I saw a wonderful recording of a talk the authors gave a few years ago (which I regrettably can't find now), and it was amongst the most eye-opening talks I've ever seen.
It is sort of interesting… I think we will all admit that brains are more complex than computer chips. But I still wonder if there’s some general underlying principle that makes brains more reasonable to study in this fashion than computer chips.
For example, they talk about destroying one transistor, observing that the thing can’t play Donkey-Kong anymore, and concluding that that is the DK transistor.
But computer chips are designed to have incredibly long chains of dependencies where each specific transistor does exactly the right thing, every time.
For neurons, it isn’t so specific, right? They all might fire, depending on the timing, and whether or not they are… I don’t know biology, charged or whatever. The whole system works under the assumption that many complements will mis-fire or be duds are any moment.
It seems (to me at least) more reasonable, to come to the conclusion that the DK neuron is really a DK neuron, if removing it causes an un-recoverable DK related failure… because the whole system is based around handling failures! It is somehow special that something can break it.
"For neurons, it isn’t so specific, right? They all might fire, depending on the timing, and whether or not they are… I don’t know biology, charged or whatever."
So we assume. And with some good reason, including both the studies done over the decades, and the fact that we've built systems based on this architecture that match this concept.
However, it is important to observe that this characteristic is still in the metaphorical spotlight. It is a thing that we can discover. If, in fact, there was One Blessed Neuron that contained the most vital aspect of some critical concept in someone's brain, we currently have zero capability to discover it, zero ability to characterize it, and effectively zero ability to manipulate that neuron directly in some experimental fashion once identified. Therefore, we should be fairly suspicious of the claim that we've eliminated this as even being a possibility.
I expect it is unlikely that there is a such thing as the One Blessed Neuron, even so, but there are a large number of other hypothetical organizations that could exist beyond "an amorphous neural net with nothing really located anywhere", and we have good evidence for that as well; the "regions" of the brain, the fact we can visibly see physically different organizations of neurons in certain regions and associate them with certain tasks. I would not even dream of trying to guarantee that there is no structure lying in between the gross differences we already know about and the hypothetical undifferentiated neural mass, the structures in those complexity voids between what we can currently see. We again have a lot of inductive reasons to believe that there is likely more structure there we do not even have a clue exists, on the grounds that every time we get a closer look at something for the first time ever, it is rarely only and exactly what we expected. It's such a notable outcome that it gets called out specifically when it happens, precisely because it's rare.
Yes, there's more of a degree of redundancy in brains than microprocessors, but the 'lesion' approach tends to involve affecting more than just one neuron. The main point of that section is that you've got to be careful about what you define as a 'function'. In the processor case, if you defined function in terms of a register or instruction working properly, then this approach could actually give you a pretty good map. But if you've defined it as whether a particular game runs, it doesn't give you a good map at all, because most games exercise most functions of the microprocessor, and so which small parts aren't important to that particular game is only incidental. With brains the main thing is the underlying functions are not really known, so you need to approach with care.
I used to have the impression that the brain is more "mixed up" than it really is. It's quite hard to get the right impression as a layman. Experts push too hard towards the extreme that makes us think that everything is involved in everything and it's all thoroughly uniformly mixed, advising against believing those old naive brain charts etc. But really, certain functions are remarkably well localized. This kind of overcorrection is quite common if one often reads HN-like "well actually"-content, which is supposed to supplement a common perception with a small caveat. Beware of internalizing just the caveat and forgetting the main thrust.
Author of that paper here -- What an incredibly nice comment to wake up to at 3am, thank you! This paper made me quit neuro and switch to systems that are easier to model (small molecules) which it turns out are still annoyingly difficult!
I'm grateful that my 2019 Norco Section uses a round seatpost, threaded Shimano BB, and standard cockpit; I deplore the "self-adjusting" D-shaped Giant seatpost on my girlfriend's bike (which is subtly off-centre and takes all kinds of witchery to approximate the ease with which I can adjust a standard seatpost), as well as the mess of BBs and integrated cockpits that are becoming common even on mid-range road & gravel bikes. When I buy my next bike, I will go out of my way to select something using standardized parts. I very much hope something akin to the Framework laptop comes to market in cycling, where the entire machine is built to be user-serviceable with off-the-shelf, readily available parts. I put something like 20,000 km commuting to school on my early 1970s Raleigh Record, which I rebuilt almost completely with my brother, and it was a gloriously simple machine that I miss dearly today.
