Bibliolater 📚📜🖋 @bibliolater@qoto.org
Not a bot just a rather corpulent male fifty years of age; a very very slow ignoramus who reads occasionally.
Toots are #humanities, #science, #nonfiction, #book, #map, #chart and #graph related. Some toots containg #videos may also find their way into the #timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Expect many typing errors and copious amounts of nonsensical commentary from my personal formulations.
Finis
Joined Nov 2022
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
How does electrical current move through water? Here's a little movie of it, made by Mark Petersen. A positively charged proton gets passed from one molecule to another!
This is called the 'Grotthuss mechanism' because Theodor Grotthuss proposed this theory in his paper “Theory of decomposition of liquids by electrical currents” back in 1806. It was quite revolutionary at the time, since ions were not well understood.
Something like this theory is true. But in fact all the pictures I've shown so far are oversimplified! A hydronium ion is too powerfully positive to remain a lone H₃O⁺. It usually attracts a bunch of other water molecules and creates a larger structure!
(2/n)
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
If you could watch an individual water molecule, about once in 10 hours it would do this!
As it bounces around, every so often it hits another water molecule hard enough enough for one to steal a hydrogen nucleus - that is, a proton - from the other!
The water molecule with the missing proton is called a hydroxide ion, OH⁻. The one with an extra proton is called a hydronium ion, H₃O⁺.
This process is called the 'autoionization' of water. Thanks to this, roughly one in ten million molecules in a glass of water are actually OH⁻ or H₃O⁺, not the H₂O you expect.
And this explains why water conducts electricity so well. Let's watch.
(1/2)
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
"In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs."
Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11817
<strong>The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant</strong>
"_We find that Levant-related modern populations typically have substantial ancestry coming from populations related to the Chalcolithic Zagros and the Bronze Age Southern Levant. These groups also harbor ancestry from sources we cannot fully model with the available data, highlighting the critical role of post-Bronze-Age migrations into the region over the past 3,000 years._"
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.024
#Reasearch #DOI #Ancient #AncientDNA #aDNA #DNA #PopulationGenetics #Population #Genetics #History #Demography #Archaeology #Archaeodons #Levant #MiddleEast #Asia @archaeodons
<strong>The origin of every European country's name</strong>
"_attempt to explain the origin of every European country's name in English!_"
#Video length: twenty three minutes and thirty nine seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pcv2ySMi40
#Name #Names #Word #Words #Language #Languages #Europe #European #Origin #Origins
🇳🇴 <strong>Inside the Extreme Plan to Refreeze the Arctic | WSJ Future of Everything</strong>
"_A method normally used to create ice-skating rinks is now coming to the rescue of melting sea ice in the Arctic. Since satellite records began in 1979, summer Arctic sea ice has shrunk by around 13% per decade. Could making more ice be a potential solution to this issue?_"
#Video length: eight minutes and eighteen seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ebVUj2lh9U
#Climate #ClimateChange #Environment #Norway #Svalbard #Arctic #Sea #Ice #Science @science @climatechange @environment
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
@bibliolater @ai the other thing maybe worth note is that taking participant responses in the highly constrained pragmatic context of a psych experiment to reflect the full breadth of human responding is a bit misleading. It’s an interesting question how LLMs without pretraining or finetuning respond to experimental questions, but a better comparison might be with data from asking those questions of random shoppers at a mall if “breadth of answer” is of interest
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
@bibliolater @ai minor comment: the LLM data are not being compared to multiple responses by a single person on the same task as that is not a general feature of the primary human experimental literature involved. So, as far as I can make out, the levels of human self-consistency are simply imputed/assumed. Doesn’t mean the difference isn’t there, just that the empirical basis seems somewhat anecdotal.
<strong>(Ir)rationality and cognitive biases in large language models</strong>
"_First, the responses given by the LLMs often display incorrect reasoning that differs from cognitive biases observed in humans. This may mean errors in calculations, or violations to rules of logic and probability, or simple factual inaccuracies. Second, the inconsistency of responses reveals another form of irrationality—there is significant variation in the responses given by a single model for the same task._"
Macmillan-Scott Olivia and Musolesi Mirco. 2024 (Ir)rationality and cognitive biases in large language models R. Soc. Open Sci. 11: 240255. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240255
#OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #DOI #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMS #Bias #Academia #Academic #Academics @ai
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
U.S. #TreasurySecretary #JanetYellen will warn that the use of #AI in #finance could lower transaction costs, but carries "significant risks," according to excerpts from a speech to be delivered on Thursday.
