Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. Metin Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University, fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon.

Sadly for the legend, the blades failed every test, but the study was colorful enough to snag Eren an Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And it's just one of the many fascinating projects routinely undertaken in his Experimental Archaeology Laboratory, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies, whether they involve stone tools, ceramics, metal, butchery, textiles, and so forth.

This video is a bit older now (over one year), but I just found about it. And I want to share it here, because it was very well explained, without boring stock videos or background music. It's just like a teacher would teach you, but with some enthusiasm behind it. I enjoy his videos so far.

• Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Zkv8sW6y3sY
• Watch on Invidious, a more private and indirect way to watch: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Zkv8sW6y3sY

Video description:

Why is the speed of light the same in all reference frames? Let's rediscover the thought experiments that led Einstein to his special theory of relativity

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction
01:15 1/3 Detect motion with particles? (Thought experiment)
04:01 Inertia doesn't allow detecting constant velocity motion
06:18  2/3 Detect motion with waves? (Thought experiment) 
09:18 Medium doesn't allow detecting constant velocity motion
10:15 Constant velocity motion is RELATIVE!
11:02 3/3 Detect motion with light? (Thought experiment)
13:12 Does light break relativity? 
13:46 Michelson & Morley's experiment (oversimplified) 
14:20 The logical conclusion - Speed of light is same in all frames

Brain structure can tell us a lot about reading skills. Importantly, though, the brain is malleable — it changes when we learn a new skill or practice an already acquired one.

For instance, young adults who studied language intensively increased their cortical thickness in language areas. Similarly, reading is likely to shape the structure of the left Heschl’s gyrus and temporal pole. So, if you want to keep your Heschl’s thick and thriving, pick up a good book and start reading.

[...] it’s worth considering what might happen to us as a species if skills like reading become less prioritised. Our capacity to interpret the world around us and understand the minds of others would surely diminish. In other words, that cosy moment with a book in your armchair isn’t just personal – it’s a service to humanity.

An excellent video about how (long) covid and other diseases/pandemics are awful and how capitalism and governments loves to ignore them in hopes that things will 'carry on' as normal thus creating social stigma and work policies that disable people more and more.

When digging a pit, one way to prevent the walls from collapsing inward under pressure is to make them less steep, so they slant outward like the sides of a cone. A good rule of thumb is to make the hole three times wider than its depth.

[...]

Suppose you were to try digging through the Earth, and that the planet was all solid. (We know that it’s not, but this is the simplest scenario.) The depth of a hole all the way through the planet would be equivalent to Earth’s diameter, which is just a name for a line that passes straight through the center of a circle. So your hole would need to be about three times as wide as the diameter of the Earth in order for it to be stable.

Clearly, this is an impossible task that would completely alter the planet’s shape.

[...]

This revolutionary infertility treatment is now responsible for about 2% of all births in the US annually. Plus, the live birth rate for IVF cycles has been getting steadily better over the years – roughly tripling for women under 38 since the early 1990s, according to UK data. In the US, the number of live births resulting from assisted reproductive technology – IVF accounts for 99% of such procedures – are 1.6 times higher in 2020 than they were a decade earlier.

And yet the live birth rate, per embryo transfer cycle, for women aged 35 or so is still just 30% in the UK and 39% in the US. In women of all ages, only 45% of embryo transfer cycles led to a live birth in the US, although that has grown from 36% in 2011.

It is clear that an IVF cycle is still a long, agonising roll of the dice.

Meanwhile, IVF remains gruelling for those who find themselves going through it. Multiple cycles, each one often costing thousands, can end in failure. Women inject themselves with drugs for weeks at a time, endure painful surgical procedures, while the emotional toll on couples can be severe enough to end relationships.

Scientists around the world are trying to help by working on techniques that might improve the odds of success. While there are many interwoven reasons for why IVF treatment can fail, it is possible that other interventions could make a difference. And they might transform the lives of millions.

How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary

Metadata

• Author: Stephen Ornes
• Category: rss
• URL: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-base-3-computing-beats-binary-20240809/

Highlights

Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a stool to stand on its own, and at least three points to define a triangle.

If a three-state system is so efficient, you might imagine that a four-state or five-state system would be even more so. But the more digits you require, the more space you’ll need. It turns out that ternary is the most economical of all possible integer bases for representing big numbers.

Surprisingly, if you allow a base to be any real number, and not just an integer, then the most efficient computational base is the irrational number e.

Despite its natural advantages, base 3 computing never took off, even though many mathematicians marveled at its efficiency. In 1840, an English printer, inventor, banker and self-taught mathematician named Thomas Fowler invented a ternary computing machine to calculate weighted values of taxes and interest. “After that, very little was done for years,” said Bertrand Cambou, an applied physicist at Northern Arizona University.

Why didn’t ternary computing catch on? The primary reason was convention. Even though Soviet scientists were building ternary devices, the rest of the world focused on developing hardware and software based on switching circuits — the foundation of binary computing. Binary was easier to implement.

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the effect of Fox News Channel (FNC) on the mass public’s political preferences and voting behavior in the United States from 2000 to 2020. We show that FNC has shifted the ideology and partisan identity of Americans rightward. This shift has helped Republican candidates in elections across levels of U.S. government over the past decade. Our estimates suggests that an increase of 0.05 rating points in Fox News viewership, induced by exogenous changes in channel placement, has increased Republican vote shares by at least 0.5 percentage points in recent presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections. Our findings have broad implications for political behavior, elections, and the political process in the United States.

As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult. This study examined whether non-expert readers could reliably differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by well-known human poets. We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N = 16,340) = 75.13, p < 0.0001). Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N = 16,340) = 247.04, p < 0.0001). We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

study in question: A Numerical Connection Between Two Khipus

We test for labor market discrimination based on an understudied characteristic: name fluency. Analysis of recent economics PhD job candidates indicates that name difficulty is negatively related to the probability of landing an academic or tenure-track position and research productivity of initial institutional placement. Discrimination due to name fluency is also found using experimental data from prior audit studies. Within samples of African Americans (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004) and ethnic immigrants (Oreopoulos 2011), job applicants with less fluent names experience lower callback rates, and name complexity explains roughly between 10 and 50 percent of ethnic name penalties. The results are primarily driven by candidates with weaker résumés, suggesting that cognitive biases may contribute to the penalty of having a difficult-to-pronounce name.

Virologist Beata Halassy says self-treatment worked and was a positive experience — but researchers warn that it is not something others should try