Post: #26

The chick who wrote that used to date Anthony Cumia.

Post: #27

A critical take on the work of Malcolm Gladwell.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...07968.html

Post: #28

5 Surprising Facts About Otzi the Iceman

Quote:A report that Ötzi the Iceman has 19 genetic relatives living in Austria is the latest in a string of surprising discoveries surrounding the famed ice mummy. Ötzi's 5,300-year-old corpse turned up on the mountain border between Austria and Italy in 1991. Here is a rundown of the latest on the world's oldest Alpine celebrity, and some of the other remarkable things we've learned about Ötzi

....

Post: #29

An article on the shrinking size of the human brain during the past 20,000 years.

Quote:“You may not want to hear this,” says cognitive scientist David Geary of the University of Missouri, “but I think the best explanation for the decline in our brain size is the idiocracy theory."

Post: #30

(10-18-2013 07:21 AM)Libertas Wrote:  An article on the shrinking size of the human brain during the past 20,000 years.

Quote:“You may not want to hear this,” says cognitive scientist David Geary of the University of Missouri, “but I think the best explanation for the decline in our brain size is the idiocracy theory."

Some absolute gold in this article

Quote:Still others believe that the reduction in brain size is proof that we have tamed ourselves, just as we domesticated sheep, pigs, and cattle, all of which are smaller-brained than their wild ancestors.

Quote:The observation led the researchers to a radical conclusion: As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive. As Geary explains, individuals who would not have been able to survive by their wits alone could scrape by with the help of others—supported, as it were, by the first social safety nets.

Quote:So what breeding effect might have sent humans down the same path? Wrangham offers a blunt response: capital punishment. “Over the last 100,000 years,” he theorizes, “language became sufficiently sophisticated that when you had some bully who was a repeat offender, people got together and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about Joe.’ And they would make a calm, deliberate decision to kill Joe or expel him from the group—the functional equivalent of executing him.”

Very reminiscent of some of the stuff we talk about here

Post: #31

Psychologist gets three mental patients who each claim to be God into a room to talk to each other.

http://www.damninteresting.com/three-thr...koos-nest/

Post: #32

Was reading the times and came across this article. Thoughts?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinio...l?src=recg


"MY favorite story in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s fascinating new book, “The Second Machine Age,” is when the Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner was asked how he’d prepare for a chess match against a computer, like I.B.M.’s Deep Blue. Donner replied: “I would bring a hammer.”

Donner isn’t alone in fantasizing that he’d like to smash some recent advances in software and automation — think self-driving cars, robotic factories and artificially intelligent reservationists — which are not only replacing blue-collar jobs at a faster rate, but now also white-collar skills, even grandmasters!

Something very, very big happened over the last decade. It is being felt in every job, factory and school. My own shorthand is that the world went from “connected to hyperconnected” and, as a result, average is over, because employers now have so much easier, cheaper access to above-average software, automation and cheap genius from abroad. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, both at M.I.T., offer a more detailed explanation: We are at the start of the Second Machine Age.

The First Machine Age, they argue, was the Industrial Revolution that was born along with the steam engine in the late 1700s. This period was “all about power systems to augment human muscle,” explained McAfee in an interview, “and each successive invention in that age delivered more and more power. But they all required humans to make decisions about them.” Therefore, the inventions of this era actually made human control and labor “more valuable and important.” Labor and machines were complementary.

In the Second Machine Age, though, argues Brynjolfsson, “we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for. In many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans.” So humans and software-driven machines may increasingly be substitutes, not complements. What’s making this possible, the authors argue, are three huge technological advances that just reached their tipping points, advances they describe as “exponential, digital and combinatorial.”

To illustrate “exponential” they retell the story of the king who was so impressed with the man who invented chess that he offered him any reward. The inventor suggested rice to feed his family. He asked the king to simply place a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard and then have each subsequent square receive twice as many grains as the previous. The emperor agreed until he realized that 63 instances of doubling yields a fantastically big number, even starting with one grain — like 18 quintillion grains of rice, once you finish the second half of the chess board.


The authors compare this second half of the chessboard to Moore’s Law about the relentless doubling of digital computing power about every two years. Unlike the steam engine, which was physical and doubled in performance every 70 years, computers “get better, faster than anything else, ever,” says Brynjolfsson. Now that we’re in the second half of the digital chessboard, you see cars that drive themselves in traffic, Jeopardy-champion supercomputers, flexible factory robots and pocket smartphones that are the equivalent of a supercomputer of just a generation ago.

