A Neural Network Taxonomy, Domino Spirals, and Tomato Juice on Airplanes: Lux Recommends #49
Welcome to Lux Recommends #49, the newest edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (and want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
Biologists are close to reinventing the genetic code of life: Scientists approaching synthesizing an entire E. Coli from scratch thanks to naturally occurring redundancy in genetic code. By Lux friend John Bohannon. — Zavain
How to get Good Business Ideas — The Mental Alchemy of Ideation: A sprawling piece with a huge number of pointers to articles and talks. Very thought-provoking. — Sam
Yuval Noah Harari on big data, Google and the end of free will: “Dataism” is the emerging implicit (and jarring?) religion. As more and more can be optimized under the guise of data driven empiricism, what happens to our sense of creative independence and “free will”? — Zavain
The Neural Network Zoo: A cheat sheet for all of the neural network architectures that you might hear about.— Sam
One Nation Divisible: An absolutely gorgeous and fascinating Businessweek feature about the American Electorate — Jeff
Why do people drink so much tomato juice on airplanes? Science and culture and aviation. — Sam
Secrets of the sidewalk — what pavements say about a city: “A city’s pavements say a lot about its people and power. They are a symbol of civilisation but conceal a murky underworld” — Adam K
Researchers prototype system for reading closed books: Terrahertz imaging working like magic: reading closed books. — Bilal
Inside the Vault: Oregon Ducks x Jordan Brand: Inside the genius to Nike’s Tinker Hatfield on merging two iconic brands. — Adam G
Report of the Defense Science Board Summer Study on Autonomy (pdf): AI race between militaries?— Bilal
The 24-Year-Old Coca-Cola Virgin: This is an amazing essay written by someone who tries Coke for her first time. So well-written. — Sam
And Nature’s Issue on Science Fiction and Science Fact: “Why are we celebrating Wells and Star Trek now, in this sci-fi special (which includes our long-running Futures sci-fi series presented as a graphic novel for the first time)? It happens to be 150 years since Wells’s birth, 70 years since his death and 50 years since Star Trek was first aired. All satisfying multiples of ten, but measured in units based on the revolution of a small planet round an unremarkable star in the suburbs of an ordinary galaxy. As Wells lamented, we are shackled to our past. It might be a while before we run such commemorations based on binary representations of elapsed numbers of Planck time units.”
Television
Atlanta: Savvy with just enough bit of strange, ambition, music, culture, realities of crime, social justice, poverty, power. — Josh
Better Things: Awesome female protagonist Pamela Adlon, produced by Louis CK, snarky, sarcastic, semi-struggling mom of 3 plays partial version of real-life self. Funny and intelligent. — Josh
Videos
Watch a triple spiral of 15,000 dominoes fall down — Adam K
And a little optical illusion: There are twelve black dots at the intersections in this image. Your brain won’t let you see them all at once. — Adam K
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