134385547
submission
Faizdog writes:
The BBC has a fascinating story about about how to warn future humans about nuclear waste dumps. How does language or knowledge survive over 300,000 years? Only ~6% of the world's population recognizes the nuclear danger symbol even today, and we've forgotten the purpose of Stongehenge mounds 4000 years old. Language, culture, history all change and are forgotten in a relatively short period of time on a nuclear scale. What about maintaining that knowledge through culture, songs, multiple backups, even a dedicated "nuclear priesthood" whose sole purpose would be to maintain a sense of danger though rituals and practices.
From the article (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time):
The nuclear waste buried far beneath the earth will be toxic for thousands of years. How do you build a warning now that can be understood in the far future?
“This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
It sounds like the kind of curse that you half-expect to find at the entrance to an ancient burial mound. But this message is intended to help mark the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) that has been built over 2,000 feet (610m) down through stable rocks beneath the desert of New Mexico. The huge complex of tunnels and caverns is designed to contain the US military’s most dangerous nuclear waste.
131125780
submission
Faizdog writes:
There's a really interesting story in New York Magazine about how the future of college education will change, and how COVID19 is accelerating/causing that. In the post-pandemic future, tech will partner with universities, think MIT@Google, iStanford or HarvardxFacebook. That's because tech is looking for huge future margins, they have to for their stock appreciation to continue, and the big industries are government, healthcare, and education. Education has huge margins.
https://nymag.com/intelligence...
"There’s a recognition that education — the value, the price, the product — has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how students and their parents are responding.....
The better universities are fine in the short term because they just fill spots from the waiting lists. The kid who’s going to Boston College will get into MIT. But if that snakes down the supply chain, and you start getting to universities that don’t have waiting lists, those are the ones that get hit....
In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000. What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves. I don’t want to say that education is going to be reinvented, but it’s going to be dramatically different."
112743168
submission
Faizdog writes:
The “sensitivity” conjecture stumped many top computer scientists, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.
“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science,” he added in an email.
The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them “the bricks and mortar of whatever you’re doing in computer science,” said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.
“People wrote long, complicated papers trying to make the tiniest progress,” said Ryan O’Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University.
Now Hao Huang, a mathematician at Emory University, has proved the sensitivity conjecture with an ingenious but elementary two-page argument about the combinatorics of points on cubes. “It is just beautiful, like a precious pearl,” wrote Claire Mathieu, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, during a Skype interview.
Aaronson and O’Donnell both called Huang’s paper the “book” proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erds’ notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. “I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this,” Aaronson wrote.
It can even be described in a single tweet!
35601087
submission
Faizdog writes:
The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/07/whats-next-for-superhero-movies/260243/) has a very interesting article on what's next for superhero movies after the Dark Knight leaves theaters. DC in particular seems to not have a good pipeline of readily available heroes to create movies around.
They discuss the challenges surrounding the upcoming Man of Steel movie, as well as how the circumstances around the successful Spiderman reboot may not necessarily translate to a Batman reboot.
They also discuss the necessity and viability of the comic book print medium continuing on in light of the film successes, especially in terms of revenue (the Avengers movie alone made more profit for Marvel than ALL comic book sales for the last two years).
The article finally concludes with an interesting suggestion that television may be the ideal medium for comic book adaptations as it may permit a more richer and complex story telling experience than a two hour movie.
