The Marshmallow Test :)

Live fast, die young, cuttlefish, squids and octopuses all follow this edict to the nines but also, these amazing cephalopods are smart as hell, an "alien" intelligence we are just beginning to understand with one new finding proving cuttlefish have self control as per the Marshmallow test 

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University.[1] In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. During this time, the researcher left the room for about 15 minutes and then returned. The reward was either a marshmallow or pretzel stick, depending on the child's preference. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores,[2] educational attainment,[3] body mass index (BMI),[4] and other life measures.[5] A replication attempt with a sample from a more diverse population, over 10 times larger than the original study, showed only half the effect of the original study. The replication suggested that economic background, rather than willpower, explained the other half.[6][7]

To whit ...

Cuttlefish can pass the "marshmallow test" — the famous psychological test of self-control. 

In this case, the cephalopods were willing to forgo meals when they knew that waiting meant they would be rewarded with more delicious treats, according to a new study. That makes them the first known invertebrates to show the ability to exert self-control.

The common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) — relatives of squids and octopuses — are sneaky hunters and impressive camouflagers, with the ability to quickly disappear into any environment. They are also scarily smart; studies previously showed that they have a good memory, can learn the value of different types of prey and can use past experience to help them predict where to find food.

 They rule. Next up, octopuses. :)

Hypnotizing as well

Lethal as well ...

The red pill ...

Is the Matrix a reality? For years, conjectures about this notion has remained totally unproven but now, interesting research in AI may prove said conjecture may not be crazy after all.

A physicist creates an AI algorithm that predicts natural events and 

may prove the simulation hypothesis.

It gets better ...

Qin developed this algorithm to predict the orbits of planets in the solar system, training it on data of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, and Jupiter orbits. The data is "similar to what Kepler inherited from Tycho Brahe in 1601," as Qin writes in his newly-published paper on the subject. From this data, a "serving algorithm" can correctly predict other planetary orbits in the solar system, including parabolic and hyperbolic escaping orbits. What's remarkable, it can do so without having to be told about Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation. It can figure those laws out for itself from the numbers.

Qin explained the unusual approach taken by his work:

"Usually in physics, you make observations, create a theory based on those observations, and then use that theory to predict new observations, " said Qin. "What I'm doing is replacing this process with a type of black box that can produce accurate predictions without using a traditional theory or law. Essentially, I bypassed all the fundamental ingredients of physics. I go directly from data to data (…) There is no law of physics in the middle."

Qin was partially inspired by the work of Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2003 paper famously argued that the world we are living in may be an artificial simulation. What Qin believes he has accomplished with his algorithm is provide a working example of an underlying technology that could support the simulation in Bostrom's philosophical argument.

The red pill ...

You can't fix stupid/rev XX

As often said, you can't fix stupid. As an example, consider Gov. Greg Abbott unilaterally declaring Texas is 100% open for business, an edict pissing off leaders in that state and for good reason, the virus is mutating.

Mayors and county judges in some of Texas’ largest urban areas criticized Gov. Greg Abbott over his decision to lift the statewide face mask mandate next week, saying it contradicts health officials’ advice as infections continue to spread throughout the state, which averaged over 200 reported deaths a day over the last week.

Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price, a fellow Republican, called Abbott’s order “premature” and asked him to allow more people to get the vaccine.

“I am calling on Gov. Abbott to open up additional vaccine tier categories so that more people are eligible to get a vaccine if they want one,” Price said in a statement. “As the state’s directive has changed, so must our response. Now, more than ever, vaccines and testing must be readily available.”

It gets better ...

But officials lambasted the latest order because it does not allow local leaders to enforce their own mask mandates. The latest order also removes a previous option available to local leaders: compel businesses to require that customers wear face masks.

Why Abbot's ruling is really stupid ...

After a month of falling coronavirus case numbers in the United States, President Joe Biden's CDC director warned that the rise of mutant coronavirus strains could wipe out all of the gains made so far in fighting the pandemic. 

"Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who Biden appointed to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters on Monday. She noted that new infections increased by 2% last week compared to the week before that one, a stark contrast to how numbers had been declining over several previous weeks.

Any questions?

1998 lives ... in Perseverance :)

1998, the year of the Technicolor Macs, ran on Power PC hardware, the first prime time use of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) as this was the only viable way to make the Apple fast enough to do high res real world graphics without issue. Now, this ultra reliable chip resides in Perseverance and for good reason ... Mars is hostile to the max.