Now add the spread of the Internet to both people and things — soon everyone on the planet will have a smartphone, and every cash register, airplane engine, student iPad and thermostat will be broadcasting digital data via the Internet. All this data means we can instantly discover and analyze patterns, instantly replicate what is working on a global scale and instantly improve what isn’t working — whether it is eye surgery techniques, teaching fractions or how best to operate a G.E. engine at 30,000 feet. Suddenly, the speed and slope of improvement, they argue, gets very fast and steep.

Combinatorial advances mean you can take Google Maps and combine them with a smartphone app like Waze, through which drivers automatically transmit traffic conditions on their routes by just carrying their phone in their car, and meld both into a GPS system that not only tells you what the best route is to your destination but what the best route now is because it also sees all the traffic everywhere. Instantly, you’re the smartest driver in town.

Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability. They suggest that we consider lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital labor, that we reinvent education so more people can “race with machines” not against them, that we do much more to foster the entrepreneurship that invents new industries and jobs, and even consider guaranteeing every American a basic income. We’ve got a lot of rethinking to do, they argue, because we’re not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We’re in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace — and it just keeps doubling."

Post: #33

From three years ago. But an amazing story.

A gelogical statistician (whose job is helping companies mine for diamonds) spots flaw in printing of lottery scratchcards which helps him crack the code in order to separate the winning ones from the losing ones.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/

The method is detailed in the article as well.

Post: #34

Civilization may be much, much older than archaeologists previously thought:

http://www.sott.net/article/271881-Gunun...f-Atlantis

Post: #35

Funny/Entertaining Article - http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-...ction.html

Post: #36

Archaeology News Network - Atlas of human genetic history reveals likely genetic impacts of historical events

"When individuals from different groups interbreed, their offspring's DNA becomes a mixture of the DNA from each admixing group. Pieces of this DNA are then passed along through subsequent generations, carrying on all the way to the present day. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Oxford University and University College London (UCL) have now produced a global map detailing the genetic histories of 95 different populations across the world, spanning the last four millennia."


   
Selected admixture events. Boxes show historical events, while blobs show dates inferred using genetic data, including the statistical uncertainty around them.

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.c...wFS5PmwIXg
Follow us: @ArchaeoNewsNet on Twitter | groups/thearchaeologynewsnetwork/ on Facebook


Sidenote - does anyone know any good reads on the Turkic Migration? It looks like a huge historical even I have studded very little of (outside of Attila the Hun).

Post: #37

Do you guys ever print out articles you find online? For longer articles, I find it makes 'em much easier to read. If it's an especially interesting article, I can also highlight important points and take notes.

Post: #38

(02-16-2014 08:21 PM)Cincinnatus Wrote:  Do you guys ever print out articles you find online? For longer articles, I find it makes 'em much easier to read. If it's an especially interesting article, I can also highlight important points and take notes.

I print out articles all the time. I am constantly reading, whether out at lunch or solo happy hour at the pub. Less obnoxious than a phone or pc.

And come to think of it, I get more curiosity from chicks when doing this than with my nose being buried in a phone or computer.
I didn't realize it was such a conversation starter, but it seems to be so.

Post: #39

Great article by F. William Engdahl on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the Russian oligarchs imprisoned by Putin. Engdahl asserts that he was a Western puppet.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article168007.html

Post: #40

This is one of the best long articles I've ever read. It's about a British diver and his friend who set out to retrieve the body of a drowned kid at the bottom of the biggest underwater cave in the world, and return it to his parents. Very inspiring, very affecting. Give it a read

Raising the Dead - Outside Magazine

Post: #41

Great article about freediving, an extreme sport

Open Your Mouth and You're Dead
The freediving world championships occur at the outer limits of competitive risk. ­During the 2011 event, held off the coast of Greece, more than 130 athletes assembled to swim hundreds of feet straight down on a single breath—without (they hoped) ­passing out, freaking out, or drowning

http://www.outsideonline.com/1896841/ope...d?page=all

Post: #42

Really interesting article I was reading last night about the Quebec Maple Syrup Cartel. http://business.financialpost.com/featur...-in-quebec

Post: #43

I like quality sports writing - this article about Suarez was written before he was kicked out of last year's World Cup for biting a guy - great analysis though and strong narrative. I also like the graphics.

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/...ful-player

Just off to read Seamus's Seadiving link.

Post: #44

The Devil at 37,000 Feet

"There were so many opportunities for the accident not to happen—the collision between a Legacy 600 private jet and a Boeing 737 carrying 154 people. But on September 29, 2006, high above the Amazon, a long, thin thread of acts and omissions brought the two airplanes together. From the vantage point of the pilots, the Brazilian air-traffic controllers, and the Caiapó Indians, whose rain forest became a charnel house, the author reconstructs a fatal intersection between high-performance technology and human fallibility."

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/0...rash200901

Post: #45

"Why the cult of hard work is counter-productive"

https://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/right-be-lazy