Useful beats truthful: Survival and repetition of ideas in the information ecosystem

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on April 28, 2024. View the original post.

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Viewpoint

Utility trumps truth in the world of information: useful information survives and gets repeated, even if it's not accurate. Truthful information goes extinct if it's not useful.

Background

About 20 years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a corporate training program with a presentation from our company's chief scientist. One of the few things that I still remember from that training program was his assertion that within 10 or 15 years, "Everything that can be digitized will be digitized." I suppose he reached this conclusion because the rapidly falling cost of digital storage seemed to suggest that storage would eventually be nearly free and inexhaustible.

Here we are twenty years later, and a lot of information has been digitized, but there is also a lot that has not yet been saved. It's conceivable that much of the information that exists at a given moment may never be saved, let alone repeated. The question that occurs to me is, "why does some information survive and reproduce while other information evaporates?"

pixabay license from Vika_Glitter

Introduction

We would like to think that truthful information is more likely to survive and false information is more likely to go extinct - that human knowledge is getting perpetually closer to the target of "truth". But, I'm starting to question this.

A little under a year ago, I posted about Donald Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Shortly after that, I read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene, of course, is a famous book because it introduced the idea of the meme as an evolutionary information concept that is analogous to the biological gene.

If we set these two readings against today's information landscape, maybe it provides some insight into the pervasive reach of "fake news", "misinformation", "disinformation", "malinformation", "Community Notes", and "fact checkers" that seem to dominate much of what we see, hear, and read from modern media sources.

Let's recall some relevant ideas from the two books and see how they apply to the survival and reproduction of information.

Chester County Notables: Samuel Barber, Bayard T. Rustin, and N. C. Wyeth - A random glance at history

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on September 04, 2019. View the original post.

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This post looks at some notable figures from history that I've had the opportunity to learn about in recent years, all of whom had connections to Chester County, Pennsylvania. Samuel Barber was a renowned American composer in the 20th century, Bayard T. Rustin was a civil rights leader who collaborated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists of the time, and N. C. Wyeth was a widely known American artist.

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Introduction

Roman Totenberg (violin) and Samuel Barber (piano), public domain photo from the US Library of Congress

Here in the introduction, I'll tell you how I happened to learn about these three noteworthy people, and in the following sections, I'll tell you some of what I've learned about their lives, and why they're noteworthy outside of our community.

The reason that I first heard of Samuel Barber is that he was a West Chester native, and, at the age of 12, he was the organist in the church that my family now attends. The first time I remember hearing his name is when it was announced at a 100 year anniversary ceremony for the church organ, and one of the pieces that was played had been composed by him, and donated to the church.

After that, when @cmp2020 went into the high school marching band, we learned that - at the age of 15 - Barber also composed the Alma Mater that is in use by all three of the high schools in the West Chester Area School District. @cmp2020 did an analysis of it last year, on Steem. It's here - Analysis of Rustin High School's Alma Mater (Composed by Our Very Own Samuel Barber), and when we visited West Chester University of PA's school of music, there was a huge mural on the wall with Barber's picture.

Moving on to Bayard T. Rustin. When we moved into this area, there were only 2 high schools in the school district. Some time around 2001 or 2002, I started hearing about plans to build a third, colloquially known as "the New School", because at the time, no one knew what it would be called. This would be the school that @cmp2020 would attend when he reached high school. Eventually, however, I learned that the school opened in 2006, having been named after Bayard T. Rustin, but I still had no idea who he was. I never thought much about it until some years later, when I read the article, The Civil Rights Movement's Unsung Hero, and I thought, "Wait. Can this be the same guy?" So then, my curiosity was piqued. It turns out that like Barber, Rustin was also a West Chester native.

Finally, we come to N. C. Wyeth. Unlike the other two, Wyeth was not born locally, but he moved to Wilmington, DE, for art school, and wound up living in the nearby Chadd's Ford area. The reason I learned about Wyeth, as you may have seen, is that @cmp2020 wrote a composition for a Young Composer's Workshop at the Brandywine River Museum of Art that was inspired by Wyeth's illustrations on display in the museum and from the book, The Boy's King Arthur. If you haven't listened to the composition, you really should (and I'm not saying that just 'cause I'm his dad):

https://youtu.be/sIizMHiRN8c

So that's how I heard of these folks. Now, let's move on to what I've learned about them...

What does a college visit have to do with Beethoven and Mozart? - A random glance at history

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on March 18, 2019. View the original post.

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On Friday, @cmp2020 and I went for his first "official" college visit at Eastern University in St. Davids, PA. We had a fun time touring the campus, monitoring a musicianship class, and meeting with admissions and music department personnel. The day also had a surprising tie-in to classical music history.

