5 Intriguing Things
1. A warning about new image-recognition capabilities from a leader in the techniques.
"Before, it would take months of my time to build a classifier for just one kind of object. Now any competent engineer with a bit of training can do the same thing in days. Image analysis algorithms used to be rare handcrafted Fabergé eggs, but now they’re cheap off-the-shelf components made on a production line... All of us have become used to uploading photos and videos safe in the knowledge that we have privacy through obscurity, but as data-mining images becomes easy, they could come back to haunt us."
2. How the health care experience has changed over the last 50 years.
"Until 1914, a patient who received charitable care from a hospital had no right to deny care or refuse to take part in medical experiments. The Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital case changed that, establishing informed consent. But doctors would still withhold critical information, Kernahan says. If you were a married woman with cancer in the 1950s or '60s, there was a chance you wouldn't be informed of your diagnosis – though your husband likely would be. Some physicians felt that knowing you could have a potentially negative or life-threatening diagnosis could hurt patients' psychological health, and therefore affect their prognosis, Kernahan says."
3. Where do your early childhood memories go?
"Young children have a tenuous grip on chronology. They are years from mastering clocks and calendars, and thus have a hard time nailing an event to a specific time and place. They also don’t have the vocabulary to describe an event, and without that vocabulary, they can’t create the kind of causal narrative that Peterson found at the root of a solid memory. And they don’t have a greatly elaborated sense of self, which would encourage them to hoard and reconsider chunks of experience as part of a growing life-narrative. Frail as they are, children’s memories are then susceptible to a process called shredding. In our early years, we create a storm of new neurons in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus and continue to form them throughout the rest of our lives, although not at nearly the same rate. A recent study by the neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto suggests that this process, called neurogenesis, can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories."
4. The state of the art in 1930s theoretical space flight.
"Soviet model makers built this spacecraft based on the designs and notes of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Late in his life, much of Tsiolkovsky's theoretical work focused on ideas about transporting humans into space on board rockets. Although this model, reflecting the scientist's ideas, grossly overestimates the living space available on board a rocket, it does convey a sophisticated understanding of the physical constraints of space travel for that time. Among Tsiolkovsky's concerns were the effects of acceleration and weightlessness on the human body."
5. Somehow, the BBC got renowned primatologist Frans de Waal to talk about The Planet of the Apes.
"'The apes are very humanised: They walk on two legs, they talk - somewhat - they shed tears. In real life, apes do a lot of crying and screaming, but they don't produce tears like we do.' However, other aspects of ape behaviour in the film, he says, are true to life. 'We know chimpanzees are aggressive and territorial - they wage war. The use of tools and weapons is also a possibility,' he explains. To quote a colleague in his field, he said: 'If you gave guns to chimps, they would use them.'
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
celerity. Swiftness, speed, now used chiefly with reference to living beings, as opposed to velocity, used for the rate of speed of objects.
If You Gave Guns to Chimps