Poverty Metrics

Rocinha Favela

Satellite images used to predict poverty
BBC News, Aug 2016

Night lights, paved roads and metal roofs are markers that can help distinguish different levels of economic wellbeing in developing countries, and are surprisingly predictive...

More Three-Body

It's hard to predict the orbital mechanics of three bodies, as seen here. 

Astronomers have found an Earthlike planet in the habitable zone of the closest star to the sun
Toronto Star, Aug 2016

I don't get paid by Liu Cixin or anything but I am crazy about his book, Three Body Problem. And in current news, his story is becoming even more plausible, as the origin for his alien race of Trisolarians is a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the same planet that has now been verified into existence. The Centauri star system is our closest Milky Way neighbor; it's four light years away.

I Network Therefore I Am

The Brainmap, ie the Connectome.

I'll just leave these here, as the paradigm inevitably shifts from physics to network science, we see more promise of finding the evasive rainbow
of human consciousness.

A new study looks for the cortical conscious network
phys.org, Aug 2016

Network theory sheds new light on origins of consciousness
Medical Xpress, March 2015

Algolords

Mostly unrelated image.

Today in the Can’t Make This Shit Up Department:

Facebook fires human editors, algorithm immediately posts fake news

Ars Technica, Aug 2016

"Earlier this year, Facebook denied criticisms that its Trending feature was surfacing news stories that were biased against conservatives. But in an abrupt reversal, the company fired all the human editors for Trending on Friday afternoon, replacing them with an algorithm that promotes stories based entirely on what Facebook users are talking about. Within 72 hours, according to the Washington Post, the top story on Trending was about how Fox News icon Megyn Kelly was a pro-Clinton "traitor" who had been fired (she wasn't).

…

"There were so many problems with this story, ranging from plagiarism to falsity, that even a fairly simple-minded robot editor should have caught them. The Trending algorithm is clearly not ready for prime time, or maybe Facebook is just trying to redefine what it calls "a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics."

So, first, we don’t trust humans to give us information because they’re biased. We put it in the hands of the computers instead. Then we realize that since the computers are only doing what we are doing, they can’t be trusted either. … All Hail.

Quantum Terror Correction Makes Qubits Less Sensitive to Their Environment via Quantum Noise

aka All Hail Nonsense Supreme

Sometimes I just like the headlines, even if I’m half making them up.

Autonomous quantum error correction method greatly increases qubit coherence times

April 2016, phys.org

More Crystals Still

Crystal

These Mysterious Ultra-Rare Crystals Probably Formed in Outer Space

Gizmodo, 2016

(Please excuse the fact that I’m posting my science news via gizmodo, I just take it as it comes.)

Quasi crystals have been known for a bit, but "nobody had found a naturally occurring quasicrystal until Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt stumbled upon one in 2007" (Gizmodo, 2016)

Also, Neal Stephenson, in his mindf***ing Anathema, makes reference to a similar aperiodic repetition in his telling of a mindgame similar to chess where one tries to arrange different tiles in a crazy complex pattern that looks random but in fact uses some deep math to get there...(I think the game is called a tangram.)

Interlinks from Network Address:

Diamonds Everything

Weird Computers

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

New type of animated crystal structure discovered

phys.org Jan 2016

“The trio readily acknowledges that they have no idea if such crystals actually exist in the real world but suggest it might be possible that they are in atomic nuclei or in electrons in solids—finding them would be a challenge, however, because they would have to be seen in action, a single snapshot would not convey the motion required to see the symmetry. They also suggest that their new crystal structure could lead to some new math as was the case when static crystal structure math led to applications in number theory and even error correction in computer applications.”

Teaching a machine to spot a crystal
Jun 2018, phys.org

Crystallizing proteins is hard—really hard. Unlike the simple atoms and molecules that make up common crystals like salt and sugar, these big, bulky molecules, which can contain tens of thousands of atoms each, struggle to arrange themselves into the ordered arrays that form the basis of crystals.

"What allows an object like a protein to self-assemble into something like a crystal is a bit like magic," Charbonneau said.

All Hail Trisolaris

Shout out to one of the most epic scifi novels I've read in a while, The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (and perhaps the first major Chinese scifi novel to be translated into English).

The book is about a race of people that live on a world of more than one sun called Trisolaris, which sucks, so they want Earth. The thing about the three body problem, or living on a world with more than one sun, is that it's really hard to predict what's going to happen next - do we get one day of 5,000 degree heat because one sun is too close or 5,000 years of subzero temperatures because all the suns are too far away.

Trisolarians dehydrate themselves and roll up like a piece of paper so they can't be damaged as easily, and they get stored in a big old pyramid for a hundred or a thousand years until it's safe to come back out again. The book is well written, full of hyperbolic machinations, and supertight on the physics. If you haven't already, see what's in the mind of a Chinese scifi writer (as a Westerner raised on Western scifi and Western ideologies, it's very eye-opening and refreshing to read something like this).

Also, how could I forget, they make a human computer, with hundreds of thousands of living people, all performing calculations together to crack the three body problem that plagues their civilization...

And so, in conclusion, this goes out to Cixin Liu:

16-million-year-old planet with three suns discovered

USA Today, July 2016

Tiny 'water bears' can teach us about survival
Mar 2019, phys.org


When the going gets tough for tardigrades, they curl up, dry out and wait. Then, when the environment gets better and they get water, they spring back to life.