Spring Quarantine, Summer Joys. The year 2020 (first half).
Certainly, humans are strange creatures in a strange world.
Former president Barack Obama described (In ''Dreams from my father'') our basic condition (with the following Bible quote):
For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding (Chronicles 29.15) [1].
Humans can massacre one another, but also perform spectacular acts of altruistic kindness.
Some would say that it is just a ''product of our biology'', and leave it there.
Rather unsatisfying, though. But luckily, there are more thorough explanations out there.
E.g. Robert Sapolsky's wonderful book ''Behave''.
See my review here.
Or take a quiz about what you think should be done, see here.
But, in order, to really understand, we have to go beyond biology, and (say, perhaps)
into the world of physics.
But, well, here things tend to become even stranger...
I.e. in the world of Quantum Physics, there are no particles, there are only fields ...
Indeed, seeing the world as fields is the only way that allow us to make sense of things like the
widely-demonstrated double-slit experiment...
(For more about this, see e.g. the thought-provoking introduction Quantum Field Theory visualized on Youtube).
Still, in the end, it is, of course, just Information ... All of it...
(''It from Bit'', in John Wheeler's words...).
...that our brains use, in order to be able to construct that thing we call ''our world''...
A strange world indeed...
And strange times here in the spring of 2020, when we are all in lockdown
(in Europe). But, who knows, maybe a quarantine is what we all
need, in order to really move forward, and become a little wiser...? Who knows...
Certainly, even though some parts of society have come to a complete halt in these months, there are also
areas of our society, where new technologies are being introduced at breakneck speeds.
Who knows, maybe we are becoming smarter?
See my Microsoft Teams report for more...
And prepare youself for the future with the SpaceXISS Docking Simulator, see here.
Or, prepare yourself to go even further.
Perhaps, all the way to Mars...?
For now, you can send your name out there. See here.
Who knows, everything might work out for us all in the end?
Indeed, soon, even stocks might be up again ... See here
(Look out for Tulip Mania periods though...).
Certainly (And luckily), in the end, after 3 months of lockdown, it was again summer.
See my photo report from the summer of 2020, in Denmark, here.
With more, here.
Quarantine.
As the coronavirus situation continues to develop (followed by social distancing and quarantine),
many have noted that it was in (times of) quarantine,
that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did some of their best work [2].
According to Wikipedia:
Newtow was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, June 1661, age 18.
...
Soon after Newton had obtained his BA degree in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague (1665 to 1666).
Shakespeare had been lucky to survive the bubonic plague when Stratford-upon-Avon was ravaged by
a huge outbreak in the summer of 1564, where up to a quarter of the town’s population died [3].
The play, Macbeth, was conceivably written during the 1606 epidemic, and contains lines like:
Expire before the flowers in their caps (Act 4, Scene 3) [4].
Meaning: People die all the time...
Its even worse in King Lear. Probably, first performed in 1606:
The first performance on record, and its a decent bet that it was scripted that year or the year before.
...
I.e. there was a major plague event in London in summer 1606,
which led to the Globe and all other London theatres being closed.
Still, the outbreak wasn’t as bad as the one three years before that killed more than a 10th of London’s population [5].
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in palaces, treason.
We have seen the best of our time (Act 1 Scene 2) [6].
Still, as columnist Alexandra Petri writes:
There was a plague, so Isaac Newton went home, and for him it was an annus mirabilis,
which in Latin is a ''year of miracles''. ... He discovered the theory of universal gravitation,
began his study of optics and began work on calculus [7].
According to Gillian Brockell:
Without his professors to guide him, Newton apparently thrived.
The year-plus he spent away was later referred to as his annus mirabilis, the ''year of wonders'' [8].
Indeed...
When to buy stocks (Beware of ''Tulip Mania'').
Ratios of the stock prizes of companies ralative to their income as of February 20, 2018. The historic median is 16, meaning that company stocks are typically valued at 16 times their historic earnings. Ratios above 16 indicate a bubble.
Futures markets started in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. The Tulip mania was a period when tulip bulbs reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637.
And, certainly, changing the way we work together.
Turning stuff that was ''breaking news'' into ''old hat'', ''run of the mill'', stuff.
