Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) has been referred to as a fertilizer for your brain.
Low levels of BDNF have been associated with depression, anxiety,
poor memory and brain degeneration as seen in conditions such as
Alzheimer's and dementia.
...
Don't try to learn something while exercising ... – blood flow increases
to the brain post-exercise, while BDNF levels are still increased,
meaning immediately after exercise is the perfect time to take in new
information.
There are three main systems that provide us with the sensory information about our bodies and the surrounding environment that we need to maintain balance. These are the visual (eyes), vestibular (inner ear and semi-circular canals) and somotosensory (sensation feedback from joints in ankles, knees, spine and neck) systems. To maintain balance, our brains must rapidly and continuously integrate and then process the sensory information received from these systems, and this integration is often worse in older people who are prone to falls.
Russ Roberts EconTalk podcast.
Early detection of cancer seems like a very good idea.
But it's a lot more complicated than it seems.
Oncologist and epidemiologist Vinay Prasad of the University of California,
San Francisco talks to EconTalk's Russ Roberts about why many tests
to detect cancer do little or nothing to extend lifespan.
...
And so, when that revenue is threatened, as in the recent trial called
NordICC--which failed to find a benefit on colorectal cancer mortality
-- a lot of people are going to be very defensive.
...
If you look at all-cause mortality in all of the mammographic screening
trials put together, you will find there's just no signal there.
It's just not budging all-cause mortality. It looks pretty null.
Matthew Yglesias
One problem, I think, is that while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught. It also, in my view, greatly complicates the question of the right policy response for the United States of America. As a matter of pure-position taking, I think it’s easy to say that the right stance is “Hamas is bad, it is correct to make war on them, but the ongoing colonization of the West Bank is also bad and Israel ought to halt and partially reverse it.” But I don’t know that foreign countries can actually craft a policy that makes that outcome any more likely.
Want to really understand how large language models work? Here’s a gentle primer.
Conventional software is created by human programmers who give computers
explicit, step-by-step instructions. In contrast, ChatGPT is built on a
neural network that was trained using billions of words of ordinary language.
...
As a result, no one on Earth fully understands the inner workings of LLMs.
Researchers are working to gain a better understanding, but this is a
slow process that will take years—perhaps decades—to complete.
webpage capture
Search the archive for saved snapshots by copying and pasting the link (without the query string, that is everything after the '?' in the URL), in the blue box.