102 - Just me? 🤔
Hey there, !
Welcome again - Melbourne's in an extended lockdown once again, and I hope wherever you are, you're staying safe, warm and healthy.
Anyway, a shorter piece this week:
Have you ever...
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experienced a situation that calls for a specific emotion, but imagine yourself being in a movie and acting the way you think that you should be if there was a camera on you, rather than just reacting how your body tells you? There's so many situations where I'm like 'I should cry here' but I don't actually feel like crying but I cry anyway. I feel like there's a psychological reason for it but I don't know for sure...
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...borrowed a book from a library, renewed it 4 times, and then still get angry because you haven't got through Chapter 1 even though you had 4 months to read it? Especially if it's like...a BIG book that you just had too much other content to get through so you couldn't get through it. It's not my fault that books are so long and I have such a short attention span these days!
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...gone on to social media and stumbled upon something someone's posted that you vehemently disagree with, yet you thought you knew them since you were friends but now question your entire friendship? Bonus points if you type up a heated response, then delete your comment so you don't have to be involved in pointless arguments online for the rest of the day, but then stew on what would have happened if you had posted it, thus defeating the purpose of not posting it in the first place.
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...felt like everything you do is going towards some ultimate human race goal that you will have had some small part of and that's what keeps you going? Like...one day someone finds the cure to both cancer and climate change in one fell swoop, and that was the ultimate accomplishment of the human race which you had a really miniscule part to play (by, for example, backing out of your driveway kind of carefully so you didn't crash into one of the ancestors of the doctor / researcher that was part of the team that helped to pave the way for a new technological method that was ultimately used to combine medical and environmental solutions - if you didn't do that, it wouldn't have happened! Thanks saviour)
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...picked up a funny shaped stone when you were <15 years old, left it in a box somewhere in your house, and then when you find it 10 years later you're like 'cool!'' but also 'I should throw this out' but then you don't throw it out? Some stones are, like, really cool, man. And sticks. And bark. And stickers from that one time you went to Movie World.
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...been in lockdown 6 times and are completely over it? Don't know how many of you have been in a worldwide pandemic tho so might be less relatable /s.
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...ever felt like this. When strange things happen, are you going Round the Twist?
Yeah, me neither đź‘€
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Goldelucks - an Asian-led bakery in Melbourne does these real fun cake boxes; sent one to a friend that didn't really work out but I still recommend it! A bit of fun during an extended lockdown :)
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Novelty - I'm sure I've mentioned this before on the newsletter, but especially during lockdowns, find novelty. Search far and wide for it, so that you can feel like you're progressing or still doing something new with your life during lockdown. It could be books, or games, or a random call to a friend out of the blue, or a new recipe, or trying a different exercise, or rearranging your phone / room / clothes. There's not much we can control in our lives during lockdown, and so anything we can do helps. It also helps to scratch (in a much more inferior way) the same itch of exploration and wanderlust that we all experience in our lives.
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets - we use spreadsheets in so many ways in our daily lives; what happens when we start relying on A1:Z150 and forget that there are limits to the whole thing??
Nearly 16,000 positive Covid cases had disappeared completely from the UK’s contact tracing system. These were 16,000 people who should have been warned they were infected and a danger to others, 16,000 cases contact tracers should have been running down to figure out where the infected went, who they met and who else might be at risk. None of which was happening.
Why had the cases disappeared? Apparently, Microsoft Excel had run out of numbers.
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Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI - another example of how tech can be used for 'evil', or at least comes as a consequence of apathy. An AI was developed to 'listen out' for gunshots, and then track their approximate location using triangulation. The analysts from ShotSpotter would then pass this on as evidence for cops to use in court. But what happens when this is augmented by cops who tell analysts where those gunshots allegedly occurred?
The only evidence against Simmons came from ShotSpotter. Initially, the company’s sensors didn’t detect any gunshots, and the algorithms ruled that the sounds came from helicopter rotors. After Rochester police contacted ShotSpotter, an analyst ruled that there had been four gunshots—the number of times police fired at Simmons, missing once.
This isn't a 'AI sucks and you should be scared' story, this is a 'humans suck and will forever suck if not held to account' story.
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Julia used Multiple Dispatch! It's Super-Effective! - I'm learning Julia very slowly at the moment - seems like a fun mathematical programming language to pick up and is honestly just something new to do. This article is a bit nerdier; it's explaining the concept of multiple dispatch (choosing what operation to use in a function based on the arguments given to it) using Pokemon!!