You can still buy bikes like that. There are plenty of people still making frame sets that will work with standard drive train components, standard sized stems, and plain ol handlebars in a variety of shapes. And they will build a bike for you.
I bought a Rivendell about 10 years ago and it's probably my last bike. Is a steel frame heavier than carbon? Yes, a bit, but I don't have to throw it away after a crash, it rides like a dream, and the weight difference is less than the extra "water bottles" I carry around my midsection. Most of the weight of the bike+rider (which is what you have to haul around) is the rider, not the bike, and the frame is just a fraction of the weight of the bike!
Even though new bikes are getting more and more proprietary, I don't foresee a time when I can't buy a new Shimano cassette or other replaceable parts.
It does seem like a complete bike that is under $1100 or so today will be less repairable than the bike I got in 2008 for $600 (less than $900 in 2024 dollars).
In some ways yes in other ways no. Shimano has been on their forced obsolescence train for 30 years. They don’t make hoods for my old 8spd levers. If I want to not deal with ratty old tape over sticky ancient hoods I need to drop $130 on new claris levers and $25 on a new fd because the pull ratio changed then another $20 on new bar tape.
You should check AliExpress for those. You might be able to find some knock-offs. AE is actually really good for things like this. The other place to check is Ebay, in case someone is selling NOS (new old stock).
I’ve tried both. They don’t make 8spd era hoods they do have some 9spd clones. NOS has n’t existed for years and when it comes up people ask $100 for a set of hoods.
I wonder if any of the companies making 9spd clones would be interested in making 8spd clones. It might not be worth it for them, but probably wouldn't hurt to ask, especially if people are actually getting $100 for a set when they dig up some NOS.
I tried that too. Talc only works for the first time you grip the hoods. If you then take your hands off and regrip you are back to where you started getting black crap everywhere. Tape has been the best solution if a bit ugly.
You have 46 chromosomes. Each chromosome is one massive contiguous molecule of DNA, which can be represented as a string of (up to) 150 million letters ("nucleotides") drawn from {A, C, G, T}. Together, the whole human genome is roughly 3 billion nucleotides. Since you have two copies in each cell, you have 6 billion nucleotides in total.
Each chromosome is either an autosome or sex chromosome. The autosomes are chr1 to chr22. All people (excepting those with chromosomal disorders, like trisomy 21) have two copies of each autosome, with one copy coming from each parent. Then, for the sex chromosomes:
* If you're male, you get an X chromosome from your mom and a Y chromosome from your dad.
* If you're female, you get an X chromosome from your mom and another X chromosome from your dad.
So, yes, "two copies of each chromosome" and "two copies of the genome" are the same concept, since the genome consists of chromosomes.
I moved to Toronto from Calgary four years ago to do my PhD at the UofT. I love Toronto.
* Toronto has a legacy as one of the best places to do ML, and while it felt like it was losing momentum, the Vector Institute's opening has infused the academic community with incredible energy. Vector's been recruiting top researchers from around the world, but particularly from the US -- there are a number of new Vector members who've come from the Boston/Cambridge area. The academic community in Toronto will only become stronger over the next few years, given how hostile the US has become to students from abroad.
* The strength of the academic community is fuelling a burgeoning startup scene. While it's still early days, there are a number of accelerators associated with the UofT and other entities, so given the talent coming out of the academic system here, I think the community will grow rapidly.
* Quality of life is fantastic. The food and music scenes are world-class, stemming largely from how diverse Toronto is. Downtown Toronto feels like a mixture of Manhattan and Brooklyn, just on a smaller scale. I don't own a car, and only use the subway perhaps once a week -- everything is in easy walking distance.
As to downsides:
* We have a reasonably cold winter from November to March. It's far less harsh than Calgary, though.
* Rent is expensive and rising. I've lived in the downtown core for all four years on a grad student's salary, so it's possible to make it work. But finding accommodations seems only to be getting harder.
* The political interests of the city are often overwhelmed by the sprawling suburbs surrounding it that make up the Greater Toronto Area. The new provincial government seems to be intent on attacking Toronto at every opportunity.
I've had the privilege to travel around the U.S. and Europe quite a bit during my PhD, and it's made me realize how well Toronto compares to the rest of the world. I plan to settle here after graduating -- the tech scene here seems like it's going to explode over the next decade, and it will be a lot of fun to be part of it.
You need to realize that you, and your peers at Vector, are the exception, not the rule. I'ver heard Uber ATG is headhunting people with $500K/year salaries, right after PhD graduation.
