A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Why Do Some People Always Get Lost?
“Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.
The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location—or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location—and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.”
AI Chip Trims Energy Budget Back by 99+ Percent
“Neural networks that imitate the workings of the human brain now often generate art, power computer vision, and drive many more applications. Now a neural network microchip from China that uses photons instead of electrons, dubbed Taichi, can run AI tasks as well as its electronic counterparts with a thousandth as much energy, according to a new study.”
Words We Think We Know, but Can’t Pronounce: The Curse of the Avid Reader
“When I mispronounced tinnitus (ti–nuh–tuhs is correct, ti-nai-tis is not) recently and was kindly corrected, my embarrassment was a fraction of when I said apropos (a–prow–pow instead of a-pruh-pow) to a large table of people in London when I was in my 20s. That day I was not kindly corrected, but only realised my mistake after howls of laughter and a whispered, “Maybe that’s how they say it in Australia?”
It is not, unfortunately.”
To Make Sure Grandmas Like His Don't Get Conned, He Scams the Scammers
“The gentle voice of an elderly woman named Edna is heard over the phone.
"I'm going to call Ticketmaster and see if we can get us some tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, OK?" she says. "Will you call them with me?"
She's speaking to a scammer from Nigeria on the other end of the line who is after her money. For months, he's spent a rough total of 20 hours on the phone with her, professing his love as he tries to get her to invest her millions in a house on the Moon. But the rambling Edna has been testing his patience with her absurd questions and tangents.
When the scammer insists they marry in Nigeria, a place he says he's never been, Kitboga drops the act.
"Interesting, 'cause all of your IP addresses are there," Kitboga says on a livestream, his voice now deeper, after switching off a voice changer. The naïve Edna character is one of the many disguises devised by Kitboga, the alias of a computer software engineer-turned-Twitch streamer, to lure scammers into his traps.”
How to Die in Good Health
“Attia, now fifty-one, has become convinced that science, technology, and targeted work can solve a uniquely modern problem: the “marginal decade” at the end of our lives, when medicine keeps us alive but our independence and capacities bleed away. It’s a scandal, in his view, that our life span has grown so much more than our health span.”
Why Time Seems to Pass Faster as We Age
“As kids, everything is new and surprising.
The world is full of learning opportunities, so the brain makes massive updates in memories.
Full snapshots of your birthdays, vacations, days at school and so on.
Surprising information comes in droves every single day, so the brain simply paid a lot of attention, and hence you felt there were so-many-slices-of-time in a day.
It also stored that rich information in memory, so even looking back, days felt longer.
As we grow, new surprises become a merely tiny-patch on an old memory.
Why store the full details of your N-th vacation when you can simply store the diff of it from your first one? ”
Schools Were Just Supposed To Block P*rn, Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites
“A middle school student in Missouri had trouble collecting images of people’s eyes for an art project. An elementary schooler in the same district couldn’t access a picture of record-breaking sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner to add to a writing assignment. A high school junior couldn’t read analyses of the Greek classic “The Odyssey” for her language arts class. An eighth grader was blocked repeatedly while researching trans rights.”