Quantity trumps Quality
Ro.bert
Hey there,
Robert here 👾Here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌Some things I thought were worth sharing this week!
Follow the white rabbit 🐇
....🎶 Something to listen while reading
I started listening to handpan music. Handpan is a term for a group of musical instruments that are classified as a subset of the steelpan.
Here is a playlist I enjoyed on Spotify.Also something on YouTube.
Complex, fiery, divisive 🔥
This is a Q&A excerpt on the topic of AI from a lecture by Richard Feynman from September 26th, 1985.
Nuclear Forces’ Messaging System Finally Got Rid of Its Floppy Disks
Anti-aging intervention, partial reprogramming, now applied to the brain of aged mice.
This newsletter is a COVID-free territory, but an exception can be made for the super-fast development of mRNAvaccines.
DeepMind does bio
AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology
Google’s DeepMind announced ‘Alphafold’, which uses machine learning to work out the likely structures of complex folded proteins. This is a long-running, important and very hard biology and medicine problem, and people who (unlike me) know what folded proteins are think this is a very big deal. A general observation, though - we seem to have two tracks in ML. On one hand, cutting-edge scientists inside cutting-edge companies unlock dramatic new things. But on the other, huge numbers of boring old-economy companies automate internal processes with pieces of ML that have very quickly become generic commodities. Somehow ML is both rocket science and tractors. Link via Benedict Evans
Mathematical Theory of Communication
In 1956, 8 years after introducing information theory to the world with “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Claude Shannon reflected on the incredible popularity of Information theory, and its scientific bandwagon.
From the paper: “Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems.”
Read the short paper here: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-bandwagon
When does a human embryo have the moral status of a person?
On 25 July 1978, the birth of a baby at a hospital in Oldham in England was greeted by the public and medical community alike with an intense mix of celebration and consternation. Heralded as the world’s first ‘test tube baby’, little Louise Brown was born by in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a then groundbreaking technology that involves an embryo being created from an egg and sperm in a Petri dish, before being implanted into the potential mother’s uterus.
How to plan a research project
What follows is a distillation of what I’ve learned about this process over 27 years as a professional social scientist. It reflects the skills that my own professors imparted in the sociology doctoral programme at Harvard, as well as what I learned later on as a research supervisor for Ivy League PhD and MA students, and then as the author of award-winning scholarly books and articles. It can be adapted to the demands of both short projects (such as course term papers) and long ones, such as a thesis.
One can also take a look at Michael Nielsen’s Principles of Effective Research
Cool tech I found this week🧞
ListenLater.fm A read-it-later service that turns the articles you send it into a private audio podcast. Listen to articles you don’t have time to read.
PolotnoFree web app to make graphic designs. A hustle-free alternative to canva.com and crello.com. No signups, no ads.
Part of Z-Library project. The world’s largest ebook library
👽 My latest YouTube video
why Quantity trumps Quality (always)
🐦 Tweet for thought
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Bits & Pieces
Ask yourself “what are those things that I find just stick in my brain effortlessly? And what things go right through me” – Angela DuckworthGet Those Broccoli Sprouts: Clinical studies have linked the benefits of sulforaphane to a variety of chronic diseases such as autism, aflatoxin toxicity, cancer, air pollution toxicity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes – and much more – Dr. Rhonda Patrick
That’s it! 👋
Thanks for reading!If you enjoyed this, maybe I can tempt you with my YouTube channel.
My website is here.💌 My Favorite Links: articles I’ve enjoyed, podcasts, tech, software, ideas, and personal philosophies.
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Again, you can also reach out via Instagram, Twitter, or using gravitational waves.That said, how’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment?
I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message and telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been up in your world.
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Have a great day ahead!