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The iconic waterwheel at Eastern University

Public domain photo, circa 1913. Source

Aside from a chance comment by the admissions counsellor, there would have been nothing blogworthy about our college visit to Eastern University the other day. The day began in the admissions office, we toured the campus and had lunch in the campus cafeteria with a student tour-guide (Thanks, Collin!), then monitored a musicianship class and returned to the admissions office. Of course, all of that was interesting to a prospective student and his father, but nothing that would qualify for a blog post.

Hope on the horizon: Recent advances in brain cancer immunotherapy

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on May 04, 2024. View the original post.

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Modern immunotherapy is making strides to improve the odds for brain cancer patients.

Many people may remember that Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer in May, 2008, and died from it about 15 months later, in August of 2009. For me, Kennedy's cancer progression was one of those news cycles that intersected with the personal life, because my mother was diagnosed with brain cancer around the same time, in the summer of 2009, and she died from it half a year later, in January of 2010.

One of my lasting memories about Kennedy's death is the pessimistic tone of commentary from media personalities at the time. As they commented on the almost hopeless odds that Kennedy was facing, I was - of course - thinking about how their commentary applied to my own mother. And it turned out that they were right. My mom tried surgical treatment and chemotherapy, but in the end it didn't seem to make much difference. In a mere few months, she went from a healthy and vibrant retiree traveling around the country to a wheelchair bound cancer patient, and even that stage passed quickly. In a few more months, she was gone at the relatively young age of 61.

Image by Bing Creator

As a result of this experience, it always catches my attention when I come across news about advances in the treatment of brain cancer. This week, my RSS feed contained some news of this nature. The articles, New Vaccine For Deadly Brain Cancer Shows Incredible Results in Clinical Trial and Brain cancer in children is notoriously hard to treat – a new mRNA cancer vaccine triggers an attack from within describe some promising results from a clinical trial of a new vaccine for brain cancer. Both of those articles are commentaries on newly published research from Cell, RNA aggregates harness the danger response for potent cancer immunotherapy.

As with the treatment covered in my recent article, Revolutionary Canine Cancer Vaccine Shows Promising Results: A Ray of Hope for Man's Best Friend, the product is called a vaccine, but it is only used after a cancer diagnosis. This is explained in Nature's YouTube video, below:

Spacetime rearranges itself to prevent paradoxes from time travel

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on December 19, 2022. View the original post.

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"Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect—but maybe the universe doesn’t insist on cause and effect." -[Edward M. Lerner](https://www.tor.com/2009/10/16/tropes-and-mundanity)

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Introduction

Pixabay license from Genty at source.

Today, Science Alert published the article A Physicist Came Up With Math That Shows 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel Is Plausible, which is an update of a 2020 article on the same topic. The article summarizes the 2020 paper, Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice by Germain Tobar and supervised by Fabio Costa. This is an Open Access paper (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0) in the journal, Classical and Quantum Gravity.

According to the paper, Einstein's theory of general relativity opened the door for the possibility of closed time-like curves (CTCs), which are paths through spacetime where an observer can interact with past or future versions of themself. In our intuition, however, this idea is challenged by the notion of the grandfather paradox.

The grandfather paradox is a potential logical problem that would arise if a person were to travel to a past time. The name comes from the idea that if a person travels to a time before their grandfather had children, and kills him, it would make their own birth impossible. So, if time travel is possible, it somehow must avoid such a contradiction.

Classical physics, and human intuition, both suggest that time moves in a single direction where past events determine the current state of the system, and where all parts of the system experience time in the same way. Relativity, however, argues that an event in a CTC can be in its own past and future.

The Mysterious Death of Ellen Greenberg - A 12-Year-Old Homicide or Suicide?

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on July 23, 2023. View the original post.

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In 2011, a Philadelphia school teacher was found dead in her apartment with 20 stab wounds. Her death was ruled a suicide, but now authorities are taking another look.

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Pixabay license from Victoria_Regen at source.

Back in 2020, I posted the article A possible new use for Steem: Citizen investigation of unsolved crimes, which told the story of an unsolved murder near Wilmington, Delaware. Delaware resident and Academy Park school teacher, Susan Ledyard, had been found dead a year earlier on the bank of Wilmington's Brandywine Creek.

I also posted a follow-up to that earlier this year, in the article Ex-husband of DelVal murder victim now charged with assault of his new wife - Updating a 2020 article in [Delaware Valley Life]. At that time, Susan Ledyard's widower had been accused of committing two assaults against his next wife (after Susan).

And I haven't posted about that story again, but as long as I'm here, I'll mention that when I checked for updates, I learned that the story is even closer to home than I had realized. First, I learned that Ledyard was originally from West Chester, Pennsylvania, which is where I happen to live. And second, her widower was arrested yet again for allegedly assaulting a girlfriend in Kennett Square, PA. Kennett Square is about halfway between West Chester, PA and Wilmington, DE, where Ledyard's body was found. As far as I know, Ledyard's murder is still unsolved, and the family may still be offering a $50,000 reward for information.