Toronto's tech scene is not limited to that narrow and elitist scope of workers.
I think it's easy to dismiss Toronto, but the quality of life items you listed are absolutely correct, as far as I'm concerned. If only housing weren't so expensive and we had a better transit system.
Quality of life is low in Toronto IMHO. It's impossible to find a decent apartment to rent for most: not necessarily because rents are crazy high (2k/mo for a 1BR poorly built condo anyone?) but because landlords are so picky that if you don't offer more than the asking rent include a personal letter, and are luckier than the other 50 applicants, you'll never get a place to live in. The city is also overly crowded and polluted. Traffic is beyond ridiculous, cycling is a nightmare (most dangerous city to cycle in North America). People here are obsessed with money and with living to work. There aren't that many parks and green spaces but a lot of concrete, noise and pollution. A significant number of employers demand that you incorporate so they can "hire" you as a freelancer rather than an employee, and so that the tax fallout of being reclassified as an employee is all on you (because you incorporated.) Overtime is rampant, and most of my colleagues are happy to oblige. Really, Toronto is not a nice place to live. It's an interesting experience because of how diverse it is (I've never seen so many people from so many countries, and I've lived abroad a lot!), but don't come here for quality of life or to make a good living.
Hype has almost universally negative connotations to me. Based on the name, I expected your extension would hide "hyped" stories (where hype is perhaps defined by a high comment-to-upvote ratio for a story), since hype is usually bad. You may wish to consider a new name.
I remember reading about OpenWorm a few years ago and thinking it was ridiculously cool. I'm glad to see the project has persisted. They do a bad job, however, of selling themselves.
1. What have they accomplished to date? I see little more than an animated worm. Tell me about how you're trying to model the worm, and how these approaches may accurately capture its behavior.
2. Why should I care about having an animated worm in my browser? Why is this an appropriate medium to deliver the simulation? If I want to do any kind of science, how will this help me? What I've seen to date looks scarcely more useful than Bonzi Buddy. The most interesting part seems the Academy, but I must donate at least $250 to gain access. This seems counter to the "open" part of "OpenWorm."
3. What academic affiliations does the project have? If the project is useful and has experienced success to date, surely they can recruit students/postdocs/whatever to work on it full-time, with well-established labs making major contributions. Are they computational people? Biology people?
4. What are the bona fides of the people involved? If they can't typeset or capitalize the species' name properly ("C. Elegans") in their video, that doesn't lend much faith to their expertise. The gentleman in the video marvels over the mere "1000 cells" in the worm, but does nothing to put this number in context (with, say, the 10 trillion cells of humans).
I'd love to see this project succeed, and I admire its attempt to recruit funding through a novel means, but the pricing seems too steep, and the overall quality of the pitch is regrettably poor.
Calgary is just silly large and special. My commute to the university is 30 minutes in good traffic by car. Mass transit implies about one and a quarter hours on the ctrain and twenty minutes on a bus. Plus waiting time.
Keep in mind Tokyo is only the center of that metro area. Tokyo itself is 13M people. The full metro area is 35M! Meanwhile calgary is a mere 1M!
Calgary is just not scaling. If we tried to fit 35M people in Calgary the city limits would start hitting the Rockies! Just as CPUs are hitting limits on the speed of light Calgary is hitting limits on safe highway speeds. Mass transit could be improved but it cannot shrink the city.
I don't understand the crux of this fellow's argument. If we can engineer and then print a fully functional cell, one which perhaps performs a function radically different than found in any natural organism, then what we're doing is no longer synthetic biology -- it's nanotechnology. In this case, we're building nanomachines, not cells.
Synthetic biology's appeal is that it leverages nature to do all the heavy lifting -- we don't have to engineer functions from the ground up, but only find similar designs in nature and then tweak them for our purposes. Furthermore, in synbio, we don't actually have to build anything, but only design it. We let nature -- which can assemble cells extremely efficiently, through a process it has been refining for the last four billion years or so -- build our systems for us, once we've translated them into the language of genes. If we have the ability to build our own nanomachines from the ground up (understanding, of course, that the cell is simply a specialized nanomachine built by nature), there's no need to constrain ourselves to the limitations inherent to nature's design. At that point, there's no reason not to divorce ourselves from the "biology" part of "synthetic biology."