To whit.

NASA’s brand-new Perseverance rover is the most advanced machine that’s ever landed on Mars. But when it comes to rovers, “state of the art” is a subjective term. Perseverance is running on none other than a PowerPC 750, a single-core, 233MHz processor with just 6 million transistors that’s most famous for powering the original “Bondi blue” iMac from 1998. It’s the same type of processor that NASA already uses in its Curiosity rover.

That may seem like a waste to some. After all, even with the difficulty of buying computer parts these days, surely NASA could have found the budget for something like Intel’s $500 Core i9-10900K CPU (with 10 cores and a max clock speed of 5.3GHz) somewhere in the $2.7 billion cost of Perseverance. But as New Scientist explains, such an advanced chip is actually a detriment to the unique operating conditions of Mars.

Image: Apple

To make the system even more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip in Perseverance is a little different than the one in the old iMacs. It’s technically a RAD750 chip, a special variant that’s hardened against radiation and costs upwards of $200,000. The chip is popular for spacecraft, too: in addition to Perseverance and Curiosity, it also powers the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler telescope, among others.

The chip has never failed.

Serious iceberg ...

Serious iceberg makes the scene in Antartica, a natural event not necessarily tied to GW for a change.

An iceberg more than 20 times the size of Manhattan split off from the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica this week because our planet is totally having a normal one.

The ginormous iceberg measures roughly 490 square miles (1,270 square km) and is nearly 500 feet (150 meters) thick, according to the British Antarctic Survey. BAS scientists captured an aerial view of it, which you can check out above in a video that’s eerily reminiscent of that one scene at the beginning of The Day after Tomorrow.

Not the biggest ...

While undoubtedly huge, this iceberg is still dwarfed by the massive chunk that broke off from Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf in 2017, which recently threatened to collide with South Georgia Island and is among the largest ever recorded at 2,240 square miles (5,800 square km).

Eventually this monster will melt away in due time.

In the far future, this could happen but not today. :)

Sony A7SIII 1st Test Run

A short clip using the A7SIII for the first time, a true state-of-the-art camera requiring one to take the time to learn the nuances of the system as it's different from the II in subtle ways. Enjoy.

You can tell ...

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

One can tell when a market is mature, it's when the notion of innovation no longer applies because the products in a specific market differentiate from one another on superficialities, something readily seen in smartphones as the tech has gotten so good and so similar, the notions of products in a mature market such as smart phones having unique selling points becomes meaningless.

To whit ...

Let's face it, mobile phones, even the best ones, just aren't that exciting anymore. They're all way more powerful than we really need, they all have nifty multi-lens cameras and they all look essentially the same. I really hoped that folding phones would give a much needed shot of adrenaline to the industry, but well over a year on from their arrival, they've fizzled out like a damp firework and left me feeling disappointed.

I've worked for CNET for a decade and most of that time I've specifically covered mobile phones. I've seen a lot come and go. I've seen the rise and fall of BlackBerry, I've seen weird phone ideas like the Russian Yotaphone with its e-ink second screen and I saw the brief trend of curved phones like the LG G4 and Samsung's Galaxy Round. But in recent years it's seemed that genuine innovation has been put aside, with every company clamoring to make what could easily be revisions of the same product. 

The Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X are both essentially tablets that fold into phones.

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

Exactly

For years ...

For years, yours truly has ranted about the inherent dangers of displays in cars in terms of distraction, bad interface and just downright stupid in compromising the potentially deadly art of driving, something beautifully depicted by the guy giving the finger to same in The Drive 's excellent take on why this is so. Driving is serious business. Ask Tiger Woods about this as he did nothing wrong in trying to negotiate a dangerous curve in CA. This design fubar is a long running disaster resulting in an increase in traffic fatalities, a tragic fact aided and abetted by fools texting on cell phones while driving. 

Pretty much every study of in-car touchscreens' effects on drivers reaches the same conclusion: They're a serious distraction. This holds true for tech-literate younger drivers as it does for older ones who might face a steeper learning curve, and for well-rested drivers as well as those fatigued by a long day at work. That goes double for the millions of Americans like me, who live with attentional, cognitive, or similar impairments that make dealing with these overwrought gadgets while driving not just a nuisance, but an unnecessary hazard.