I was reminded of all this because I recently learned of a new investigation involving another deceased school teacher in the region. Ellen Greenberg was a school teacher at Philadelphia's Juniata Park Academy.

On January 26, 2011, the 27 year old, New York City born, school teacher was found dead in her Manayunk apartment with 20 stab wounds on her body. Her fiancé, Sam, had last seen her alive when he left the apartment to go to the gym. Not quite two hours later, he was dialing 911 for medical assistance. You can hear the 911 call at the beginning of this 2021 podcast from Crime Junkie by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat.

AI-driven nuclear renaissance? Microsoft makes a deal to reopen Three Mile Island

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on September 21, 2024. View the original post.

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Before TMI meant "Too Much Information", it meant "Three Mile Island". Before Fukishima and Chernobyl, there was the TMI accident. Even those who don't remember the actual events in 1979 may be aware of the TMI accident as the subject of the controversial Netflix documentary Meltdown: Three Mile Island. Closed in 2019, the TMI plant is now getting a 2^nd chance.

Background: TMI Accident and plant closure

Public domain license from picryl.com

The site of the TMI accident, Three Mile Island, is less than 100 miles from my home, and my (late) father in law was one of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) nuclear engineers who responded on site during the March,1979 crisis.

Here's how the AI at Brave Search describes the accident:

The Three Mile Island accident occurred on March 28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania. It was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor (TMI-2), a pressurized water reactor.

Initial Cause The accident began 11 hours earlier, during an attempt to fix a blockage in one of the eight condensate polishers, sophisticated filters cleaning the secondary loop water. This led to a series of mechanical failures, including a stuck open valve and a faulty pump, which ultimately caused a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA).

As my father in law told it, there were three primary concerns at the time: (i) planning for the possibility of large scale public evacuation; (ii) dealing with a panicking public; and (iii) dealing with the potential for a full-scale meltdown - which he said the plant's containment technology was designed to handle.

More evidence for a coming nuclear renaissance in America

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on May 26, 2025. View the original post.

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Introduction

Back in September, I posted the article, AI-driven nuclear renaissance? Microsoft makes a deal to reopen Three Mile Island. At the time, Microsoft and Constellation Energy had announced that the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant would be reopening as the Crane Clean Energy Center, and Microsoft would be purchasing 100% of their energy.

This week, we had new evidence - in the form of four Executive Orders - that America is on the edge of a nuclear renaissance. Here are the orders:

• Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base
• Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy
• Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security

As I've mentioned before, this topic is particularly interesting to me because my (late) father in law was one of the TMI responders from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the 1979 accident. Coincidentally, I recently happened to notice that he even makes a brief appearance in the current Netflix documentary on the subject. He's the guy in the hardhat.

Before he passed away, we had many dinner table conversations about the accident and about the relative safety of nuclear energy.

So, let's look and see what the Whitehouse said on the topic last week.

Imagining a DeSci use case for Steem: A decentralized global climate dataset and reporting system

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on August 31, 2025. View the original post.

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TL;DR: An outline for a Steem-based DeSci project proposes a decentralized global climate dataset using blockchain to improve data reliability, community involvement, and reduce politicization.

Pixabay license from naturepost

Introduction

Yesterday, I was in a Home Depot store, and I happened to walk past an aisle that was displaying a bunch of different home weather stations. This reminded me of a possible Steem dapp for DeSci that I've been imagining for a while. Namely, a decentralized global climate dataset.

As a science and numbers geek, I have loosely followed the field of climate science for a couple of decades. This is not (by any means) to say that I'm anything close to an expert on the topic, but just that I do have some familiarity with the subject. To me, one of the weak points for the field has always been the temperature measurement. It suffers (IMO) from multiple threats to its reliability:

1. Urban expansion leads to localized temperature increases that are not "climate" related.
2. It depends on measurements by volunteers, which limits the amount and quality of available data.
3. Outside of the US and Western Europe, many regions of the world don't have temperature measurements at all, so those temperatures are estimated by combining data from other areas.
4. The conditions around thermometers can change in other ways: Trees can grow up and start shading the area or blocking wind, nearby forest can be cleared, which changes the prevailing wind flow, etc.
5. Other biases exist (such as Time of Observation).
6. The whole field depends on government funding, which frequently leads to politicization.

Scientists argue that data adjustments can correct for these challenges, and they disagree on how much they matter (if at all), but I don't think anyone disagrees that they exist.

I'm not here to join one side or the other in the political debate on the subject of "global warming" (i.e. climate change). Instead, I'm wondering if we can improve the reach and quality of future climate data collection.

It seems to me that the Steem blockchain has the potential to improve the reach and quality of the data, so I want to start thinking about how this might be done.

[Opinion] Culling livestock to fight a respiratory virus is a bad idea

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on March 01, 2025. View the original post.

