BC SCIENCE
Saved by @Alex1Powell

All Biological life on earth is possible because of a discrete digital mechanism of preservation and replication.

 The mechanism of signaling between the superorganism we know of as bacteria and its ongoing war against viruses is through a digital mechanism.
The source of innovation in biology is in this milieu of microbiome and viromes that are ubiquitous in every complex multicellular organism on earth. Humans are walking ecologies and cannot survive stripped of these ecologies.
We can picture this as a cloud of digital interaction that surrounds all of us.
The cells of multicellular creatures however do not communicate in the same way as bacteria. The DNA of mammals are sequestered from daily activity so as to prevent wear and tear.
The lifespan of mammals are related to their metabolism. The faster a mammal's heart beats the less time it has to live. A multicellular creature degrades like an analog system with each iteration error is accumulated.
Death is inevitable for multicellular creatures because our bodies have similar dynamics as non-linear systems found in chaos theory. The attractors that lead to our existence can lead to chaos and thus death.
Fortunately, evolution has gifted us with some of the digital mechanisms that bacteria have. The immune system is digital in nature. The same system that protects us from bacteria and viruses is also the same system that corrects for errors in our bodies.
At higher scales, evolution creates species that are more analog. But there is a constant tension between the drive to become analog and the need for preservation and replication.
All biological creatures balance these opposing forces by leveraging what is known as code duality. Every system has both an analog part that meets with the world and a digital part that preserves itself against the world.
In biology, the stuff that interprets the digital code of RNA are analog devices. More specifically, mechanical and electrical nano-machines.
The molecular machinery that converts energy into motion and energy into sensing are a consequence of biological innovation happening at bacteria and viral level.
But what meets the reality of physics and chemistry are analog machines. Living things require analog machinery to interpret and act within the world. The language of reality at higher scales is an analog language.
But to scale in size any organism requires digital mechanisms. Therefore this code duality must exist at many scales in a complex organism.
A common idea about the brain is that it is a dynamical system. A dynamical system is unlike a digital system like a computer. Brains have evolved to make sense of and move within their environments. They can only do so if they meet with the analog environment.
This idea however is an incomplete picture in the framing of code duality. The brain should have a digital component as predicted by this hypothesis of code duality. That digital component shares the same origin as our immune system.
Our immune system has the fascinating capability of recalling all the pathogens that have attempted to infect the body. What is the mechanism of this incredible memory system?
I've mentioned earlier that the human cognitive system consists of 3 'brains'. The nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system. It's a very different triune brain that people conventionally think of.
The difference with biology and things that we design is that the latter has a designer that organizes things. So in a computer, the common currency is electrons. In biology, there is no common currency but a bureaucracy of transactions between different incompatible coins.
RNA has a surprisingly common currency (i.e. nucleotides). It is universal across earth originating living things. The power of digital systems come from a multitude of possible combinations. This only comes from standardization that leads to compatibility.
So evolution despite not having a designer with a mind, it has arrived at a strategy that acts like it has a mind!
@threadreaderapp unroll

More from Carlos E. Perez

Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
My attempt to map the research *doctrines* of various groups working on Artificial General Intelligence.


Although one might see names of individuals here as well as organizations, take it just as identification of the organization behind the person and a very narrow slice of their overall research portfolio.

Here is a @swardley map that captures the relationship of doctrine with other individual and organizational processes.


We can capture a party's doctrine by either an explicitly stated agenda or an aggregation of the kind of approach that is pursued. A doctrine is an invariant property of the overall behavior of a party.

In this map one can see the conflict between different parties (compare @garymarcus with the deep learning folks).
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
It is astonishing that most of cognitive science ignores an obvious reality. That there are two kinds of humans.

Tomasello has a very credible hypothesis that what distinguishes humans from the great apes is the inclination towards shared intentional behavior. What is innate is the disposition and like personalities, it is what defines our cognition as we grow.

