MIT Technology Review - Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling
Wait! Wasn’t every story some sort of Hero’s Journey? Turns out, not all are shaped like one. This researchers put 1,700 novels though a sentimental analysis to map the emotional journey of the story. Turns out there are 6. Check the one of your favourite novel here.
Wired - Facebook aims its AI at the game no computer can crack
Deep Learning has been working quite well with images. Computers learn to use new input to continuously improve their ability to recognize what’s in the picture. And now Facebook is having a go at it (pun intended). They’re trying to create a Go computer that can beat the best human player. Go, you see, has so many possibilities that a computer simply doesn’t have the calculative power to use brute calculative force to get to the best move. But by using deep learning they’re learning what the next best move might “look like”.
Gabriel Popkin - Is it foolish to model nature’s complexity with equations?
Is it possible to model nature? We run into all sorts of problems with ecological models. And do we have to use equations? Chaos Theory can do neat tricks. It can link variables that are don’t cause the effect to predict the effect. What? Yeah! Check this one out if you dare. It’s not as complex as it sounds :).
Veronique Greenwood (Wired) - How the body’s trillions of clocks keep time
A bit technical, but so cool. Almost all your cells have clock mechanism in it. No Swiss radars of course. But proteins that regulate the behavior of the cell over the day. A biochemical horn blows from parts of the brain that react to light and darkness. A few proteins get together in the cell’s nucleus. They lead thousands of genes to transcribe to proteins. That wakes up the cell. And makes you feel hungry. Or open your eyes.
Margaret Atwood (for Matter) - It’s not climate change, it’s everything change
The second THE article of the year about climate change. It dives into the two extreme pictures on how our transition to new energy resources can go. And goes into how it will go down depending on where we are in transitioning. About how the conversation has shifted the last few years. But what struck me most is that this transition is about the human psyche. How when you just think about it as climate change, you miss the psychological change that is needed for this transition. How our values and the way we view ourselves are dependent on how we create energy. From "I am what I make", to "I am what I buy”, to “I am what I save and protect”.
The New Yorker - Why Startups Love Moleskines
Eric Roston (Bloomberg) - What’s Really Warming the World
Or course, we know there is no debate on climate change among people who know about it. There is an orchestrated perception of a debate. This infographic/article by Bloomberg puts all the potential causes (sun, volcanoes, deforestation, you name it) and their effects on the average temperature in one graph (last 125 years). Very insightful.
Wait but why - Fermi Paradox
Ok dus het heelal is oneindig groot. Echt een shit load aan sterren. De kans dat er ook andere planeten met leven erop zoals de onze zijn is daarmee best groot. Maar waar is iedereen dan? Waarom merken we niks van al dat leven? Dat is de Fermi Paradox. Tim Urban van "Wait But Why" neemt je helemaal mee door alle opties en waarom geen helemaal lekker voelt. Fijn ook dat je na het lezen misschien nog wel meer in de war bent dan ervoor ;).
Ethan Siegel - Einstein, Schrödinger, and the story you never heard
Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything
The Guardian zet Climate Change de laatste tijd (eindelijk) flink in het daglicht. Hier een essay nav Klein’s boek “This changes everything”. Ze zet heel mooi uiteen hoe de mindset van het economische systeem haaks staat op hoe we moeten handelen om climate change tegen te gaan. “Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life"