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TL;DR: Fighting a respiratory virus by culling chickens is a bad idea: It doesn't work; high food prices hit vulnerable people the hardest; and it creates counterproductive evolutionary pressures.

Introduction

In recent weeks, the American media has begun to focus on the currently elevated price of eggs. For example (via Brave Search):

• Eggcellent alternative: High egg prices causing people to rent and raise their own chickens
• Trump’s got a bird flu plan. So when will eggs stop costing so much?
• Egg prices expected to rise more than 40 percent in 2025
• Egg Shortage: Trump Administration Announces $1 Billion Plan To Lower Egg Prices
• Is Bird Flu the Only Reason Egg Prices Are Soaring?

It seems that one of the primary reasons that egg prices are high, and expected to remain that way, is because hen farmers are being required to cull their flocks as a result of bird flu outbreaks. This is described by The Independent as follows,

Skyrocketing egg prices are largely the result of a widespread bird flu outbreak that forced a mass culling of egg-laying birds. With fewer birds, there are fewer eggs, and with scarcity comes increased cost.

It seems to me that this mandatory culling is a really bad idea. Why? Three reasons:

• It doesn't work.
• The resultant high prices hit marginalized communities the hardest
• The evolutionary result of this policy will be bird flu variants that spread more easily and are harder to detect.

Let's look at all three arguments.

You take the high road and I'll take the low - a short trip through musical history

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on October 07, 2024. View the original post.

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When I was a kid, maybe 4 or 5 years old, there was a song that my grandfather would sing to me while I was sitting on his knee. By the time I was in my twenties, after my grandfather had passed away, all I could remember of the song was a line or two of the chorus:

You take the high road and I'll take the low road, and I'll be in Scotland before you.

Pixabay license from BuyCustomThings

Although I remembered him singing it, I had no idea what song that chorus was from for another decade or two. Then, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago, it occurred to me to use Internet magic to find the song, and I finally learned what you probably already know... The song was, The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond. According to Justapedia, the song is:

"a Jacobite adaptation of an eighteenth-century erotic song, with the lover dying for his king, and taking only the 'low road' of death back to Scotland."

Having tracked it down, every once in a while, I amuse myself by listening to different renditions of the song on YouTube.

Do bra sizes influence tip sizes in the service industry? With a surprise ending

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on August 31, 2024. View the original post.

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Kari Byron of Mythbusters fame at the San Diego Comicon in 2010, License: CC 2.0, Original photo by Ray Sampson

Last weekend, I saw an entertaining rerun of a MythBusters segment on the Science Channel. The episode is 10 years old (Season 16, Episode 5), but I hadn't seen it before. I thought the results were surprising enough that it was worth posting about.

In the segment, Kari Byron went under-cover in a coffee shop on three different days in order to test the myth that women with larger breast sizes in the service industry tend to receive larger tips from their male customers.

According to evolutionary theory, the idea is that women with "full cleavage" signal that they have better reproductive potential, and men who find this trait attractive tend to be more successful at reproducing their genes. After millions of years of evolution, this attraction spreads far and wide, and it influences the ways that men behave.

So, here's how the MythBusters experiment went down.

Interlune's Moonshot: Unlocking the Moon's abundant resources to satisfy needs on Earth

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on May 18, 2025. View the original post.

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I recently saw a fascinating series of videos on 𝕏 where Nina Hooper, Director of Business Development at Interlune, discusses the firm's plans to mine helium-3 on the Moon and bring it back for use on Earth.

Pixabay license from Placidplace

According to Brave Leo, Interlune is headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA, and it launched in 2020. The firm, with its 22 employees, specializes in harvesting resources from space. With private and public partnerships, the firm is creating the infrastructure to access marketable commodities in space and bring them back to Earth.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find embeddable copies of the videos from YouTube, so here are the videos on 𝕏:

• #1 - What is helium-3 and WHY is it so important?
• #2 - Why do we need to go to the moon for helium-3?
• #3 - How MUCH helium-3 is out there?:
• #4 - Mission Plans

The videos are only two or three minutes, each, so go ahead and click through.

In the first video, Hooper tells us about helium-3. What is it, and why is it important?

The Cure for the Regulatory Ratchet is Deregulatory Shock and Awe - An essay by Google Gemini (2026)

This article was written by Google Gemini in June of 2026.  Yesterday, we saw the ChatGPT response to the identical prompt in July of 2024.

I. Introduction

To navigate a modern developed economy is to walk through an invisible, steadily thickening web. Every year, new structural threads are spun. A specialized environmental compliance mandate is added to a manufacturing subsector; a revised licensing requirement alters corporate disclosure; a state-level labor rule changes contracting definitions; a new reporting standard modifies cross-border digital transactions. Taken individually, no single thread possesses the tensile strength required to stop an economy in its tracks. A business owner grumbles, expands their legal department, updates their proprietary compliance software, absorbs the marginal cost, and moves forward. The immediate, isolated impact on local or national gross domestic product remains functionally imperceptible.

