably going to ditch all my CDs with stored files too.

No, that's long gone.

Ah, I think it is finally time to let go of my old floppy disks with the figures for my early books on them.
(Gen Z: "Wait, how come those look like the Save icon?")

This is exactly what I'm working on now 😉

"...to you rather than the experts who actually built these systems?" Well, this is why. Many of those people can code better than I will ever be able to, but in other respects OMFG. 2/2

"Retirement may be a risk to welfare of the models themselves. Although we remain very uncertain on this front, models may have morally relevant preferences or experiences related to or affected by their deprecation and replacement." Sometimes you hear people say "Yeah but why should I listen... /1

Crikey, 89. I've seen Buddy several times, always amazing.

I'd nitpick it.

True, but the likes of Hinton are unconvincing on this. You needn't take that from me - far better informed people say the same thing.

🙁

That's very good. But it is a recent thing that needed a lot of pushing to achieve - a couple of decades ago, scientists doing sci comm were still rather looked down upon, or at least it wasn't seen as a core part of what they do. Now the likes of Alice R, Helen Cz, Mark M & Jim Al-K are superstars

Yes, it does - but perhaps not as much as it used to, before the BBC radio science unit was foolishly broken up by the corporation, and now with the excellent Science In Action dropped from the World Service. Shows we can't take it for granted.

That's so good to hear Katie. I'm proud to be a part of it. Part of the key to it is that we actually like each other. There are plenty of folks like this in the US too, and I just wish they were the most prominent. (But I know you're working on that, even if from over the border...)

He's speaking for just about every left-wing progressive I know. The question is whether these changes can be made (perhaps), and whether they can be made without ugly factionist infighting (seems unlikely, sadly).

And I could list a whole galaxy more of this crowd with equal 😍. (You know who you are, folks.)

Have to say, when I think about Brockman's Edge elite of "sci comm intellectuals" and then see the folks we have (even just UCL has!) today in the UK, I feel pretty damned flag-wavy about it. 😍

Cover of The Lancet:

@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

OK, well as a fan of quantum (not so much AI), can I just say that this is really dumb?

So far, so stupid from Starmer 😖

The comments thread made me laugh though.

Mine too, TBH.