Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The most invasive data breach imaginable is a political scandal Democrats can't just wish away.
Very long, sordid New York Magazine Intelligencer article about Hunter Biden. Many details you may not know if you don't view right-wing media.
The first thing you need to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop, though, is that it's not a laptop. The FBI reportedly took possession of the original - at least if you accept the version of events promoted by those who have distributed the data, which Hunter Biden and his lawyers don't - and all we have now are copies of copies.
Also somewhat related, Two conspiracy theories about cola:
P.S. All sugary drinks are bad for you, don't drink them.
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing.
But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work. Better ideas don't always triumph immediately, but they do triumph eventually, because they're more useful. You can't land on the moon using Aristotle's physics, you can't turn mud into frogs using spontaneous generation, and you can't build bombs out of phlogiston. Newton's laws of physics stuck around; his recipe for the Philosophers's Stone didn't. We didn't need a scientific establishment to smother the wrong ideas. We needed it to let new ideas challenge old ones, and time did the rest.
If you've got weak-link worries, I totally get it. If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don't actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say "INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL," and those stickers are very hard to get off. That's way scarier.
Video of panalists Susan Schneider and Jonathan Birch presentations at the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, Dec 7, 2022.
Get a free account to use OpenAI ChatGPT,
the latest AI fascination.
Note, it requires a non-voip phone number to verify a user.
For some commentary about it, see Autocomplete: Coming to terms with our new textual culture.
An understanding of the past in which not just our intellectual
successes but our technological breakthroughs occupy pride of
place would be very different from the political one that dominates
now. Instead of politics and war, and the growth, rise, and decline
of states and empires being the focus, the central story would
rather be one of human cooperation and inventiveness, innovation
and scientific and technological progress and discovery, and the
improvement in human well-being than the deeds (often diabolical)
of those with power.
...
If it is the case that human ingenuity solving problems is the most
potent force in history, why do so many still fixate upon politics,
wars, and revolutions?
Daniel Jassby | April 19, 2017
Conclusion:The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of "unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy." Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It's something to be shunned.
Scientists seek a single description of reality. But modern physics allows for many different descriptions, many equivalent to one another, connected through a vast landscape of mathematical possibility.
A more dramatic conclusion is that all traditional descriptions of fundamental physics have to be thrown out. Particles, fields, forces, symmetries - they are all just artifacts of a simple existence at the outposts in this vast landscape of impenetrable complexity. Thinking of physics in terms of elementary building blocks appears to be wrong, or at least of limited reach. Perhaps there is a radical new framework uniting the fundamental laws of nature that disregards all the familiar concepts. The mathematical intricacies and consistencies of string theory are a strong motivation for this dramatic point of view. But we have to be honest. Very few current ideas about what replaces particles and fields are "crazy enough to be true," to quote Niels Bohr.