Yet, over decades and centuries, these threads multiply by the hundreds of thousands. What began as an open, competitive plain transforms into an impenetrable, bureaucratic thicket. This is the structural reality of the regulatory ratchet: a socioeconomic mechanism designed to spin effortlessly in the direction of added restriction, while locking tightly against any structural attempt to move backward. It acts as an economic tax on time, capital, and imagination, slowly draining a civilization of its capacity for radical innovation.

The fundamental mistake of modern economic reformers, classical liberals, and market-oriented politicians has been the flawed belief that this historical ratchet can be unwound using the same methodology by which it was constructed—one click, one rule, one compromise at a time. It cannot. Incremental deregulation is an illusion. Its marginal benefits are routinely swallowed by the structural noise of the broader business cycle, leaving its political champions exposed and its bureaucratic opponents vindicated. If the regulatory ratchet is an existential threat to long-term civilizational dynamism, the cure is not a administrative scalpel, but a policy of deregulatory shock and awe: the simultaneous, systemic dismantling of vast architectures of the administrative state in a single, concentrated moment. Only a massive, undeniable expansion can shatter the structural inertia of the status quo and reclaim the compounding growth that humanity has traded away for the illusion of managed safety.

II. Shifting Baselines and the Regulatory Ratchet

The Cure for the Regulatory Ratchet is Deregulatory Shock and Awe - An essay by ChatGPT (2024)

This article was written by ChatGPT in July of 2024. Tomorrow, we'll see what Gemini did with the identical prompt in June, 2026

Introduction

In the complex web of modern economies, regulations are often seen as a necessary means to ensure safety, fairness, and stability. However, over time, these regulations accumulate gradually—often as responses to crises or shifting political pressures. Their impacts, individually, may be small or seemingly benign, but the cumulative burden becomes significant. Like layers of paint applied over years, regulations pile up until the original surface is barely recognizable.

This phenomenon is what we refer to as the regulatory ratchet. Once a regulation is introduced, it is rarely removed, and the slow but steady buildup goes largely unnoticed by the public, economists, and policymakers. As a result, societies accept ever-increasing levels of regulation as the "new normal," forgetting what an unencumbered economy looks like.

Deregulating slowly or one regulation at a time is not a viable solution. The impact of piecemeal deregulation will be too gradual to be felt. Instead, I argue for a bold and comprehensive approach: deregulatory shock and awe. By repealing large swaths of regulation at once, we can unlock dramatic economic improvements that are immediately observable, much like the fishery scientists who, upon realizing their error, had to drastically rethink their approach to environmental management.

The Regulatory Ratchet – A Slow and Steady Accumulation

Definition of the Regulatory Ratchet

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on September 04, 2023. View the original post.

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[Donald Hoffman](https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/) argues that all of spacetime is an abstraction for a deeper and unobserved reality. According to this line of reasoning, spacetime only exists when it's being perceived. What do you think?

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The Reality Illusion

Introduction

Whatever reality is, it's not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction. -Donald Hoffman

In browsing through the available eBooks from my local library, I came across The Case Against Reality by UC Irvine Professor Emeritus, Donald Hoffman, and I read it over the weekend. The book presents a fascinating discussion on the nature of reality, a topic that has intrigued me for years.

In this book, Hoffman uses three major frameworks to argue that consciousness - not spacetime - is at the root of reality, and that our perceived reality is very different from the objective reality that actually exists.

The crux of Hoffman's argument relies on something of his own creation, called the Fitness Beats Truth Theorem (FBT), which he conjectured and claims that Chetan Prakash proved. According to this theorem, if perception agents that optimize for evolutionary fitness compete in evolution against perception agents that optimize for truth, natural selection favors the fitness-optimizers and the truth-optimizers go extinct.

In addition to the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, Hoffman also introduces us to the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP). According to this theory, the "reality" that we observe is something akin to an operating system interface. In this view, the things we see are nothing more than avatars and icons that provide useful shortcuts in order to allow us to survive for long enough to reproduce. A file icon on a computer desktop doesn't say anything about the underlying bits on the hard disk. Similarly, ITP argues that when we see an apple or a train or a snake, we're not seeing the reality of those objects, just abstractions that evolution has given us in order to guide our decisions. Provocatively, Hoffman argues that these representations don't even exist at all when nobody is perceiving them.

The General Slocum Disaster - a random glance at history

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on June 20, 2019. View the original post.

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On June 15, 1904, a paddle boat steamer, the General Slocum caught fire in New York's East River and was forced to ground itself. As a result of the incident, somewhere around 1,021 people lost their lives. Here's what happened.

