5a) Daily Zen

 

5a1a) "The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic." 

Arthur C. Clarke on the future, BBC Horizons 1964

5a1b) The issue at its core is that bosses hiring people “full-time” often do so, as dramatic as it sounds, to capture their soul. Within the hours of 9 to 5 (but let’s be real, it’s more than that), they expect to own the time, attention and energy of that person. The nebulous badge of “full-time” brings with it a level of ownership of the person - they cannot go elsewhere, what they create is yours, on some level they are yours, because you have deigned them worthy of a salary and benefits and whatever other crumbs you pass their way. In return, you expect them to dedicate their existence to you - on levels of dramatic ranging from “I need to see you in the office” to “I want to make sure I can text you at 10PM and badger you about some shit that bothers me.”

Ed Z – The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains

5a1c) "Um...I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow...

5a1c) It is both baffling and banal that Clarke's prediction has not fully been realized due to social memes that appeared during the Industrial Revolution. But before we head too far down the path of humans frustrating foibles, here are some additional areas of nascent technology that imagine greater. What will the next five decades look like?

5a2) All the World's Data in DNA | Dina Zielinski | TEDxVienna

5a3) Quantum Computers, Explained With Quantum Physics

2a) Daily Zen

 2a1) These are the tape recordings of Richard Feynman's 1961-64 Caltech Introductory Physics lectures, which form the basis of the book The Feynman Lectures on Physics. The original recordings were made on 1/4" reel-to-reel tapes, now preserved in Caltech's Archive. In 2010 the entire collection was digitized by media preservationist George Blood, at a sampling rate of 96 kHz with 24-bit samples, PCM-encoded in tiff files about 2 GB each in size. For this online publication we are serving more compact versions, downsampled to 48 kHz with 16-bit samples, reencoded as AAC-HE (mp4) and Opus (ogg) at a data rate of 48 kbps.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Audio Collection at Caltech.edu

8a) What the Bene Gesserit knew–memes rule.

8a1) In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics.
        After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a "special evolutionary transition" in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.
        Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.
        Culture is a stronger mechanism of adaptation for a couple of reasons, Waring says. It's faster: gene transfer occurs only once a generation, while cultural practices can be rapidly learned and frequently updated. Culture is also more flexible than genes: gene transfer is rigid and limited to the genetic information of two parents, while cultural transmission is based on flexible human learning and effectively unlimited with the ability to make use of information from peers and experts far beyond parents. As a result, cultural evolution is a stronger type of adaptation than old genetics. 

Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics at Pys.org

8a2) A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.

The Coda

Frank Herbert – Chapterhouse Dune

8a3) See 060321_2a2

8a) See Post 051721_1a

8a1) Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management.
    Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing "replication crisis" in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don't hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments.
    The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.
    "We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated," write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. "Given this prediction, we ask 'why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?'"

[...]

The influence of an inaccurate paper published in a prestigious journal can have repercussions for decades. For example, the study Andrew Wakefield published in The Lancet in 1998 turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine because of an implied link between vaccinations and autism. The incorrect findings were retracted by The Lancet 12 years later, but the claims that autism is linked to vaccines continue.

    The authors added that journals may feel pressure to publish interesting findings, and so do academics. For example, in promotion decisions, most academic institutions use citations as an important metric in the decision of whether to promote a faculty member.

A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more at Phys.org

8a2) Of interest is the memetic survival rate based on fitness. According to this study, the fitness of the meme is determined not by truth–as represented by replicability, but by different, and arguably non-scientific factors such as novelty, narrativization, media coverage, and the public's willingness to engage with the data offered. 

We might ask, what is the memetic fitness of this study?

8a) Human All Too Human

8a1) Did the coronavirus escape from a lab? The idea deserves a second look, scientists say – Medical Xpress

In a letter published Thursday in the journal Science, they argue that there is not yet enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab in China, and they call for a "proper investigation" into the matter.

    "We believe this question deserves a fair and thorough science-based investigation, and that any subsequent judgment should be made on the data available," said Dr. David Relman, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University who helped pen the letter.

[...]

But Relman said that, as a scientist, he needed more than this thirdhand account to rule out the chance of an accidental laboratory leak. (He and his colleagues did not suggest any potential leak was intentional.)

"Show us the test you used: What was the method? What were the results and the names of the people tested? Did you test a control population?" Relman said. "On all accounts, it was not an adequate, detailed kind of presentation of data that would allow an outside scientist to arrive at an independent conclusion."

[...]

Michael Worobey, who studies viruses at the University of Arizona to understand the origin, emergence and control of pandemics, also signed the letter. Since the start of the pandemic, he had entertained two possibilities for how it might have begun—either as an escape from a lab or natural transmission from animal to human.

    Fifteen months later, he's still open to both possibilities.

    "There just hasn't been enough definitive evidence either way," he said, "so both of those remain on the table for me."

    In his own lab, Worobey works with a grad student who collects viruses from bats in the wild, and he's thought a lot about how this research could create an ecological avenue to introduce a new pathogen to humans.

    "As someone who does this, I'm very aware of the opening that creates for new viruses to get close to humans, and so I think that's another reason I take this seriously," he said. "I'm concerned about it in my own work."

[...]

    David Robertson, the head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow, was not among the letter's signatories. He said he didn't understand the point.

    "Nobody is saying that a lab accident isn't possible—there's just no evidence for this beyond the Wuhan Institute of Virology being in Wuhan," he said.

    Robertson said viruses naturally migrate from animals to humans all the time, and SARS-CoV-2 could have been one of them.

    Although he agreed with the authors of the letter that it was essential to find the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to prepare for the next pandemic, "wasting time investigating labs is a distraction from this," he said.

8a2) See 051721_1a 

8a3) Unknown unknowns are risks that come from situations that are so unexpected that they would not be considered. Contemporary usage is largely consistent with the earliest known usages. For example, the term was used in evidence given to the British Columbia Royal Commission of Inquiry into Uranium Mining in 1979: 

Site conditions always pose unknowns, or uncertainties, which may become known during construction or operation to the detriment of the facility and possibly lead to damage of the environment or endanger public health and safety. The risk posed by unknowns is somewhat dependent on the nature of the unknown relative to past experience. This has led me classify unknowns into one of the following two types: 1. known unknowns (expected or foreseeable conditions), which can be reasonably anticipated but not quantified based on past experience as exemplified by case histories (in Appendix A) and 2. Unknown unknowns (unexpected or unforeseeable conditions), which pose a potentially greater risk simply because they cannot be anticipated based on past experience or investigation. Known unknowns result from recognized but poorly understood phenomena. On the other hand, unknown unknowns are phenomena which cannot be expected because there has been no prior experience or theoretical basis for expecting the phenomena. 

There are known knowns – Wikipedia