Adding a touchscreen to the equation, however, introduces a second, wholly separate environment to monitor while driving. Figuratively speaking, a touchscreen is a separate space, one that competes directly with the outside world for my one-channel attention. This might not be a problem if it weren't for the poor working memory common to ADHD's inattentive and combined subtypes, which can make people like me feel like goldfish, with their (fictitious) seconds-long memories. For me, this has on multiple occasions manifested as putting food in the microwave, only to completely forget what I just did, then get hungry again, and begin boiling a pot of water for pasta—only for beeping to pleasantly surprise me with the meal I forgot I was preparing. So you can imagine that driving increasingly complex cars is similarly challenging sometimes, just with movement involved.

Tesla Model 3 infotainment system

I have imagined and ... I've have had close calls with bozos distracted by this tech. Is it really that hard for the software vendors to turn their code off when the car's in motion, whether it be in cabin display or cell phone as we got along just fine without this tech for over 80+ years while plying the open road. Worth thinking about don't you think?

Channeling Cars :)

Jakionik is a biggie with yours truly. Being knowledgeable and enthusiastic about cars is their mantra and it shows, especially with their take on the new postal van that reminds one of Cars. All she needs now are eyes in the windshield to complete the Cars vibe but the design's not bad when taking in the exacting requirements of delivering the mail, hopefully on time, to us rubes. :)

This is a machine designed to perform a very specific job, and the design absolutely reflects that. Off-the-shelf delivery vans don’t really cut it. I spoke at length with my own mail carrier about the interim RHD Mercedes Metris vans they were using, and even with those being more comfortable than the old LLVs, he was not happy with them.

They were too hard to load and unload, the wrong height to get access to mailboxes, and just not laid out in a way that a mail carrier finds useful. This is a reasonable place for a bespoke design, and I’m glad to see the post office is continuing with that path.

The Oshkosh Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) selected is an overall good design, I think; sure, it looks kind of cartoonish in its proportions, but if you think about the design decisions that led to that, it’s understandable.

Makes sense to me and I'll bet to Mator as well. :)

The Conveyer Belt ...

Surface temperatures in the western North Atlantic. The North American landmass is black and dark blue (cold), while the Gulf Stream is red (warm). Source: NASA

Back in 2015, yours truly discussed the loss of Albedo, whereby the effect of turning the North Pole from a reflective source of sunlight to a heat sink, due to the loss of polar ice, would, in part, slow the Gulf Stream. Seems this dire prediction's coming true which, in turn, will eventually turn Sweden, England and connected environs, into an ice box.

An influential current system in the Atlantic Ocean, which plays a vital role in redistributing heat throughout our planet's climate system, is now moving more slowly than it has in at least 1,600 years. That's the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience from some of the world's leading experts in this field.

Scientists believe that part of this slowing is directly related to our warming climate, as melting ice alters the balance in northern waters. Its impact may be seen in storms, heat waves and sea-level rise. And it bolsters concerns that if humans are not able to limit warming, the system could eventually reach a tipping point, throwing global climate patterns into disarray.

NOAA

The majority of that heat is redistributed by the atmosphere. But the rest is more slowly moved by the oceans in what is called the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt — a worldwide system of currents connecting the world's oceans, moving in all different directions horizontally and vertically. 

Through years of scientific research it has become clear that the Atlantic portion of the conveyor belt — the AMOC — is the engine that drives its operation. It moves water at 100 times the flow of the Amazon river. 

CLIMATE CENTRAL

The prime driver for the slowing is the density of fresh water and how it acts as a cap over salt water.  To whit ...

One important mechanism through the ages, which acts as a lever of sorts controlling the speed of the AMOC, is the melting of glacial ice and resulting influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic. That's because fresh water is less salty, and therefore less dense, than sea water, and it does not sink as readily. Too much fresh water means the conveyor belt loses the sinking part of its engine and thus loses its momentum.

As proof ...

Almost all of the globe is warming except for a cold blob in the North Atlantic. NASA

Recently scientists have noticed a cold blob, also known as the North Atlantic warming hole, in a patch of the North Atlantic around southern Greenland — one of the only places that's actually cooling on the planet.

The fact that climate models predicted this lends more evidence that it is indicative of excess Greenland ice melting, more rainfall and a consequent slowdown of heat transport northward from the tropics.

The CBS blurb's long but worth reading to learn just how important the Gulf Stream truly is to the earth's climate as man moves further into the 21st century.