The issue of how to deal with people who seek out child porn troubles me. The tone accompanying an article such as this inevitably vilifies those who consume such material, as though this is a clear moral issue. This implies all of us have pedophilic urges, with only those who lack the moral fortitude to resist going on to seek out child porn. But this is not accurate -- I don't have the least desire to view such images, but instead feel a visceral disgust. Most others, I imagine, have the same reaction.
People who want to view sexually explicit images of children are sick, not immoral. They suffer from a deviant urge from which the rest of us are free. The issue, then, should not be how to punish them, but how to cure them of this urge. (Whether such a cure is possible is another matter altogether -- our sexual desires exert regrettable power over our behaviours.) In conjunction, we must do everything we can to halt the dissemination of such material, just as Microsoft is doing here. By shifting our reaction from wanting to punish consumers of child porn to wanting to rehabilitate them, we will encourage more to come forward for treatment, ultimately reducing the amount of such material that is consumed, and thus the number of children harmed in its creation.
I appreciate that you are trying to take a reasonable stand here, but I do think there are some things wrong with your reasoning.
First of all, it is not at all clear that mere consumption of child pornography leads to the production of more child pornography. This gets asserted all the time, but I have never seen anyone produce a shred of evidence for it. Because people tend to see red at this point and stop reading closely, I want to be very, very clear that I am not advocating child abuse in any way. Rather, I think that focusing on consumers of child pornography is a waste of energy that would be better directed at the producers.
When I press people on this (which is not usually a popular move), the response I always get is along the lines of "they wouldn't make it if people weren't watching it", which is, in addition to begging the question, totally at odds with what we know about human sexuality in general. Look at non-pedophiles and you'll find no shortage of people documenting their sexual experiences in various ways that are never meant to be public. Hell, the whole "revenge porn" thing can only exist because people enjoy documenting their sexuality. Perhaps if you eliminated consumption of child pornography, so that the producers of it were truly shouting into the void, you would cut down on some of it. But that's not going to happen, and there's no middle ground. As long as they have some audience, those seeking an exhibitionist thrill will keep doing it.
And if CP stopped existing, would that really plausibly lead to less child abuse? I seriously doubt it. It seems overwhelmingly likely that people who abuse children on camera are doing so primarily because they like to abuse children. Yes, having images of their abuse float around the internet probably adds to the child's psychological pain. But that seems like kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the abuse itself, and the globs of shame and disempowerment that our society smears on victims.
And that's my point here. We waste a tremendous number of resources on trying to solve what is a fairly minor part of the problem. Why? Well, as far as law enforcement is concerned, I suspect that it's because it's easier to catch the consumers (there are more of them), and the rest of us cheer just as hard for either. As far as the rest of us are concerned, I reckon that part of it is that we need someone to pin our anger on for the injustice that's happening to these children. And, reaching into the darker parts of our psyches, we really love to see someone get stomped down, and not have to feel guilty about cheering for it, or worried that we might be next (for evidence of this, pick a random page from any history book and start reading).
Now sometimes, every once in a while, someone notices that consumers of CP are people, like you did. But seeing the cognitive failure is often not enough to recognize the damage that it has done. People's brains are consistency engines, and wrong ideas tend to pollute the ideas they're connected to, like a ripple of wrongness. It's natural, then, when you see a problem with the way people are thinking, to smooth over the inconsistency by saying "well, we should focus on curing them instead of punishing them", and to miss that we're actually focusing on entirely the wrong part of the problem.
And that brings me to one last point: pedophilia is very likely not something we're going to cure - at least, not until we're able to do extensive, direct brain modification. A lot of effort has been put into trying to cure paraphilias and sexual orientations, and it just doesn't seem to be something you can do.
But what we might be able to do is help people who are sexually attracted to children to find harmless outlets for their urges, and teach them to handle them without acting on them. It would also help if we could stop filling them with shame and guilt over something they can't control.
And it would help even more if we could stop filling the victims with shame and guilt over something they can't control. When someone says something like "child abuse is soul murder", we shouldn't let that slide, and we certainly shouldn't nod sadly in agreement to such a fucked up sentiment. We have to stop telling people that they're broken, that they're lost causes, no matter how much delicious anger at the perpetrators it stirs in us. It's selfish.
And it's also selfish to bask in our moral superiority as we obsess over the easiest and most futile part of the problem.
Or a recap from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/can-neur...
I saw a wonderful recording of a talk the authors gave a few years ago (which I regrettably can't find now), and it was amongst the most eye-opening talks I've ever seen.