E.g. in Microsoft Teams it is now standard, that you can press a button, and blur the background in your video-conference
call (if you don't like people to see, or focus on, how you live).
If you want to have a Transcription
of your video call, Teams can make this on the fly.
You can save your conference call, and Teams will then automatically store
the video call in the Cloud (Stream) forever...
In Zoom the call can easily be stored on your local harddrive, and you can the review meeting highlights afterwards, if you want...
Well, well...
Indeed, this is the next phase...
First we went mobile.
See some of my experiments here (2010),
as well as some Ipad experiments, here (2011).
And now everyone is working from home...
Review of
Robert Sapolsky's book
''Behave''.
Vintage 2017.
Human behavior is a complicated thing.
And yes, a recurring theme in the book is that ''Its complicated''.
Nature, nurture, early childhood experience, culture all
impact our behavior. There is no ''silver bullet'' that explains it all.
Sometimes we look at the world through the lense of ''Us vs. Them''.
Sometimes we run on ''auto-pilot''.
Sometimes it is brain science, income inequality, morals or something else,
that explains what is going on.
''It depends''...
...
Many good insights throughout the book though:
What majorly predicts a life of crime?
Being born to a mother who, if she could, would have chosen that you not be.
Whats the most basic thing provided by a mother?
Knowing that she is happy that you exist.
Human parents teach their young what to bother dreaming about:
The antropologist Adric Kusserow os St. Michaels College compared
parents from Manhattans Upper East Side, to parents in a blue-colar
community and parents in a crime-ridden community (both in Queens).
Parenting in the poor community was full of metaphors about not
losing what had been achieved, ''stand your ground'', ''not letting anyone
get under your skin''.
Parenting was authoritarian, toughening the goal. For example,
parents teased kids far more than in the other neighborhoods.
Working class parents talked about momentum. And contained
images of movement, progress. With hard work, your child move on
to the middle class.
In the upper class, the childrens success was a given, as were expectations
of physical health. Far more vulnerable was a childs psychological health,
''fulfillment''. A child should not do something ''just for money''.
A lot of stories that we thought we knew turns out not to be entirely correct.
E.g. in hunter-gatherer societies we have always been told that
''Women do the gathering, while men supply most of the calories by hunting''.
Well:
In actuality, the majority of calories comes from foraging...
Men spend lots of time talking aout how awesome they were
in the last hunt, and how much awesomer they will be in the next...
Grandmothers probably supply more calories to families than men, in e.g. the Hazda tribes.
Surprise ...?
So, do we have free will to do anything about all of this?
Well:
The AI researcher Marvin Minsky once defined free will as:
''Internal forces I do not understand''...
Maybe, the only thing that we really can do, is to motivate others to work hard (How to behave, and what to do):
When kids do something well, you can praise them in two ways:
...
a) That was great, you must have worked hard.
but...
b) If you praise the kid for being smart, effort begins
to look suspect.
I.e. if you praise kids for working hard, they tend to work harder the next time.
Praise them for being smart, effort begins to look suspect...
(According to psychologist Carol Dweck).
There is a lot of interesting stuff on Sutton's website.
E.g. you might want to
take a look at this great talk about the Future of AI (by Richard S. Sutton).
And his (RL) agenda is certainly something that I totally agree with:
I am seeking to identify general computational principles underlying what we mean by intelligence and goal-directed behavior.
I start with the interaction between the intelligent agent and its environment. Goals, choices, and sources of information are all defined in terms of this interaction.
In some sense it is the only thing that is real, and from it all our sense of the world is created.
SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.
Now they even have simulators...
The SpaceX ISS Docking simulator will familiarize you with the controls of the actual interface used by NASA Astronauts to manually pilot the SpaceX Dragon 2 vehicle to the Internation Space Station:
Scheduled for launch in July 2020, the Perserance rover will search for signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past. And, indeed, for signs of past microbial life.
Interestingly, you can even get your name out there:
NASA's ''Send Your Name to Mars'' campaign invited people around the world to submit their names to ride aboard the agency's next rover to the Red Planet. Some 10,932,295 people did just that.
Btw. if you missed the opportunity to get your name on Perseverance rover...?
Well, then other opportunies will be available later on (See: Send your Name to Mars).