If cognitive preference is so critical in cognitive development then why is it that we seem to have completely ignored the difference in cognitive preferences between men and women?

Humans are that species of primates that wandered out into the savannah. The savannah is different enough from a dense jungle to exert the evolutionary pressures that encourage the development of planning and forecasting skills.

Furthermore, human infants required a disproportional amount of effort to rear. This meant the specialization of roles between women who were responsible for rearing offspring and men who were responsible for bringing home the bacon. Failure in either implied death.
SCIENCE
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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Conscious and conscience are two words that share the same origin but mean two different things. The bias against explanations of consciousness comes from the conflation of these two words.

In addition, the question of free will is also adjacent to the notion of both consciousness and conscience. The ideas of consciousness, conscience, and free will serve as the foundation of justice in our civilization. (care to add another?)

So when we see people fail to condemn an act that is morally repugnant, we wonder if they have a conscience. But we don't wonder if they are conscious. When we incarcerate a person, we ask if they had "free will" but we inquire if they were 'conscious' during the crime.

The presence of consciousness and free will imply sentience. Which is the same as conscious and sounds just like a conscience. Our biases have muddled all the words together to likely mean the same thing.

The words that we use today continue to evolve. The same word can have a different meaning in the past. The word empathy is a recent word invented in the early 1900s. Originally it meant to place oneself from the viewpoint of a thing. Today we don't use it in this way.
LIFE
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Constructivism is perhaps the most important idea that will shape the future of humanity. The ills of society are a consequence of the willful ignorance of constructivism.

There are two important definitions of constructivism, one comes from mathematics and the other from psychology. The mathematical definition leads rejects the law of excluded middle. It's relevant in understanding causation.

The psychological definition: "Humans actively construct their own knowledge, and that reality is determined by our experiences as a learner."

The models of causality that our brains invent to navigate the world is a consequence of our progressive development in the world we live in. Robert Kegan calls his theory constructive developmental theory to emphasize two important aspects of cognitive growth.

Cognitive growth is constructive as explained above. It is also developmental in the sense that our mental models of the world make abrupt changes as we grow in maturity. The symmetries in our models break and lead to new symmetries.
LIFE
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Abduction is that thought process where we renew our past, question our present, and reimagine our future.

It was C.S. Peirce, a century ago, that coined the use of this term to describe a thought process that would convey hypothesis making.

A little over 50 years ago, proponents of Artificial Intelligence, proposed that deduction would be the core feature of human intelligence. This idea was driven by the bias towards formal logical systems and the emergence of computers.

This approach was in stark contrast to cybernetics (introduced a decade early) that proposed that dynamical systems were a model for intelligence. The descendant of this approach was coined as artificial neural networks.

This dynamical systems approach was later understood as being similar to an induction based thought process. Deep Learning leads to what can be characterized as Artificial Intuition.
LIFE

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NotTheMacAnon
NotTheMacAnon
@NotTheMacAnon1
Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

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In some cases, almost 100% of the light energy can be converted to the second harmonic frequency. These cases typically involve intense pulsed laser beams passing through large crystals, and careful alignment to obtain phase matching.
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Corey Lynn \U0001f64f\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
Corey Lynn 🙏🇺🇸...
@CoreysDigs
1) OBSERVATION: The frequencies are changing. I would have to assess stats on the electromagnetic field to see its fluctuations. All I know is, I am highly sensitive to energy/frequencies, and they are changing, because…

2) 2 Weeks ago, my dog was effected by it as well. He is hearing things that aren’t technically audible. I can tell by his body language and sounds. One week ago I began feeling a pressure in my head and ears. It wasn’t painful at all, but it was intense for a bit.

3) It reminded me of taking off in an airplane a bit. I felt like I was in a vacuum. It went on and off for a couple of days. I’ve picked up on frequencies and high pitched sounds (not audible to most) for 30 years, and today my right ear began to ring for longer than usual.

