#SlideRules: Gone But Not Forgotten http://www.AmericanScientist.org/issues/pub/2017/3/slide-rules-gone-but-not-forgotten Live on in logos & architecture + the desire to estimate orders of magnitude
Posts Tagged ‘x57s’
A.I. Versus M.D.
May 7, 2017AI v MD by @DrSidMukherjee http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md great progress finding skin #cancer. Eventually, continuous monitoring via iPhone pics
QT:{{"
“In June, 2015, Thrun’s team began to test what the machine had learned from the master set of images by presenting it with a “validation set”: some fourteen thousand images that had been diagnosed by dermatologists (although not necessarily by biopsy). Could the system correctly classify the images into three diagnostic categories—benign lesions, malignant lesions, and non-cancerous growths? The system got the answer right seventy-two per cent of the time. …Two board-certified dermatologists who were tested alongside did worse: they got the answer correct sixty-six per cent of the time.
…
“There’s one rather profound thing about the network that wasn’t fully emphasized in the paper,” Thrun told me. In the first iteration of the study, he and the team had started with a totally naïve neural network. But they found that if they began with a neural network that had already been trained to recognize some unrelated feature (dogs versus cats, say) it learned faster and better. Perhaps our brains function similarly. Those mind-numbing exercises in high school—factoring polynomials, conjugating verbs, memorizing the periodic table—were possibly the opposite: mind-sensitizing.”
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Sarah Silverman, Mark Ruffalo and Edward Norton at Turtle Ball – NYTimes.com
May 1, 2017At the turtle ball
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/04/19/fashion/sarah-silverman-mark-ruffalo-edward-norton-turtle-ball.html “I relate deeply to a #turtle…1 thing I’ve learned is to just set your course & plod…through”
QT:{{”
“Mr. Ruffalo accepted his award. “I’m sure I’m not the first person to ever say this, but I relate deeply to a turtle,” he said. “I’m really an introvert even though I’m an actor. And the one thing that I’ve learned is to just set your course and slowly plod your way through it.”
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Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker
April 28, 2017Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious #Hacker
https://www.Wired.com/2017/03/russian-hacker-spy-botnet/ A
progression: Zeus, the Business Club & then espionage
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“As far as anyone could tell, GameOver Zeus was controlled by a very elite group of hackers—and the group’s leader was Slavik. He had reemerged, more powerful than ever. Slavik’s new crime ring came to be called the Business Club. A September 2011 internal announcement to the group—introducing members to a new suite of online tools for organizing money transfers and mules—concluded with a warm welcome to Slavik’s select recipients: “We wish you all successful and productive work.””
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Can we hit the snooze button on aging? | March 6, 2017 Issue – Vol. 95 Issue 10 | Chemical & Engineering News
April 23, 2017Can we hit the snooze button on #aging?
http://CEN.acs.org/articles/95/i10/hit-snooze-button-aging.html Various ways to tackle this timeless issue; for me more pertinent by the day
In-browser Mac OS 7.0.1 emulation, compatible software suite arrives at the Internet Archive
April 23, 2017In-browser [classic] Mac OS7 emulation…arrives at the Internet
Archive http://AppleInsider.com/articles/17/04/16/in-browser-mac-os-701-emulation-compatible-software-suite-arrives-at-the-internet-archive Gr8 for old file formats if upload possible
Opinion | The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
April 16, 2017The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/04/08/opinion/sunday/the-utter-uselessness-of-job-interviews.html Random answers work better for interviewees than correct ones HT @shantaolee
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“It gets worse. Unbeknown to our subjects, we had instructed some of the interviewees to respond randomly to their questions. Though many of our interviewers were allowed to ask any questions they wanted, some were told to ask only yes/no or this/that questions. In half of these interviews, the interviewees were instructed to answer honestly. But in the other half, the interviewees were instructed to answer randomly. Specifically, they were told to note the first letter of each of the last two words of any question, and to see which category, A-M or N-Z, each letter fell into. If both letters were in the same category, the interviewee answered “yes” or took the “this” option; if the letters were in different categories, the interviewee answered “no” or took the “that” option.”
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Baths Versus Exercise, a Study in Calories – The Atlantic
April 16, 2017Baths vs #Exercise, a Study in Calories
https://www.theAtlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/baths-and-calories/522756 In 1hr, burn 60 in a hot bath vs ~550 on a bike ride. Laziness has benefits!
QT:{{”
The researchers set out to see how exposure to heat can alter the molecules in our bodies. There were only 14 people (all men) in the study. They took hour-long baths at 104-degrees Fahrenheit and did burn calories, which were also measured, since energy is required to keep our cores around 98.6-degrees. But the men only burned an average of about 61 calories more than if they had been sitting at room temperature. When they exercised on a bike for the same amount of time, they burned between 515 and 597 calories.
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Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever
April 10, 2017SV’s Quest to Live Forever
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever Cal. restriction to #Singularity: Immortalists v Healthspanners, Meat Puppets v RoboCops
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“Immortalists fall into two camps. Those who might be called the Meat Puppets, led by de Grey, believe that we can retool our biology and remain in our bodies. The RoboCops, led by Kurzweil, believe that we’ll eventually merge with mechanical bodies and/or with the cloud. Kurzweil is a lifelong fixer and optimizer: early in his career, he invented the flatbed scanner and a machine that reads books aloud to the blind. Those inventions have improved dramatically in subsequent iterations, and now he’s positive that what he calls “the law of accelerating returns” for human longevity is about to kick in.”
…
“The battle between healthspanners and immortalists is essentially a contest between the power of evolution as ordained by nature and the potential power of evolution as directed by man. The healthspanners see us as subject to linear progress: animal studies take the time that they take; life sciences move at the speed of life. Noting that median life expectancy has been increasing in developed nations by about two and a half years a decade, Verdin told me, “If we can keep that pace up for the next two hundred years, and increase our life spans by forty years, that would be incredible.”
The immortalists have a different view of both our history and our potential. They see centuries of wild theorizing (that aging could be reversed by heating the body, or by breathing the same air as young virgins) swiftly replaced by computer-designed drugs and gene therapies. Bill Maris said, “Health technology, which for five thousand years was symptomatic and episodic—‘Here are some
leeches!’—is becoming an information technology, where we can read and edit our own genomes.”
Many immortalists view aging not as a biological process but as a physical one: entropy demolishing a machine. And, if it’s a machine, couldn’t it be like a computer?
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“And yet. Last year, the geneticist Nir Barzilai hosted a screening of a documentary about longevity, and afterward he posed a question to the three hundred people in the audience. He told me, “I said, ‘In nature, longevity and reproduction are exchangeable. So Choice One is, you are immortalized, but there is no more reproduction on Earth, no pregnancy, no first birthday, no first love’—and I go on and on and on.” He laughed, amused by his own determination to load the dice. “ ‘Choice Two,’ I said, ‘is you live to be eighty-five and not one day sick, everything healthy and fine, and then one morning you just don’t wake up.” The vote was decisive, he said. “Choice One got ten or fifteen people. Everyone else raised their hands for Choice Two.”
This wish to preserve life as we know it, even at the cost of dying, is profoundly human. We are encoded”
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Good hydrations: From water to wine, how drinks affect health | New Scientist
April 10, 2017Good hydrations..water to wine, how drinks affect health
https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/good-hydrations Negative on fruit juice & bottled water. Positive on coffee
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