sue me if you don't learn anything #3
here are some random facts i've written in my notes over the past weeks:
1. AI can beat world champions at chess and math but can't reliably fold a t-shirt. what's going on here?
this is moravec's paradox: what's hard for humans (complex math, chess, logic) is easy for AI. what's easy for humans (walking, recognizing objects, catching a ball) is nearly impossible for AI.
why? one explanation is that the things that feel effortless to us (vision, movement) took millions of years of evolution to develop. they're so optimized that they're hard to reverse-engineer. abstract reasoning like math on the other hand is more recent and there wasn't much evolutionary pressure for us to get good at calculus. so it's less optimized and easier to replicate with simple algorithms.1
taken to its extreme, moravec's paradox suggests humans become the body for AI brains, which is kinda scary. warehouse workers get replaced by robots who are in turn remotely controlled through AR/VR by some humans sitting at home. we'd end up spending our days controlling robots through some interface where AI tells us what to do and we do the physical tasks it can't…
2. do you ever wonder if other people think as sophisticatedly as you?
maybe they can't think such complicated thoughts?
this is the lesser minds problem, the tendency to perceive other people's minds as less vivid and less complex than your own. "i can only experience my thoughts and my reality. i know i can have these thoughts. but maybe everyone else is simpler, or less real…"
we experience our own thoughts, emotions, and desires intensely. but we perceive others' mental states as less detailed or less significant.
why?
probably because you can only observe your own monologue. since you can't observe anyone else's, your brain defaults to assuming they're not as real as you. another reason might be that imagining the complex emotions of every person you meet would exhaust your brain's energy. so you shortcut. "surely they're not as complex as me!"
3. why are most species ~50% male, ~50% female?
fisher's principle explains this: if males become rare, each male gets more mating opportunities, so parents who produce males in turn have more grandkids (because their kids are more likely to mate). this drives the ratio back to 50/50 where neither sex has advantage. and the same goes for women being rare during some time.
4. the first apple sale was done barefoot.
steve jobs, 21 and broke, walked into the byte shop barefoot and sold paul terrell on a computer that didn't exist yet. terrell ordered some 50 computers for $25,000, but only if they were assembled and delivered in 30 days. jobs and wozniak had no money for parts, so jobs bought $15,000 in components on 30-day credit. they built all 50 computers in jobs's parents' garage and delivered on time. that $25,000 purchase order launched a $4,000,000,000,000 company.
5. why is it that women have more diseases, disabilities, and health problems throughout life, but live longer than men?
you'd expect more disease = earlier death, but it's the opposite.
one theory is that women's two X chromosomes protect against genetic diseases (one chromosome can compensate for mutations in the other), hormone differences, and men taking more risks.
this is why color blindness is more common in men. women can carry the gene for these conditions without suffering from them because their "healthy" X chromosome takes over.
6. leaving your laptop plugged in 24/7 extends battery life.
a typical laptop battery lasts for about 1,000 cycles, and keeping the laptop plugged in continuously uses almost zero cycles.
how?
once the battery is full, the laptop bypasses the battery completely and draws power directly from the wall outlet to power the screen and processor. the battery just sits idle, neither charging nor draining.
(caveat: leaving battery at 100% for months can cause stress, so get it to 20% or something every month just to make sure.)
7. having apps open in the background doesn't drain battery (phones and tablets).
when i was a kid i was told to close all apps running in the background on my phone. even multiple times a day i should've closed everything. and i felt guilty if i forgot to.
but i've just learned that keeping background apps "open" uses essentially zero resources. so closing background apps is pretty useless, assuming you don't have claustrophobia.
this seems too good to be true!?
when you exit an app, iOS freezes it in a suspended state. the app switcher just shows recently used apps. they're not actively running or draining battery.
8. emotional tears (grief, joy) and reflex tears (onions, dust) look different under a microscope. emotional tears have higher protein content and contain stress hormones, hence crystalizing differently after drying.
9. a "calque" is a word-for-word translation from one language into another. for example: "beer garden" comes from german: "biergarten"
"skyscraper" to swedish: "skyskrapa"
swedish borrowed "skyscraper" word-for-word as "skyskrapa," making "skyskrapa" the calque.
10. the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to get lost. people thought it was a fraud, so they lost it. this happened around 1700 and dinosaurs weren't recognized for another 164 years.
11. jim gray, who solved concurrency for databases, disappeared and is yet to be found. he invented transaction processing and two-phase locking, which is the nerd shit that lets your bank handle millions of requests without messing up balances. in january 2007, he sailed out of san francisco bay alone on his 40-foot boat to scatter his mother's ashes. he never came back…
he won the turing award and basically built the foundation for every modern database system. then literally vanished into the pacific.
12. similar to jim gray, alan turing also died in a slightly unusual way. he invented the theoretical computer that every modern computer is based on, cracked the enigma code during ww2, and created the turing test for AI. in 1952 he was prosecuted for being gay and forced into chemical castration. two years later he died of cyanide poisoning with a half-eaten apple by his bed.