A collection of flotsam and jetsam from trolling the World Wide Web for your browsing pleasure.
A few things – the number of transportation deaths per 100k people was 20% higher in 2000 vs 2020. – Suicides have gone up, but have always hovered around the transportation rate, so it didn’t take much to overtake it – Fentanyl scourge is China’s revenge for the Opium wars- cancer treatments have Improved
The biggest new attraction that just opened in Las Vegas is a $2.3 billion worlds’ biggest sphere. U-2 will inaugurate it with a concert.
The outside has 1.2 billion LED lights. This is an artist that lights it up with his constantly changing AI generated images.
Here is some background on this mega project…
Confirmation Bias – We interpret new information as confirmation of our existing beliefs.
Availability Bias – We rely on information that comes to our mind easily/the quickest.
Action Bias – We favor action over inaction. That’s why we sell or buy prematurely.
Overconfidence – We overestimate our own knowledge and ability. Often because we know too little to understand better. (Less knowledge => more confidence)
Survivorship Bias – This is a sample bias that occurs when we assess only successful outcomes and disregard failures.
Reactive Devaluation – Automatically devaluing opinions from opposing sites or people you dislike.
Ostrich Effect – The tendency to avoid negative (financial) information by pretending not to see it.
Illusion of Validity – Our tendency to overestimate our ability to accurately interpret and predict outcomes. We draw conclusions to make a story coherent and then ignore possible alternatives completely.
Hyperbolic Discounting – We are wired to prefer instant gratification (e.g. payouts). Even when offered significantly more in the future.
Post-Purchase Rationalisation – After a buying decision, we immediately erase all doubts and rationalize our decision. This works combined with the confirmation bias.
Illusion of Asymmetric Insight – We often believe our knowledge surpasses the knowledge of our peers.
False Consensus Effect – Too often, we overestimate the degree to which others agree with us.
Egocentric Bias – Tendency to ascribe oneself more responsibility for success than others or outside factors (e.g. luck or circumstance).
Pro-Innovation Bias – The tendency to overweight the possible usefulness and oversee risks.
Choice Supportive Bias – When we choose something, we feel positive about it. We disregard flaws or mistakes in our logic and switch to a state of cognitive ease.
Self-Serving Bias – We conceive our failures as situational while we claim full responsibility for our successes.
Curse of knowledge – Once we know something, it’s hard to imagine that other people don’t. We automatically assume that everyone else knows it, too.
Dunning-Kruger Effect – The less you know, the more confident you are. The more you know, the less confident you are.
This effect is similar to WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is)
Belief Bias – We determine the strength of an argument based on how plausible its conclusion is to us, not by how strongly it supports that conclusion.
Escalation of Commitment – We remain committed to things we already invested in.
Pulling out of them feels like a waste of resources. This even applies if pulling out is obviously the best option.
Gambler’s Fallacy – We tend to think that past events affect future possibilities.
Zero-Risk Bias – If a risk is considered small, we assume there is no risk at all.
Outgroup Homogeneity Bias – We perceive outgroup members as homogenous and ingroup members as more diverse.
Clustering Illusion – We always look for cause-effect relationships. Thus, we find patterns and clusters even in totally random data.
Blind Spot Bias – We overlook biases in our own decision-making and see them more in others.
Recency Bias – We tend to put too much weight on recent events.
When things are great, we think they will get only better.
When things are bad, we think they will get only worse.
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Hey, I’m Daniel, 22 years old and currently studying Economics and Finance.
Since the news business has changed from reporting to profits, keeping eyeballs is what it is all about.
Fox found this out after they accurately reported that Trump was projected to lose Arizona. Tucker Carlson then ranted about how their viewership was going down, along with the stock price with which he was richly compensated. He understood that their viewers were there to hear what they need to believe. And if they didn’t get it, they would move to Newsmax, Onan and other alternative news sources that would feed the beast.
Rush Limbaugh always understood that and bragged that he was an Entertainer. Are you entertained?
For any democracy to it operate efficiently, it needs an informed electorate. So how do you sort out the news from the fire hose of information flow these days?
1)Realize that your. 00001 experience of the world contributes to 80% of your worldview. Approach your understanding with a scientist skepticism that he’s always willing to accept that he could be wrong.
