A weekly collection of links lovingly curated by Colin Wright.
The Giant Arcs that May Dwarf Everything in the Cosmos
“In 2021, British PhD student Alexia Lopez was analysing the light coming from distant quasars when she made a startling discovery. She detected a giant, almost symmetrical arc of galaxies 9.3 billion light years away in the constellation of Boötes the Herdsman. Spanning a massive 3.3 billion light years across, the structure is a whopping 1/15th the radius of the observable Universe. If we could see it from Earth, it would be the size of 35 full moons displayed across the sky.”
What Has Feelings?
“A cry for help is hard to resist. This exchange comes from conversations between the AI engineer Blake Lemoine and an AI system called LaMDA (‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’). Last year, Lemoine leaked the transcript because he genuinely came to believe that LaMDA was sentient – capable of feeling – and in urgent need of protection. Should he have been more sceptical? Google thought so: they fired him for violation of data security policies, calling his claims ‘wholly unfounded’. If nothing else, though, the case should make us take seriously the possibility that AI systems, in the very near future, will persuade large numbers of users of their sentience. What will happen next? Will we be able to use scientific evidence to allay those fears? If so, what sort of evidence could actually show that an AI is – or is not – sentient?”
Mathematicians Roll Dice and Get Rock-Paper-Scissors
“Mathematicians came up with the first examples of intransitive dice more than 50 years ago, and eventually proved that as you consider dice with more and more sides, it’s possible to create intransitive cycles of any length. What mathematicians didn’t know until recently was how common intransitive dice are. Do you have to contrive such examples carefully, or can you pick dice randomly and have a good shot at finding an intransitive set?”
The Most Popular Slang Words by State
“Slang words and phrases emerge locally — but those that feel right in the imagination or on the tongue have the potential to spread globally. The phenomenon is most visible online. Always-on international connectivity (some call it the ‘internet’) sends local slang airborne to travel virally. Slang that originates online — wildfiring across social networks or gestating within a particular forum or interest — has the capacity to leak out into unexpected places and real-life exchanges.”
A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic
“Mexico City’s streets have a peculiarly large number of endemic sounds. When I bring up street sounds with my friends, we invariably begin listing all we can, often reaching 15 or 20 unique sounds that can be heard on Mexico City’s streets on any given day. We can add to this the symphony of expressive honks that echo along the city’s brimming streets. With the thickening traffic, the sound of the street increases exponentially, each new car adding to the din while demanding auditory escalation from other motorists. Although the traffic might be stationary, its sound will still travel, overflowing the streets to amble through parks, markets, and the most buffered corners of the city’s apartments. Even if you’re not on Mexico City’s streets, you never really leave them.”
Very Long-Term Backup
“This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationally. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 01998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by Norsam Technologies, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years.”
How Dogs Bark and Cats Meow in Every Country
“Woof, woof is the standard interpretation of a dog’s bark in 13 English-speaking countries, including the U.S., Canada and several Caribbean nations. However, in 19 Spanish-speaking countries, the noise a dog makes is written as guau, guau, and the standard in 22 mostly Arabic-speaking countries is hau, hau or how, how. The list doesn’t stop there; however — we counted over 40 different phrases around the world for the same noise, among them bho, bho in India, ave, ave in Macedonia and oaf, oaf in France.”
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