Ella Creamer in The Guardian:

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Azeem Azhar at Exponential View:

In the corridors of Silicon Valley’s most secretive AI labs, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Headlines scream of stalled progress, insiders know something the market hasn’t caught up to yet: the $1 trillion bet on AI isn’t failing—it’s transforming.

The real story? AI’s most powerful players are secretly shifting away from purely brute-force scaling that defined the last decade. Instead, they’re also pursuing a breakthrough approach that could continue to deliver.

The strategy of using scale by training ever larger models on greater training data, is yielding some diminishing returns. Here’s The Information

Some researchers at the [OpenAI] believe Orion, [the latest model], isn’t reliably better than its predecessor in handling certain tasks, according to the employees. Orion performs better at language tasks but may not outperform previous models at tasks such as coding.

Google’s upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is said to not meet internal expectations. Even Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, has remarked that scaling has plateaued

The 2010s were the age of scaling; now we’re back in the age of wonder and discovery once again.

If this is true, does this mean the trillon-dollar bet on bigger and bigger AI systems is coming off the rails?

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Andrew Hui at The Public Domain Review:

Sant’Andrea in Percussina lies about ten kilometers south of Florence, nestled in the proverbially beautiful Tuscan landscape, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, cypress trees, wild rosemary patches, and soft rolling hills. Outside the hustle and bustle of the city, there is peace and quiet, but also a lively cross section of the working class: farmers, millers, innkeepers, hunters, masons, and carpenters.

In the summer of 1513, a disgraced forty-four-year-old man repairs to these sylvan surrounds. A tavern, as well as a few scattered farms, had been in the family’s possession for years, and the modest rent from these properties had supported them for some time. His father, Bernardo, never rich but always eager for learning, owned a modest library, and sent his son to study under the famed pedagogue, Paolo da Ronciglione. At the age of twenty-nine, with no administrative experience and virtually unknown, Bernardo’s son was catapulted to be the second chancellor of the Republic and the secretary to the Council of Ten, Florence’s ministry for diplomatic affairs. For fourteen years, in the upper echelon of society, in the thick of action, he hobnobbed with the great and the good. Now he is alone, in the periphery.

This, of course, is Niccolò Machiavelli.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Jennifer Szalai at the NY Times:

The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.

But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

John Self at The Guardian:

Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches.

The first impression we get of Levy in The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies is as a great enthusiast – for everything. Literature, of course, but also art, clothes, Freud and even the beauty of the lemons on her dining table, “happy in their own skin”. The literature about which she enthuses is of a particular kind – that which rejects “dull and dulling language”, which bursts out of the “oak-panelled 19th-century gentleman’s club” of literary tradition and makes things new.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Karan Mahajan in Bookforum:

THE LINGUIST ROSS PERLIN is an encyclopedist of New York City’s microworlds. In 2016, when he took me and ten others on a tour of Ridgewood, Queens, he alerted us to the presence of a dozen languages spoken in a two-square-mile radius, including Syriac, Yiddish, Malayalam, Haitian Creole, and Kichwa. He led us into an ancient, black-and-white-tiled, espresso-scented Sicilian social club, where a retired nonagenarian factory worker proudly discussed his dialect, Partanna. Later, we drank beer and ate bratwurst at the Gottscheer Hall, a tavern and cultural center for the Gottscheers, a tiny community of Germanic people who fled their native Slovenia following the World Wars. Their language, Gottscheerish, is a thirteenth-century dialect of German that now survives largely in New York.

Such diversity is easy to take for granted in New York, ambient wallpaper for a city powered by finance, but as Perlin writes in his comprehensive and brilliant new book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (Atlantic Monthly Press, $28), the situation is more complex than meets the eye—or ear. Half of the world’s seven thousand languages “are likely to disappear over the next few centuries,” which makes New York, with its teeming biome of seven hundred languages, “a last improbable refuge for embattled and endangered languages.” But New York—and the United States—exerts its own relentless pressure on immigrants to assimilate into dominant mother tongues like English and Spanish, and we may have already reached “peak linguistic diversity.” Perlin’s heroic task in the book is to provide a linguistic snapshot of this moment of language explosion and implosion.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Olaf Lipinski in Singularity Hub:

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the world interpret the messages differently—with some assuming they convey a threat. If humanity ended up in such a situation today, our best bet may be to turn to research uncovering how artificial intelligence develops languages. But what exactly defines a language? Most of us use at least one to communicate with people around us, but how did it come about? Linguists have been pondering this very question for decades, yet there is no easy way to find out how language evolved.

Language is ephemeral, it leaves no examinable trace in the fossil records. Unlike bones, we can’t dig up ancient languages to study how they developed over time. While we may be unable to study the true evolution of human language, perhaps a simulation could provide some insights. That’s where AI comes in—a fascinating field of research called emergent communication, which I have spent the last three years studying. To simulate how language may evolve, we give AI agents simple tasks that require communication, like a game where one robot must guide another to a specific location on a grid without showing it a map. We provide (almost) no restrictions on what they can say or how—we simply give them the task and let them solve it however they want.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings:

As you know, I am a scholar of literature, with no more than a high school background in math. Yet together we shall reach up and touch the thinnest, most delicate branches in the canopy of modern mathematics. Most likely, we will snap them by mistake.

Anyway, we begin as moderns must: by venerating the ancients in a covertly self-serving manner.