2)Intentionally expose yourself to opposing views. We don’t like to do this because it makes us uncomfortable. Over the years I have developed a diversity of writers that I follow on the hellscape that is Twitter. Most of us don’t have a luxury of time to do that. It’s not easy being free, when you don’t have an emperor to make all the decisions for you.
3) Turn off the Crisis News networks . If there isn’t good video footage, or if the victim isn’t attractive, you won’t hear about it . Just like the print media, television is all about eyeballs. Now there are live news events that television coverage excels at. Television Studios nowadays don’t need to wait for their cameras to warm up to go live. Walter Cronkite had to wait to give the world the shocking news about Kennedy being shot in Dallas.
4) Read some news sources from outside the United States bubble. Here are some free websites that also have free apps for your handhelds.
A good one to see the southeast Asian perspective on the world is the Asia Times https://asiatimes.com/
Also, try the Arab news source https://www.aljazeera.com/
France 24 for another perspective https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/
The Guardian is one of the few British rags that isn’t just a tabloid http://thrguardian.com/
If you can afford subscription the Financial Times, The Week, The Economist, Wall Street Journal and NY Times will cover a lot of area.
A great little tool that I use is an aggregator that ranks stories by their number of hits in real time. Bookmark this handy page
5) Last, but not least, Social Media is just that and not a source of verifiable information. Outrage and anger build engagement. Realize that you are being baited with these emotions to click on their stories.
Published: June 20, 2022 8.29am EDT
Imagine traveling back in time and observing the oceans of 5 million years ago.
As you stand on an ancient shoreline, you see several small whales in the distance, gliding along the surface of an ancient sea.
Suddenly, and without warning, an enormous creature erupts out of the depths.
With its massive jaws, the monster crushes one of the whales and drags it down into the deep. Large chunks of the body are ripped off and swallowed whole. The rest of the whales scatter.
You have just witnessed mealtime for megalodon – formally known as Otodus megalodon – the largest shark ever.
As a scientist who studies sharks and other ocean species, I am fascinated by the awesome marine predators that have appeared and disappeared through the eons.
That includes huge swimming reptiles like ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and the mosasaurs. These incredible predators lived during the time of the dinosaurs; megalodon would not appear for another 50 million years.
But when it did arrive on the scene, about 15 million to 20 million years ago, the megalodon must have been an incredible sight.
A fully grown individual weighed about 50 metric tons – that’s more than 110,000 pounds (50,000 kilograms) – and was 50 to 60 feet long (15 to 18 meters). This animal was longer than a school bus and as heavy as a railroad car!
Its jaws were up to 10 feet (3 meters) wide, the teeth up to 7 inches (17.8 centimeters) long and the bite force was 40,000 pounds per square inch (2,800 kilograms per square centimeter).
Not surprisingly, megalodons ate big prey. Scientists know this because they’ve found chips of megalodon teeth embedded in the bones of large marine animals. On the menu, along with whales: large fish, seals, sea lions, dolphins and other sharks.
Internet rumors persist that modern-day megalodons exist – that they still swim around in today’s oceans.
But that’s not true. Megalodons are extinct. They died out about 3.5 million years ago.
And scientists know this because, once again, they looked at the teeth. All sharks – including megalodons – produce and ultimately lose tens of thousands of teeth throughout their lives.
That means lots of those lost megalodon teeth are around as fossils. Some are found at the bottom of the ocean; others washed up on shore.
But nobody has ever found a megalodon tooth that’s less than 3.5 million years old. That’s one of the reasons scientists believe megalodon went extinct then.
What’s more, megalodons spent much of their time relatively close to shore, a place where they easily found prey.
So if megalodons still existed, people would certainly have seen them. They were way too big to miss; we would have lots of photographs and videos.Watch this PBS Eons video and learn more about the megalodon shark.
It probably wasn’t one single thing that led to the extinction of this amazing megapredator, but a complex mix of challenges.
First, the climate dramatically changed. Global water temperature dropped; that reduced the area where megalodon, a warm-water shark, could thrive.
Second, because of the changing climate, entire species that megalodon preyed upon vanished forever.
At the same time, competitors helped push megalodon to extinction – that includes the great white shark. Even though they were only one-third the size of megalodons, the great whites probably ate some of the same prey.