4) This is nothing unusual for me, with exception of the duration. This happens often with me. No, it’s not tinnitus. Only this time, when I spoke, there was reverb creating a high pitch in my ear from my voice. This lasted for about 30 minutes. It did not hurt, just annoying.

5) So yes, the frequencies are changing. What this means exactly, I am unsure of at the moment. Some will say electromagnetic fields, others will say ascension, and some will say pole shift. I honestly can’t say at this very moment.
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Mark Tomasovic
Mark Tomasovic
@MarkTomasovic
What is carbon capture? And how does it work?

While carbon capture is regularly discussed in the media, no one really ever explains what it is.

Below is a quick thread discussing the technology behind traditional carbon capture 👇

Carbon capture is broadly the "capture" of CO2 emissions from a power plant or other type of industrial facility.

Technology is connected to the "tailpipes" of these facilities and is used to remove CO2 from the plant exhaust.

Once the CO2 is removed from the plant exhaust, it is typically pressurized and sent under ground for permanent storage.

This step is called "sequestration" and is why experts often talks about "carbon capture and sequestration" or "CCS".

So how do you "capture" the CO2 molecules from exhaust?

Currently, one of the most economic forms of carbon capture is called "amine-based" capture.

An "amine" is a special liquid chemical which selectively grabs on to CO2 molecules.

To get the amine to grab on to the CO2, the amine is put into the top of a large column, while the exhaust is put into the bottom of the column.

The exhaust bubbles up through the column, and the amine drips down.

The liquid amine and gas exhaust mix in the column.
SCIENCE
Amy Maxmen, PhD
Amy Maxmen, PhD
@amymaxmen
Azar just released a delusional, alternative history of Covid testing in the US. I’m mad because our testing failures allowed this outbreak to blow-up. We can’t fix our system if we ignore where it is broken. I suspect @PublicHealth agrees.

My fact-check on remarks @HHSGov 🧵

“It is indisputable that the United States has built the most extensive testing system and strategy of any major country,” says Azar.

False. Several countries have had percent positivity ~1% whereas US has never been below 5% and is >10% today. Refs KCDC & USA @JohnsHopkins


"The federal government got out of the way of test development in safe and sensible ways,” says Azar.

False. In Feb, CDC & FDA blocked labs from testing as the disease spread exponentially. I broke this story👇🏼& wrote more like it as the year wore on.

Azar defends questions about why the CDC refused an early German test vetted & distributed by WHO, by saying it was ‘unapproved’ & beneath us.

False. Top US researchers in my stories vetted several tests as early as Feb,& found that the one recommended by WHO was ideal.


Azar refuses to concede that other countries handled Covid better. He attributes Koreas success to less travel, invasiveness & private sector.

False. Korea's gov't marshaled the private sector & tracing success was largely from hiring tons of tracers.
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Lior Pachter
Lior Pachter
@lpachter
"The new answer to a 77-year-old problem"

😭


https://t.co/hm9NoaU4nr


https://t.co/8fKDiKjSWc


https://t.co/jkaicC1F2x


https://t.co/PpxWT4Jef4
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Loren Brichter
Loren Brichter
@lorenb
So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
TECH
V\u0936\u0941\u0926\u094d\u0927\u093f
Vशुद्धि...
@V_Shuddhi
क्या आप जानते हैं कि क्या है, पितृ पक्ष में कौवे को खाना देने के पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण!