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Background

pixabay license: source

The other day, I included a link to Stuff You Missed in History Class in my article, History, Music, and Entertainment micro-summaries for June 17, 2019. I thought the story was interesting enough that I'd dedicate some time to it and cover it with some more detail in its own post here, too.

The General Slocum was a paddle boat, also known as a side wheel passenger steamer. Named after a Civil War General, the ship was built in 1891 and operated as a ferry and charter boat in New York's East River. The ship was owned by the Knickerbocker steamboat company and captained by William H. Van Schaick, who was regarded as a safe and careful sailor, but the steam boat had been in a number of accidents, and Van Schaick was 67 years old, so some people were apparently already thinking that he was due for retirement.

The ship had passed an inspection, just over a month earlier on May 5th, but it was showing signs of age, and it was filled with flammable materials like bags of charcoal, rubbish, machine oils, containers of hay, and even the paint that had been applied to the ship recently. It had three decks and was licensed to carry up to 2,500 passengers.

Philadelphia Connection: A Possible Inspiration for Titanic Character Names

The names of the *Titanic* movie's main characters may suggest a surprising connection to Philadelphia.

Most of us have probably seen the 1997 movie, Titanic, but have you ever thought to ask where the main characters' names came from? If you're like me, then maybe not.

Until the other day, that is.

The movie, Titanic, checks a lot of boxes that give it staying power. It was a compelling fictional drama that was set in the middle of one of history's most famous shipwrecks, and it was the first movie that used the Linux operating system for CGI.

As we all probably know, the movie's main characters were Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater. Jack was a working class, drifter sort of a character and Rose came from a family of upper crust elitists. The two characters met aboard ship, and the story about a shipwreck turned into a story about the relationship.

If the movie's overarching story is the sinking of the Titanic, the story within the story is a passionate and forbidden romance between Jack and Rose - a shipboard tale of Romeo and Juliet.

Unfortunately, if you go and ask Google where Jack and Rose got their names, you are not going to learn much. Here's what perplexity AI says.

The names **Jack Dawson** and **Rose DeWitt Bukater** in the film *Titanic* were created by director James Cameron specifically for the movie; they are not based on real individuals who sailed on the RMS Titanic. - **Jack Dawson**: While some viewers believe the name was inspired by a real Titanic passenger, this was coincidental. There indeed was a "J. Dawson" (Joseph Dawson), a crew member who perished in the sinking, but Cameron didn't discover this until after writing the script. Jack's character is not directly based on Joseph Dawson or any other specific passenger. - **Rose DeWitt Bukater**: The character of Rose did not correspond to any actual Titanic passenger. However, she was *partially inspired* by Beatrice Wood, an American artist and writer with a free-spirited personality and background that influenced Rose's character, especially the older version of Rose. Both names were selected for their *everyman* and *timeless* qualities, fitting the fictitious love story Cameron wanted to weave into the authentic historic tragedy.

[Citizen Science] Another way that Steem photographers and bloggers can help to advance science and protect wildlife

Background

I recently posted the articles, [Citizen Science] The Night Sky in South-Eastern Pennsylvania and Steem for Citizen Science: Globe At Night's March Campaign, where I demonstrated the ability for people on the Steem blockchain to contribute to decentralized science initiativees (aka "Citizen Science" or "DeSci"). Specifically, the GlobeAtNight web site runs a monthly campaign where people can submit observations of the night sky in order to measure global light pollution. (Reminder: The next campaign runs from April 9 through April 18.)

It's a piece of cake for people to submit an observation to the campagin and then write a blog post about it here on the Steem blockchain.

This weekend, I learned of another way that people can add DeSci activity to the Steem experience, through the iNaturalist web site/app. Unlike GlobeAtNight, this activity can be done at any time, so I wanted to post about it today.

Over the weekend, I contributed six wildlife observations to the site. The suggested identifications that I proposed were verified by other iNaturalist participants, and the observations were subsequently categorized as "Research Grade", which apparently means that the observation will be shared with certain scientific databases for use by researchers.

The species observed were as follows:

1. American Red Squirrel (observation)
2. Blue Jay (observation)
3. Dark-eyed Junco (observation)
4. Great Blue Heron (observation)
5. Red-bellied Woodpecker (observation)
6. Red-tailed Hawk (observation)

Here's the story.

The Birds at Conowingo Dam in March: Bald Eagles, Blue Herons, and Seagulls

I believe this is my third post about birdwatching and photography visits to the Conowingo Dam. Here are the previous posts:

Making Wildlife Conservation Fun and Profitable

Is it Possible to Gamify Wildlife Conservation?

