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Fiora Esoterica @fioraesoterica
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this paper is WILD

they set up a 10x10 set of cells in an FPGA with a genetic algorithm, set to optimize for a given target behavior. the results were......... bizarre and amazing

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…
note they used an actual oscilloscope run on the output as the fitness function.

the resulting circuit:

a) worked, albeit after many many generations

b) was highly analog and highly temperature sensitive, and only accurate in the range it evolved in
c) used far fewer cells than anyone thought possible (32)

d) had a logic gate NOT CONNECTED TO ANYTHING AT ALL that was ESSENTIAL TO THE OPERATION OF THE CIRCUIT
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i spent 30 minutes last night the atelier, eyes dark-adjusted, with nothing but 395nm and 425nm blacklights to play with and it was a real interesting experience. i highly recommend it for screwing with your visual perception sometime.
i can't post pictures because none of it can be meaningfully photographed. (more on this later)

the first interesting effect, at 425nm, with all other lights off, i becomes clear the light isn't actually blue (which is what it looks like at first glance), it's indigoish violet
it's a very much out-of-gamut color, something with a qualitative feel to it different from anything ordinary.

but it gets more interesting.

425nm is near the edge of human cone perception. note this is a log chart; the falloff is really rapid between ~475nm and 425nm.
Read 19 tweets
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one of my favorite science "lies to children" is the pop culture story of how antidepressants work

the truth of the matter is it's not only deeply wrong, but that they didn't have a damn clue when they invented them and have been bouncing around all kinds of theories ever since
you know the lie: "depression is about serotonin, and SSRIs increase serotonin, which helps fix depression".

of course, these are all lies
the lie falls apart when you compare SSRIs and similar antidepressants to other brain drugs, like bupropion or methylphenidate.

SSRIs take weeks to take effect, and have a long (weeks-long) withdrawal, even though their duration of action is far shorter than that.
Read 9 tweets
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so since there's a thread going around elsewhere on this hellsite about programming language ISAs, here's some hot takes as an assembly programmer and compiler maker
many ISAs, especially older ones, are built as if someone came up with a list of basic primitive operations and wrote them out and told an ISA designer to put them all in
this isn't what you actually want.

what you want is a list of operations that are:

a) maximally powerful relative to their implementation cost and opcode space cost
b) easy for a compiler or human to use to *do* all those basic primitives

things you DONT need:

c) orthogonal
Read 17 tweets

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1. This is Acuifero Guarani.
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3. “Acuifero Guarani covers roughly 460,000 square miles under parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. It is estimated to contain about 8,900 cubic MILES of water.”
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The slides of our #TechSEOBoost presentation "Search and Spam Fighting in the Age of Deep Learning" are live! All the research papers we referenced should be easy to find through @Bing but feel free to ping me if you need direct links. #SEO #TechnicalSEO slideshare.net/CatalystDigita…
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The Rupee reached an all time low against US Dollar in Sep 2018 hitting close to 73 units to a dollar

But this fall in the rupee has coincided with one of the strongest phases of the Indian economy ever

An economy growing at a faster clip than it ever has in the past 4000 years
For those who are naive about the role of currency and monetary standards this may have seemed perplexing.

How can the economy be doing so well at a time when the country’s monetary unit is at its weakest.
While this question is no doubt naive it remains very seductive.

Most intelligent people would have this gut-feel that a country’s economic health mustn’t be judged by the state of its currency unit, but they may struggle to articulate why people who feel otherwise are wrong
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1/ Why didn't America act on climate change way back when?

You've read the historical reconstruction in the @NYTmag of the 1980s, the decade when the science was becoming clearer and there was some bipartisan political momentum to act.

There's more to this story.
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THE BRAIN DAY FUN CONTINUES
Now that we've gone bottom-up, let's put the top-down and talk about brain activity that is generated BY the brain
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Here's a thread for @Noahpinion on how economists have studied African development. We can divide this into i) long-run causes: (pre) colonial history, slavery, political institutions, ethnicity, and ii) proximate causes: mkt and govt failures. I'll focus on the first.
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