if you are wondering why people ain’t flinching at deatchs exploding from 10 to 100s to 1000s, it is a cognitive bias that has a name: Scope Insensitivity (or Neglect)
“Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2,000 / 20,000 / 200,000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88.1 This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect : the number of birds saved—the scope of the altruistic action—had little effect on willingness to pay”.
a new demonstration of #quantumsupremacy via #bosonSampling, i.e. solving a calculation problem made with a quantum computer in a time impossible for a traditional computer
It is not therefore a question of having demonstrated a universal, foolproof, scalable or simply useful computer. But the Boson Sampling approach could be useful to go in that direction
The demonstration was made in China, for all the answers, for what we can understand, I refer you to Scott Aaronson who is the referee of the report.
When I refereed the Science paper, I asked why the authors directly verified the results of their experiment only for up to 26-30 photons, relying on plausible extrapolations beyond that. While directly verifying the results of n-photon BosonSampling takes ~2n time for any known classical algorithm, I said, surely it should be possible with existing computers to go up to n=40 or n=50? A couple weeks later, the authors responded, saying that they’d now verified their results up to n=40, but it burned $400,000 worth of supercomputer time so they decided to stop there”
the conversation on Twitter, tha authors did not get properly billed, their sponsor footed the bill, also becasu all went into residentail heating of the nearby houses https://twitter.com/preskill/status/1334900457894891520
nel 2000, durante le lezioni che videro l’elezione di Bush, stavo ad Atlanta, avevo un amico di nome Chad e mi faceva ridere il fatto che la contesa sulle elezioni USA fosse sui chad delle schede elettorali in Florida.
Quando Gore concesse lo sentii come una presidenza scippata, ero imbevuto dell’ottimismo degli anni 90 e anche avere il figlio di Bush alla presidenza americana mi dava la netta sensazione di una china pericolosa, la fine di un’epoca. E infatti
Ero ad Atlanta e cercavo di vendere alla CNN la mia idea di internet newsgathering. Non riuscii mai ad incontrare nessuno di CNN, non riuscii ad andare oltre Cartoon Network e a ripensrci, dovevo considerarlo un segno sulla mia prima startup. L’ho fatta lo stesso tornando in Italia, dove ho poco dopo visutto il malanimo politico del g( di genova, poi sono arrivate le torri gemelle e, visto che le impressioni di Atalanta erano giuste.
Nel 2003 fornimmo a FreespeechTV la copertura via web di tutte le manifestazioni europee contro la guerra in Iraq, internet newsgathering era una realtà.
yesterday I have to give some advise on Covid and while I was talking I said to myself, “you re not anexpert why would you do that” and I answered to myself that “I ve read thinks from good sources, I have checked facts, I have a model of the pandemia in my mind and I believe it is true”
So I felt the urge to reread something I had read sometimes ago in Douglas Hoftadter Strange Loopes and I went looking for it and was the story on Simmballism, SImms and Careenium the billiard pool with vibrating edges
and yes, this is what I needed to read to feel good about models, my belief do not have to be justified alla the way down to single evidences and experiments
powerful nanoscale chemicals, shape-shifting crystals that infect other crystals, ice-nine after all can happen, the AIDS drugs Ritonavir that was lost to this mechanism
“The conk (derived from congolene, a hair straightener gel made from lye) was a hairstyle popular among African-American men from the 1920s to the 1960s.[1] This hairstyle called for a man with naturally “kinky” hair to have it chemically straightened using a relaxer (sometimes the pure corrosive chemical lye)”
“So sharing has become a key element in my reading, and the trying to figure out what the interesting thing is that I want to share is a very good way of focusing your mind on what the core — I read a piece, so what are the three sentences here I want to cut and paste? Which is the graph that is really telling? And how do I nuggetize that into whatever it is — 280 characters? I found that, at this stage of my life, I know this isn’t necessarily the best way to read complicated philosophy of history, which I also spent a lot of time doing at various points in my career.”
for me it’s 1300 charcter short essay format of Linkedin, pretty much same psychological lever
1500-Pound Goat 