What are you reading?

looking at the risks posed by AI now that it has been released to the world. I doubt it will be possible to keep hostiles from harnessing it. No doubt our military is looking into the potential for weaponization by others or ourselves, despiite efforts to mitigate these risks. In a world that is increasingly turning to authoritarian rule....

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(24)00001-3/fulltext

The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers.

Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind. Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per liter, averaging at around 240,000 according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

https://apnews.com/article/plastic-nano-bottled-drinking-water-contaminate-b77dce04539828207fe55ebac9b27283

How to think like a Bayesian

In a world of few absolutes, it pays to be able to think clearly about probabilities. These five ideas will get you started

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-like-a-bayesian-and-make-better-decisions

"No two people ever have the same course of evidence, and no two people ever have the same sequence of opinions over their lives. We should keep these divergent paths in mind when we encounter different views. But we should also remember one beautiful piece of Bayesian mathematics: if we apply Bayes’s Rule every time we update our opinions, then, no matter where our opinions begin, there’s a high probability that gathering more and more evidence will move them ever closer towards the truth. If we keep learning, and keep updating, then Bayes’s guide will lead us to our destination."

About energy storage using gravity

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/16/gravity-storage-101-or-why-pumped-hydro-is-the-only-remotely-real-gravity-storage/

https://protagonist-science.medium.com/disparage-disorient-dispute-ff494e7f3ec4

"Confusion is a natural part of life arising from error-prone communication, conflicting information, or unexpected observations. When confused, we often misinterpret information or situations in a way that conforms to our prior expectations, knowledge, and biases. The latter is what makes confusion interesting for anti-science actors as a tool of information warfare.
Media manipulators — a mix of influencers, media owners, politicians, activists, grifters, entertainers, marketing departments, shadowy businesses, and clandestine actors — sow confusion in order to create space for unsubstantiated worldviews we might already be inclined to hold. Beliefs that are ultimately either unjustified given the current evidence, or directly contradicted by scientific knowledge."

"But why do we remember the past and not the future? The reason for this asymmetry has to do with entropy — the amount of disorder in the universe. We have memories and historical records only because entropy in the past was lower than the entropy of the present."

https://www.astronomy.com/science/what-is-time-an-astronomer-explains-the-search-to-find-its-origins/

@silvermouse said:
Or we would think 'why bother'.

I have this problem to a degree. My wife would always ask me "what will come next?" as I start a phase of a project. "I don't know yet, I'll solve that when I get there." was a typical response. She couldn't understand that if I thought the problem through to completion, I'd never complete the project because my brain considered it finished. Once that happens, I move on, and the original project never gets done. So, I keep it a little fuzzy.

Regarding entropy, you could read What Entropy Means to Me by George Alec Effinger. I did. Didn't know any more at the end than I did at the beginning.

This seems to be an easier read because I've been streaming episodes of House lately.

What Is an Electronic Sackbut? It’s probably not what you think it is

https://spectrum.ieee.org/electronic-music