Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Sara Imari Walker, Filmed on April 1, 02025
Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker proposes a new paradigm for using physics to deepen our understanding of what we recognize as life. Assembly theory is a framework that uses the physics of molecular complexity to open a new path to identify where the threshold lies for life to arise from non-life, drawing in insights from new discoveries on the nature of historical contingency and time itself.
Prior frameworks in both physics and biology have failed to explain life as a general phenomenon. While the Darwinian theory of evolution via natural selection governs much of the development of complex life on our planet, and our contemporary understanding of physics has deepened our understanding of what could possibly exist under its laws, neither system can fully explain how life can originate, nor what forms of life are more likely to exist than others.
Assembly theory is an informational theory of life: it fundamentally holds that life requires information to specify its existence - that objects complex enough to require a many-step, informationally-driven process of assembly are evidence of life, even if the forms they take do not necessarily resemble life as we know it.
Also see this interview with polymath Christoph Adami who is investigating life's origins by reimagining living things as self-perpetuating information strings.
To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as "the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance," and he says we should think of the human genome - or the genome of any organism - as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate.
According to OpenAI's internal tests, o3 and o4-mini, which are so-called reasoning models, hallucinate more often than the company's previous reasoning models - o1, o1-mini, and o3-mini - as well as OpenAI's traditional, "non-reasoning" models, such as GPT-4o.
Perhaps more concerning, the ChatGPT maker doesn't really know why it's happening.
Noah Smith in The Free Press
What the New Right wants Europe (and the Anglosphere) to do is to go back to being the tough, hard-ass champion of racial homogeneity and Christian heritage that Americans imagined it to be before 2010. What they want is for Europe to venerate these organizing principles. They want Europe to be vocally proud of its Christian heritage, and to prioritize the interests of white Europeans as the true sons of the soil.
This also explains the New Right's respect and admiration for Russia. Sure, people in Russia don't go to church, and they get divorced at high rates. But the Russian Orthodox Church supports Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, and the country hasn't been inundated by Muslim immigrants. So to the New Right, Russia feels like a much truer standard-bearer for Western Civilization than modern Europe does.
The duo only ever wrote one research paper together, in 1973, but that work is now considered a turning point in the study of learning and memory. Published in the Journal of Physiology, it was the first demonstration that when a neuron - a cell that receives and sends signals throughout the nervous system - signals to another neuron frequently enough, the second neuron will later respond more strongly to new signals, not for just seconds or minutes, but for hours.
It would take decades to fully understand the implications of their research, but Bliss and Lømo had discovered something momentous: a phenomenon called long-term potentiation, or LTP, which researchers now know is fundamental to the brain's ability to learn and remember. Today, scientists agree that LTP plays a major role in the strengthening of neuronal connections, or synapses, that allow the brain to adjust in response to experience. And growing evidence suggests that LTP may also be crucially involved in a variety of problems, including memory deficits and pain disorders.
Sabrina Carpenter and Jack Antonoff discuss the making of the 2024 hit single “Please Please Please" (cowritten with Amy Allen) on the Song Exploder podcast hosted by Hrishikesh Hirway.
The turning point, he reckons, was Live Aid (in which he himself played a central role, presenting the BBC's coverage with Mark Ellen). When Paul McCartney performed, he was greeted like some sort of curio from the past, an Old Testament prophet emerging from the haze of the desert; he was forty-three years of age. Cut to Glastonbury 2022 and no such bewilderment surrounds appearances by the octogenarian Macca: digging an old legend is now commonplace, unremarkable, almost compulsory. Live Aid did three things. It convinced artists that there was no need to be embarrassed about their back catalogues or their thickening waistlines - audiences would lap up the former and, probably, share the latter. It told the music and publishing industries that there was no upper age limit for the enjoyment of music, particularly old music. And it tipped the wink to bands that when record sales faltered, they could still make a handsome living strutting their stuff not in the half-ignored distance of festival fields, but in enormodome sports stadiums.
And perhaps related: When did people stop dancing at the club?
Technology couldn't destroy God
In the same way, the death of progress does not mean that new discoveries will no longer be made in laboratories or that new technologies will stop finding their way to the marketplace.
What it means, rather, is that these, and the rest of the odd assortment of things currently lumped together under the label of "progress", will no longer benefit from the aura of inevitability that popular culture assigned them in the past century. The once-widespread faith that what is newer must be better, just because it is newer, is already looking decidedly shopworn.
Events Happening in New York
The social-media giant has manifested its final form: not digital connector, but digital bazaar.