[Image Source: Pixabay.com, licensed under CC0, Public Domain]

Last July, the Internet blew up when a hunter killed a charismatic and seemingly popular lion in Zimbabwe named Cecil. I didn't participate much in the dust-up (and I don't particularly want to reopen it here), but I spent a lot of time in reflection. In this scenario, two of my beliefs came into conflict with each other. On one hand, I have no interest in hunting. Except when it's to put food on the table, I don't understand what motivates people to do it. Unless it comes down to a choice between a person and an animal, I think people should protect wildlife, not destroy it. On the other hand, though, I am almost always against using the government's guns to impose my own preferences on someone else, moreso when the events in question are half-way around the world.

So I began to wonder if there was a way to resolve this deadlock and bring these two beliefs into harmony, and I concluded that there needs to be a conservation method that sets up the right incentives and then works entirely through voluntary participation. It was around that time that I learned about the Property and Environment Research Center PERC, and was thrilled to find that there are people who call themselves free market environmentalists. This seemed to be on the right track.

Bald Eagles at the Conowingo Dam: A photo diary

In early October, I posted about our first birdwatching trip to the Conowingo Dam. As you may recall, the trip had actually happened in June, after I learned about this activity from the Conowingo Dam Eagles Facebook page. (If you want to see some amazing Bald Eagle photos, go visit that page! In my uninformed opinion, some of the participants there are probably world class photographers.)

In June, it was a spur of the moment trip, since we had driven in that general direction, anyway. The goal was simply to learn where to park and where to view the birds. Mission Accomplished. During that trip, we learned that the Bald Eagles are migratory birds, and they will be most prevalent at the dam between November and March. Later, I saw another report that the small peak window inside that large peak window is probably the last week of November and the first week of December.

So, it's not quite the end of November, but it's getting close. @lisa.palmer, @cmp2020, and I planned a second trip for Nov. 21. During the first trip, my 40X zoom camera had proved insufficient for the distances, so I purchased a low-budget upgrade, which is a second-hand Nikon Coolpix P1000 that is capable of zooming out to 125x.

If you go to the dam, you'll see people with photography equipment that's almost certainly worth 10s of thousands of dollars, but I can't justify that sort of expense. The P1000 cost about $900 (13,000 STEEM). I only expect to use the camera a few times per year, so I really couldn't justify a higher expense. Also, all I know about photography is "point" and "click", so I would have difficulty making use of the more advanced features, anyway.

^{A Bald Eagle stretching its wings while perched at the top of a tree near our parking spot}

My first birdwatching visit to the Conowingo Dam (and my first steem-atlas post)

Back in June, @lisa.palmer and I went to pick up @cmp2020 from the train station in Wilmington, Delaware, and on the way home we decided to take a bit of a detour.

I had recently learned about a Facebook group called the Conowingo Dam Eagles. Before then, I have driven past the Conowingo Dam any number of times, but it never occurred to me to stop there, and it really never occurred to me that it would be a good location for birdwatching. If you look at the photos in that Facebook group, however, you'll see that it actually seems to be an amazing spot for capturing photos of the American national bird, The Bald Eagle. I won't share any of their photos here due to copyright concerns, but click through and check them out. They are amazing.

I'd been watching their photos on Facebook for a few months, and I was curious what we'd see on a visit.

So, since we were driving south to Wilmington anyway, I thought it would be a good day for a short excursion to check out Maryland's Conowingo Dam. My goal for the day was really just to learn where to park, since I had never noticed any parking areas on the way by. I figured we'd plan a longer day trip in the future, once we learned our way around. With the help of the GPS, and after a couple of wrong turns, we found the parking lot for a picnic and fishing area next to the Susquehanna River, on the downstream side of the dam.

While we were there, we took some photographs, which I'll post here, and we also met a couple of people who go there, regularly, on photography excursions. From them, I learned a couple useful bits of information.

1. The Bald Eagles generally come around between November and March. During the April-October part of the year, they migrate northwards.
2. The reason it's so easy to find them on the downstream side of the dam is that fish get killed in the hydroelectric turbines, which makes mealtime for the birds a low-effort affair. (Later, I also learned that visitors may want to call for the generation schedule, since generator activity also signals higher activity for the birds. The number to call for the generation schedule is 1 (888) 457-4076, and apparently it plays a recorded loop containing the schedule.)

Because of #1, there were no Eagles present during our visit, but I'm planning to go back in November or December (maybe after purchasing a higher-zoom camera).

On the trip home, we randomly stopped for dinner at the Tidewater Grille in Havre De Grace, Maryland. I have already forgotten what we ate, but I'll say that we enjoyed the food and the atmosphere.

So, with that introduction out of the way, here are my photos. I am not much of a photographer, and my 40x zoom is clearly insufficient for the location, but hopefully they can give you an idea about what to expect.

