Cognition, in Quotes

On this day:

61 BC
Pompey the Great celebrates his third triumph for victories over the pirates and the end of the Mithridatic Wars on his 45th birthday.
480 BC
Battle of Salamis: The Greek fleet under Themistocles defeats the Persian fleet under Xerxes I.
1938
Munich Agreement: Germany was given permission from France, Italy, and Great Britain to seize the territory of Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. The meeting occurred in Munich, and leaders from neither the Soviet Union nor Czechoslovakia attended.
1941
World War II: Holocaust in Kyiv, Soviet Union: German Einsatzgruppe C begins the Babyn Yar massacre, according to the Einsatzgruppen operational situation report.
1951
The first live sporting event seen coast-to-coast in the United States, a college football game between Duke and the University of Pittsburgh, is televised on NBC.
1957
20 MCi (740 petabecquerels) of radioactive material is released in an explosion at the Soviet Mayak nuclear plant at Chelyabinsk.
1960
Nikita Khrushchev, leader of Soviet Union, disrupts a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly with a number of angry outbursts.
1982
The 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders begin when the first of seven individuals dies in metropolitan Chicago.
1988
Space Shuttle: NASA launches STS-26, the return to flight mission, after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
2007
Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, is demolished in a controlled explosion.
2008
Following the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 777.68 points, the largest single-day point loss in its history.

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People want dignity, even more than they say they want income equality. And in a modern economy they achieve it. If we insist on ignoring the equality of genuine comfort, and if we marshal populist politics against a first-act inequality of income that yields enrichment for the poor as much as it yields baubles for the rich, we can kill dignity and material comfort for the rest of us. It’s happened, repeatedly.--the always terrific McCloskey

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Melinda French Gates has an estimated $34.5 billion net worth, but , so far, has not invested in her daughter’s new startup.

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"People have often asked me what moves me most," said Tolkien. "I think the most tragic point in the whole story is the terrible irony that good often does evil. The most tragic moment is when Sam in his protectiveness, says, 'Take your hands off.' And therefore defeats Gollum's repentance. Because that seems to be very true to life."

Although Sam is only trying to protect his friend, his action causes Gollum to revert to his evil side. This speaks to Tolkien's wider worldview, said Stuart Lee, a Professor of English at the University of Oxford, in a 2019 radio programme about the lost Tolkien recordings. "What happens in his mythology is that good can sometimes do excessive evil unintentionally."

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The problem is not simply that regulation may slow innovation. It is that neither federal nor state regulators possess the knowledge necessary to determine what AI should become. And even if they did, the political process would steadily transform limited oversight into expansive control. That Bernie Sanders would suggest that the government take 50% ownership in all AI companies makes a strong case that this is a potentially very serious problem confronting a gaggle of very unserious people.

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A senior member of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s ruling party was beaten to death on Sunday after appearing on a radio programme to raise awareness about the Ebola outbreak, a party representative has said.

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Cognition, in Quotes

Physarum is slime. It first grows as single-celled amoebae, but the amoebae fuse, and the organism loses its ‘cellular’ makeup. As the organism continues to grow, nuclei divide without cell division. The resulting bag of nuclei is called a ‘coenocyte’ or ‘plasmodium’. It is covered in a layer of glycoprotein gel, giving it a slimy appearance. The plasmodium forms a tubular network, and as it moves, the network is reshaped and adapted to the environmental stimuli the tubes encounter.

The Physarum "manages" mazes. It doesn’t “solve” the maze, strictly speaking, as a person would do. It grows across all of the empty spaces, and then withdraws from everything but the shortest route. Like an engineer.

This, and the suggestion that memory resides in RNA and is transferable in sea slugs, is an early skirmish in the battle over "cognition" and "intelligence," a battle that will expand as the lifeless AI entity expands.

(The Guardian has an interesting article on this.)