श्राद्ध पक्ष में कौओं का बड़ा ही महत्व है। कहते है कौआ यम का प्रतीक है, यदि आपके हाथों दिया गया भोजन ग्रहण कर ले, तो ऐसा माना जाता है कि पितरों की कृपा आपके ऊपर है और वे आपसे ख़ुश है।


कुछ लोग कहते हैं की व्यक्ति मरकर सबसे पहले कौवे के रूप में जन्म लेता है और उसे खाना खिलाने से वह भोजन पितरों को मिलता है

शायद हम सबने अपने घर के किसी बड़े बुज़ुर्ग, किसी पंडित या ज्योतिषाचार्य से ये सुना होगा। वे अनगिनत किस्से सुनाएंगे, कहेंगे बड़े बुज़ुर्ग कह गए इसीलिए ऐसा करना

शायद ही हमें कोई इसके पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण बता सके।

हमारे ऋषि मुनि और पौराणिक काल में रहने वाले लोग मुर्ख नहीं थे! कभी सोचियेगा कौवों को पितृ पक्ष में खिलाई खीर हमारे पूर्वजों तक कैसे पहुंचेगी?

हमारे ऋषि मुनि विद्वान थे, वे जो बात करते या कहते थे उसके पीछे कोई न कोई वैज्ञानिक कारण छुपा होता था।

एक बहुत रोचक तथ्य है पितृ पक्ष, भादो( भाद्रपद) प्रकृति और काक के बीच।

एक बात जो कह सकते कि हम सब ने स्वतः उग आये पीपल या बरगद का पेड़/ पौधा किसी न किसी दीवार, पुरानी

इमारत, पर्वत या अट्टालिकाओं पर ज़रूर देखा होगा। देखा है न?

ज़रा सोचिये पीपल या बरगद की बीज कैसे पहुंचे होंगे वहाँ तक? इनके बीज इतने हल्के भी नहीं होते के हवा उन्हें उड़ाके ले जा सके।
ALL
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Richard James
Richard James
@RJSHutton
I think a plausible explanation is that whatever Corbyn says or does, his critics will denounce - no matter how much hypocrisy it necessitates.


Corbyn opposes the exploitation of foreign sweatshop-workers - Labour MPs complain he's like Nigel

He speaks up in defence of migrants - Labour MPs whinge that he's not listening to the public's very real concerns about immigration:

He's wrong to prioritise Labour Party members over the public:

He's wrong to prioritise the public over Labour Party
POLITICS
Eric
Eric
@ericbahn
1/ Recently, I learned about the concept of ‘struggle porn’. This refers to the fetish of sacrificing nearly everything (health, relationships, time) for your startup. I fear that this label is creating more harm than good.

2/ @nateliason wrote a fabulous article about this topic, which first introduced me to this concept. Everyone should read it:

3/ @alexisohanian also recently spoke about struggle porn, though referring to it as ‘hustle porn.’ (as the co-founder of @hustlefundvc, obviously I take issue with this pejorative definition of ‘hustle’, but that’s another topic)

4/ Struggling in itself isn’t necessarily bad. Let’s be real here--if you’re going to start a startup, you will struggle. Founders should expect to work harder generally than employees. You will be challenged in many ways and also be super rewarded in others. This is normal.

5/ However, if you are over-indexing on hard work without clear purpose and degrading your mental health/relationships in the process--then this is very bad and we obviously should not celebrate this behavior.
STARTUPS
Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
SRI MOOKAMBIKA DEVI, KOLLUR (KAR)

There was an Asura, Kaumasura, who was doing penance to please Shiva and get a boon. To prevent him from asking for a boon, Devi Saraswati made him dumb (hence called Mookasur)
Later, Adi Parashakti slayed him and came to be called Mookambika.


It is said that Adi Shankaracharya had a vision in which Devi agreed to follow him provided he did not look back. He kept walking and was assured of her presence due to the sound of anklets. When he reached here in Kollur, he turned back as the sound of anklets had stopped.


So Devi stayed here and merged with the lingam. The place came to be called Mookambika Kshetram.
The linga has integrated on it’s left side MahaKali, Maha Lakshmi and Maha Saraswathi and on the right side- Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.


A swarna rekha (gold line) divides this linga into left and right portion. Adi Shakthi in this Udhbhavlinga form appears only here.
Devi sits in padmasana and has 4 hands.
Adi Shankaracharya installed the Sri Chakra in front of Devi and also composed the Soundarya Lahiri here.
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