Introducing Variables, Weekly
So I decided to create a publication for my weekly digital blurbs thing, if you do not know what I am talking about, read this — Here.
It’s called Variables, Weekly. You can choose to hit that follow button or not.
So let’s get right into some interesting things I read this week. Remember, you do not have to read everything, I understand this might be a little bulky but at it’s core it’s just a list of stuff, you can skip whatever does not appeal to you.
I find too many things interesting.
Libertarian evangelists of Capitalism say it is a model that benefits all. This is not entirely false as today capitalism has become the major driver of economic progress in the world. With the rise of the merchant class, nation state, international cooperation and global trade practices among other factors, we saw the death of feudal practices and well established monocracies.
But might we perhaps be going back to the societal fragmentation prevalent in the ancient agrarian world pre-industrialisation? Have new kings and fiefdoms replaced the old?
This article takes a look — Here
I think you might find this interesting — What Twitter feels about Network providers in Nigeria.
It’s a data driven analysis using a method called ‘Sentiment Analysis’ to find patterns in tweets as regards Nigerian telcos.
SideNote: WHY DO PEOPLE SPELL MOUNTAIN AS MTN? JESUS CHRIST
Read Obama’s letter to his predecessor here, it’s quite interesting — The way ahead
Humans Aren’t the only great apes that can read minds — SorryNotSorry
Brain Exercises might just be making you better at….yes you guessed it, acing more brain exercises — Here
I have always been sceptical about abstract brain exercises that claim to have real life implications. And worse, this might not even be a case of correlation vis-a-vis causation, neither might be at play here.
Opposition to Galileo wasn’t just limited to religion — HistoricalBias?
A bot crawled thousands of peer reviewed studies looking for math errors — BotBotBotttttt
Problems facing Science — Sighs
I have always been a firm evangelist of scientific inquiry but even a layman like me has noticed the loss of quality in scientific papers of late. This article blew me away, it talks about issues like funding, poorly designed methods and processes, the mouse trap that is peer review and lots more. You should read it, maybe science isn’t as neutral as we like to think.
How did Samsung totally mess up the exploding battery fiasco? — YESHOWDIDTHEY
I first heard about Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Alpha when I saw this TED talk some time last year.
I had no idea he was responsible for Mathematica, a software I used once or twice in University. Wolfram Alpha is a computational engine that performs computations, from simple addition to calculating say the GDP of Hungary in real time. The amazing thing about this engine is it can call resources and make calculations at the instant you input your query. Unfortunately I found out about this after I had left the university. The engine is far from perfect but exceptional.
This week I read this long but wonderful piece from Stephen Wolfram on BackChannel about Computational law, Symbolic discourse and AI — Here
This talks about his work, spanning over 4 decades, trying to make computers more understanding of our natural language. Let’s make a small simplistic illustration, let’s assume you ask a computer to perform the computation 2 + 2, this is straightforward in natural language, the computer easily grasps the query. But turn this on its head and say something like ‘If I have two bananas, then go visit the supermarket to buy two more, how many bananas do I have?’. This is a different beast all together as the computer has to navigate through mountains and hills to convert the statement to what he calls — Symbolic Discourse and extract meaning to perform a computation. This is interesting because his approach is not to link concepts to actions by default but define concepts on their own.
Wasn’t the internet supposed to eliminate the need for middlemen? — No?
Did you know the famous Schrodinger’s cat also had radioactive material and prussic acid to keep it company in its famous box? — Bet you didn’t
Also the cat was an analogy that came about by virtue of a long conversation between Schrodinger and Einstein concerning the uncertainty of Quantum mechanics which eventually turned out to be ironic. It also speaks about the zeitgeist responsible for the analogy.
Did you know that air slows down the speed of light by 0.03%? And that it is possible to accelerate particles faster than light in a certain medium and when this happens, the particles emit photons in a radial pattern — Yeah?
A funny Nigerian Interview Experience — LMAO
Hope you guys have as much fun with my picks for the week as I did.