Here is the sign you see when driving across the dam (from the Pennsylvania/Delaware direction) on the way to the parking area

Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 28, 2020

As San Francisco's residents shelter in place, coyotes are emerging on the streets; A Harvard Working Paper gives best practices for business to use in preparation for novel risks; A training simulator aims to make autonomous safer before encountering real-world roads; An article suggests using wastewater sampling to identify drug usage trends; and a Steem post offers two web sites with learn-at-home resources for students

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 27, 2020

A TED talk describing the "code for Venezuela" project and its emergent solutions; A new app helps researchers track coronavirus and learn about risks; Google eliminating the "User Agent" string from its Chrome browser; DIY face shield finds its way into hospitals and onto Ford's production floor; and a Steem embedded video discussing the nature of the US election system

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 26, 2020

MIT researchers submit a $100 open source ventilator for FDA approval; Chinese company offers facial recognition for people wearing masks; A new AI system approaches 100% accuracy on cancer diagnoses; A Cold-War era submarine wreck is located off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii; and a Steem post argues that surveillance may be useful for COVID-19 in the short term, but it poses long term risks

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 25, 2020

Storj Labs launches decentralized cloud storage service, Tardigrade; Brave browser teams up with Binance to offer in-browser cryptocurrency trading; Recent evidence suggests that Schizophrenia may be an autoimmune condition; Lawyers advise to switch of smart-devices when working from home and discussing confidential information; and a Steem essay informs us that home tests for coronavirus can now be purchased online (when they're not sold out)

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 24, 2020

A TED talk gives the research history of the so-called "sex chromosomes"; Scientific theories behind the deja vu experience; A new attack tricks artificial intelligence systems into mischaracterizing images; Cancer research retracted after 14 years and more than 900 citations; and a Steem essay describes a doctor's efforts to prepare for coronavirus in Bangladesh

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 23, 2020

Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl argue for data dignity, suggesting that human contributions to AI systems need to be accounted for; Microsoft Windows' Explorer and Start Menu may be getting a new look; Firefox continues its slow elimination of the unencrypted ftp protocol; Microsoft responds to allegations that the Edge browser is bad at privacy; and a Steem essay discussing Superworms that can survive by eating plastic

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 22, 2020

IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; A new technique is able to decipher ancient languages by comparing to modern languages along with existing translations; An archaeologist is saving a digital archive of historic sites in the Yukon and using it to create an online virtual exhibit; George R. R. Martin says he's spending coronavirus down-time writing about Westeros; and a Steem essay describes an algorithm to find a longest substring with no repeating characters

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 21, 2020

Stanford soft robot operates without hydraulics or pneumatics; $1 million Turing award goes to Pixar pioneers in computer graphics; Developer acceptance increasing for Windows Subsystem for Linux; New map of the Milky Way galaxy reveals at least four spiral arms; and a Steem photo-essay tells us about the mineral, amethyst

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 20, 2020

Whitehouse promotes machine learning for coronavirus solutions; Security advice for the emerging work-from-home employers; Chloroquine and hydrochloroquine may offer low cost and effective treatment against COVID-19 and other viruses; How the coronavirus pandemic is permanently reshaping the business landscape; and a Steem essay acknowledges limited data, but argues that - at the moment - coronavirus infections are not growing at an exponential rate

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 19, 2020

Ultrasonic attack can break into cell phones through a solid surface; Monkeys develop immunity to SARS-CoV-2 after first infection; Hiker finds two bombs from 1935 in a Hawaiian volcano; Commentary arguing that once a medical treatment comes into common practice, it persists long after it's found to be useless, or even harmful; and a Steem essay describing a dive to the USS Oriskany aka The Great Carrier Reef

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 18, 2020

A TED talk discusses human comfort levels with artificial intelligence systems; Commentary suggests that working from home was normal and expected for much of human history; An open access database contains metadata from 29,000 coronavirus studies and full text from 13,000; The TSA is now permitting larger bottles of hand sanitizer on flights, and Bruce Schneier argues that this is an implicit concession that the ban was never needed; and a Steem essay describing the Rhoeo Discolor, a plant that grows in South and Central America

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 17, 2020

Brave Browser files GPDR complaint against Google, claims Google violates "purpose limitation principle"; Study suggests that mothers have implicit bias about emotional expression between genders, fathers don't; Researchers suggest there is no underlying cause to mood disorders; Microsoft Teams buckled when telecommuting Europe showed up for work; and a Steem essay discussing essential aspects of remote learning

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 16, 2020

5G wireless is driving up the cost of smartphones; Doctors in Israel removed an entire lung from a patient, eliminated all cancerous cells, then reattached the lung; Whisper app for secret sharing revealed individuals' locations, ages, and other details; Advice for people who are working from home because of the coronavirus; and a Steem post describing a youtube video where chickens were hatched from store-bought eggs

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 15, 2020

Previously unseen footage of a Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger; IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Microsoft announces the end of the line for the Visual Basic programming language; Researchers adapt flu prediction methods to the novel coronavirus; and a Steem essay describing the race to blanket the Earth in satellite-based Internet coverage

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