In A Mathematician’s Apology, after a long preamble about mathematics as an Edenic garden of harmless beauty, G.H. Hardy finally turns to some actual math:

I will state and prove two of the famous theorems of Greek mathematics… They are ‘simple’ theorems, simple both in idea and in execution, but there is no doubt at all about their being theorems of the highest class. Each is as fresh and significant as when it was discovered—two thousand years have not written a wrinkle on either of them.

No surprise that Hardy calls the proofs “significant.” But why “fresh”?

Why advertise this proof, like a synthetic fabric, as “wrinkle-free”?

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Kelly Lambert at The Conversation:

We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat.

As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.

After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs – featuring rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers – are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.

As a neuroscientist who advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Stephen M. Walt in The Ideas Letter:

This introductory essay advances two main claims. First, I argue that although America’s relative power has declined from its post-Cold War peak, this trend is not as profound as pessimists maintain. The United States still retains enormous advantages relative to all other powers; barring a prolonged series of self-inflicted wounds, it will be the most powerful state in the world for many years to come. Unfortunately, the possibility of decline hastened by misguided policy decisions cannot be ruled out.

Second, I suggest that there is little to fear if America’s relative power declines somewhat, provided US leaders accept this development and adjust their policies accordingly. On the contrary, a more even distribution of power might be beneficial for the United States and for many others around the world. The United States does not need a position of unchallenged primacy to be secure or prosperous, and a somewhat more even distribution of power would force Washington to eschew the dangerous combination of counterproductive unilateralism and liberal hubris that has roiled world politics in recent decades. Although a few states may be alarmed if they can no longer count on unconditional US protection, on balance a modest decline in America’s power position might be a good thing.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Just a Bit of Wisdom

If I had just a bit of wisdom
I should walk the Great Path and fear
only straying from it.
Though the way is broad
People love shortcuts.

The court is immaculate,
While the fields are overgrown with weeds,
And the granaries are empty.
They wear silk finery,
Carry sharp swords,
Sate themselves on food and drink
Having wealth in excess.
They are called thieving braggarts.

This is definitely not the  Way.

Lao Tzu
from Tao Te Ching
Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Michael Atkinson at The Current:

More than the films of any other genre, horror movies are the phenotypes of cultural anxiety—often, you can read the turbulence right on the skin, like hives. In Japan, a nation always rich with wild expressions of social stress, this phenomenon yielded two primary surges: the New Wave attack of the 1950s and ’60s, and the J-horror invasion starting in the late ’80s and ’90s. While these phases reflected different societal shifts, when you take the macro view, they come together to look like one big haunting.

The New Wave horror films are primarily set in the broad swath of history stretching from the early feudal centuries to the Edo period. In America, the Old West is just for westerns, but in Japan, the medieval epoch has always been ripe for use in any genre or mode. Both eras were formative and have proven irresistible because they represent the evolution from semicivilized lawlessness to modernity (still, despite its massive mythology, the Old West, from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 onward, stretched for maybe eighty-five years, while the Japanese had over half a millennium to play with). The history was always a fuming source of folktales, including kaidan (ghost stories), and that’s the boneyard the New Wave dug into; after the distinctly gentle ghostliness of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), the most notable kaidan adaptations include Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964), Kuroneko (1968), and The Iron Crown (1972), as well as Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Ghost of Kasane (1957), Black Cat Mansion (1958), and The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959); Masaki Kobayashi’s lavish Kwaidan (1964); and Kimiyoshi Yasuda and Yoshiyuki Kuroda’s Yokai Monsters trilogy (1968–69).

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

Tucked away in a dusty corner of St. Mary’s Hospital in London lies a tiny, one-room museum dedicated to one of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine: a mold that changed the world. Curators have recreated Alexander Fleming’s laboratory as it would have looked on the day of his discovery, from the cigarettes that he smoked incessantly while working in the lab to a replica of the famous Petri dish of Penicillium.

While samples of the original isolate, known as Penicillium rubens IMI 15378, are cryopreserved in collections around the world, this strain is curiously absent from modern-day commercial penicillin production. The isolate used in mass production today didn’t originate in Fleming’s laboratory at all; instead, the multi-billion dollar industry uses a microbe derived from a moldy cantaloupe found at a fruit market in Peoria, Illinois in the early 1940s.¹

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

From Phys.Org:

Johns Hopkins University-led researchers, working with the Biomarkers for Older Controls at Risk for Dementia (BIOCARD) cohort, have found that certain factors are linked to faster brain shrinkage and quicker progression from normal thinking abilities to mild cognitive impairment (MCI). People with type 2 diabetes and low levels of specific proteins in their cerebrospinal fluid showed more rapid brain changes and developed MCI sooner than others.

Long-term studies tracking brain changes over many years are rare but valuable. Previous research mostly provided snapshots in time, which can’t show how individual brains change over the years. By following participants for up to 27 years (20-year median), this study offers new insights into how health conditions might speed up brain aging.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Yiyun Li at Harper’s Magazine:

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up following along, which seemed to me a good way to connect people in isolation. But there were disagreements. Someone complained to a friend of mine that she didn’t see why I bothered to read Tolstoy, who was a “patriarchal figure.” An acquaintance told me that I did not need to read Tolstoy to feel like a writer. Feel, I marveled: What did she mean? It was baffling that people would feel strongly about what I did with my reading time; it was as though someone took personal offense that I often eat broccoli.

Later, at a writers’ festival, I gave a talk on what I’d learned from reading War and Peace. Afterward, someone who had been in the audience asked me if I knew anything about Tolstoy’s life. I did, as I had read his biography and visited Yasnaya Polyana, his estate outside Moscow. “He was an aristocrat!” the woman said. “He had servants. His wife served him. He was a horrible man!”

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.