Then there were killer sperm whales, a now-extinct type of sperm whale. They grew as large as megalodon and had even bigger teeth. They were also warmblooded; that meant they enjoyed an expanded habitat, because living in cold waters wasn’t a problem.
Killer sperm whales probably traveled in groups, so they had an advantage when encountering a megalodon, which probably hunted alone.
The cooling seas, the disappearance of prey and the competition – it was all too much for the megalodon.
And that’s why you’ll never find a modern-day megalodon tooth.From NatGeo
Will the Server Farms of today turn into Server Cities to supply the Fifth Industrial Age’s insatiable drive for more computing power?
Or will it be like the Main Frame Computer being overtaken by the PC?
But nowadays the PC in your hand, i.e. your cellphone, offloads it’s computing load to more powerful computers at a server farm. A server farm is actually a large number of PCs hooked up parallelly. All that data has been harnessed in Large Language Models (LLM) to train Artificial Intelligence (AI).
By winning the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Britain was able to produce the ships and tanks that powered their Empire. Whoever wins the AI race (the Fifth Industrial Revolution) will dominate this century and maybe beyond. This thoughtful interview will brief you on the implications of our ongoing competition with China and why we should win, except for one caveat –
this idea of “temporal claustrophobia,” where the Kaiser, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany all convinced themselves they were at a high watermark.
Jeffrey Ding
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JUL 10, 2023
Jeffrey Ding is a professor at George Washington University and the creator of the ChinAI Substack. He argues in a recent paper that great powers must harness general-purpose technologies if they want to achieve global dominance.
In this show, we discuss the historical underpinnings of that argument and apply it to AI today — drawing out policymaking lessons spanning centuries of technologically driven great power transitions. We also get into:
Co-hosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of DeepMind and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Click on the 2 page to read the whole interview. It is worth your time to learn about what will undeniably will be the defining driver of our age.
NPR chose today to follow-up on a story that literally blew up on Jan. 20, 2022 when the underwater eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai sent megatons of water vapor into the stratosphere, contributing to an increase in global warming over the next 5 years.
NPR picked up on the story today https://whttp://NPR picked up on the story today https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stratosphere-water-warming
EOS noted back in March that the extra moisture in the upper atmosphere would trap enough heat to warm the climate 1.5 degrees in the publication
And Space.com in Marchhttps://www.space.com/tonga-eruption-water-vapor-warm-earth
So while this vapor will eventually dissipate, we don’t know if it will leave any permanent changes to the chemical composition of the upper atmosphere. We do know that the excess warmth will speed up the melting in Greenland that threatens the stability of the gulf Stream and will also release more methane stored in the permafrost.
You want to see why the writers and actors are on strike?
Because they have seen the future and they are not in it.
This Barbie/Oppenheimer trailer was all made with AI tools that are available to the Public. Yes some of them require subscriptions, but the fees are nominal. That’s how I made this hot date night for them.
Now it is time for your feature Trailer…
Published: July 21, 2023 8.28am EDT in The Conversation
As scorching heat grips large swaths of the Earth, a lot of people are trying to put the extreme temperatures into context and asking: When was it ever this hot before?
Globally, 2023 has seen some of the hottest days in modern measurements, but what about farther back, before weather stations and satellites?
Some news outlets have reported that daily temperatures hit a 100,000-year high.
As a paleoclimate scientist who studies temperatures of the past, I see where this claim comes from, but I cringe at the inexact headlines. While this claim may well be correct, there are no detailed temperature records extending back 100,000 years, so we don’t know for sure.
Here’s what we can confidently say about when Earth was last this hot.
Scientists concluded a few years ago that Earth had entered a new climate state not seen in more than 100,000 years. As fellow climate scientist Nick McKay and I recently discussed in a scientific journal article, that conclusion was part of a climate assessment report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2021.
Earth was already more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times, and the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were high enough to assure temperatures would stay elevated for a long time.
Even under the most optimistic scenarios of the future – in which humans stop burning fossil fuels and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions – average global temperature will very likely remain at least 1 C above preindustrial temperatures, and possibly much higher, for multiple centuries.
This new climate state, characterized by a multi-century global warming level of 1 C and higher, can be reliably compared with temperature reconstructions from the very distant past. (To continue reading go to Page 2 below)