"Specific vulnerabilities may arise from the complexity and opacity of AI models, inadequate risk management frameworks to account for AI risks and interconnections that emerge as many market participants rely on the same data and models," - #Yellen
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/yellen-warn-significant-risks-use-ai-finance-2024-06-05/
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
RNA has taken center stage, with remarkable versatility, such as >400 drugs approved and many more to come.
My conversation with Tom Cech, Nobel laureate, pioneer of RNA biology, with a new book called THE CATALYST, w/transcript
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/tom-cech-rna-takes-center-stage
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
Talks are now available at https://www.ias.edu/video/new-bounds-large-values-dirichlet-polynomials-part-1 https://www.ias.edu/video/new-bounds-large-values-dirichlet-polynomials-part-2
The new progress can be summarized by the following chain of implications (see James' talk for some more detail):
Riemann Hypothesis
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Lindelof Hypothesis
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Density Hypothesis
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Guth-Maynard zero-density estimate <- we are here
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1940 Ingham zero density estimate
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"Trivial" bound from Riemann-von Mangoldt formula
Does it always have to end in corporate greed?
🇳🇴 <strong>Norwegian farmer finds 1,000-year-old Viking sword on family farm</strong>
"_X-ray scans of the sword revealed outlines of rare inscriptions with a cross pattern and the likely presence of letters on the blade._
_Based on these inscriptions, scientists said it could be a so-called Vlfberht sword, produced during the Viking Age or the early Middle Ages between 900 and 1050AD._"
#Europe #News #Norway #Viking #Vikings #Science #Archaeology #Archaeodons @science @archaeodons
<strong>Medieval Mongolian Writing: How Much Survives?</strong>
"_This video looks at the history of writing amongst the Mongols and other nomadic peoples, with special focus on the writing of Mongolian during the days of the Mongol Empire._"
#Video length: twenty two minutes and forty one seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5_UFOo1uPA
#History #Histodon #Histodons #Medieval #Medievodons #Mongol #Empire #Mongols #Asia #Writing @histodon @histodons @medievodons
<strong>Indo-European Syntax (with Danny Bate)</strong>
#Video length: one hour and forty minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlQU2p_u4LQ
#IndoEuropean #Language #Languages #Syntax #Linguistics @linguistics
<strong>Episode 297 – The Rise and Rise of Nicaea</strong>
"_With the Bulgarians and Turks hobbled by the Mongols the field is clear for Nicaea. John Vatatzes annexes a huge swathe of European territory and is widely recognised as the true Roman Emperor._"
https://shows.acast.com/b53d3462-8bc8-46b5-875c-99d8b173ed52/66609088aa134f00127e6a9c
#Audio #Podcast #History #Byzantium #Histodon #Histodons @histodon @histodons
#Image attribution: Claus Grünstäudl w18, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elegant_steel_microphone_(Unsplash).jpg
<strong>The Ancestors of Today's Poles with the Haplogroup R1a</strong>
"_Genetic studies proved the autochthonic theory of Polish origin to be true at least as by the 2nd century BCE or possibly about 2000 BCE. The Polish nobility’s myth was its Sarmatian origin, a myth that proved to be true partially culturally and partially genetically. The Scythian and Slavic peoples grow out of the same Indo-European genetic trunk, or
rather, they are branches of the same thicker limb._"
Wojciech J. Cynarski (2021). The Ancestors of Today's Poles with the Haplogroup R1a. Sociology and Anthropology, 9(2), 19-25. DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.13189/sa.2021.090202
#Research #DOI #IndoEuropean #Aryan #Scyth #Slavic #Lechite #Pole #Sociology #Anthropology #Science #Genetics #Academia #Academic #Academics @science @sociology @anthropology
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
Developments in the theories of motion in medieval Europe #histsci
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2024/06/05/from-τὰ-φυσικά-ta-physika-to-physics-xxii/
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋
boosted
“A handful of current and former employees at OpenAI and other prominent artificial intelligence companies warned that the technology poses grave risks to humanity in a Tuesday letter, calling on companies to implement sweeping changes to ensure transparency and foster a culture of public debate.”
#GiftLink https://wapo.st/3yMIh9l
Not a bot just a rather corpulent male fifty years of age; a very very slow ignoramus who reads occasionally.
Toots are #humanities, #science, #nonfiction, #book, #map, #chart and #graph related. Some toots containg #videos may also find their way into the #timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Expect many typing errors and copious amounts of nonsensical commentary from my personal formulations.
Finis
Joined Nov 2022
