CapitalistImperialistPig

I went to hear a talk by visiting professor (from Mexico) on violence and rights violations in Mexico. He led off by saying that about 150,000 Mexican civilians had been killed or disappeared over a recent ten year span. That was the only quantitative or substantive thing he had to say. The rest of the one hour lecture was devoted to vague and unsubstantiated claims that the violence was the result of US policies, the Mexican establishment, and inherent in the capitalist system. In short, it was the kind of dumb leftist bullshit that gives progressives a bad name. Mexico has a high murder rate, 18.9/100,000 per year. Compare for example, such moderately violent countries as India (3.5) and the US (3.9), or relatively safe countries like Japan (0.3) or Switzerland (0.6). But even Mexico is hardly extreme compared to Puerto Rico (26.5), Jamaica (39.3) Venezuela (53.7) or our champion, Honduras at 84.3. Nearly all the high murder rate countries are significantly impacted by the dr...

Via Steve Hsu: arxiv.org/pdf/1410.3831v1.pdf Claim: A deep connection between so-called deep neural networks and the renormalization group.

One reason the triumph of AlphaGo over its human opponent made such big shock waves is that defeating a professional is a big jump over the best previous computer results. Long after computers had beaten the best humans, strong teenage amateurs could still beat computers while giving them long odds. Fan Hui, the European champion, is a 2 dan professional, much stronger than those amateurs, but still far below Lee Sedol, the strongest human Go player. Lee Sedol is a 9 dan professional. There is no neat equivalence between go strength levels and chess levels, but roughly speaking a 2-dan professional is something like an International Master in Chess. 9-dans are like the so-called super-Grandmasters, whereas Lee Sedol is the Magnus Carlson of go. There is a pretty big gap between a 2-dan pro and a 9-dan, and a significant gap between a "generic" 9-dan and Lee Sedol. Consequently we can't assume that Lee Sedol is going go down just because Fan Hui did. Sedol also has...

It's over. Humans had a good run on this planet, but our time is nearly up. Google DeepMind's AlphaGo has just clocked a strong professional Go player 5-0 in a five game match. It will take on Lee Sedol, the World's best human month after next, but even if the human ekes out a win, the handwriting is already on the wall, or maybe I should say, the pixels are already in memory. It has been about twenty years since computers cracked chess, but the ancient game of Go had been stubbornly resistant. Probably even more interesting than the fact of the accomplishment is the way it was done, not by brute computer power or clever algorithms, but with deep neural networks. Such networks are electronic emulations of the way brains work, and the networked learned, in effect, by distilling a kind of essence of millions of games it studied. Such networks, powered by enormous computing power, are now demolishing artificial intelligence problems that had defied researchers for a co...

The Indo-Europeans who spread over most Europe and a big chunk of Asia 4-5000 years ago, left their traces not only in language but in religion and social structure. A cardinal element of social structure seems to have been division into priests, warriors, and farmers, a social structure that existed ancient Greece, Rome, Germany and Ireland, and persisted in attenuated form even into the nineteenth century in Europe. It continues to play an important role even in modern India. The religions of ancient Europe all had similar elements, with the names and characters of gods, rituals, and legends sharing powerful commonalities. One common god, especially prominent in Greek and Roman mythology, was the one denoted by the Indo-European for father sky. (dyaus pita in Sanskrit, Ju piter in latin, and presumably *dyeus pəter in Proto-Indo-European). In much of the world the old gods have been chased out by the congenitally jealous Semitic God, but the old traces are not quite gone. T...

If you are Ted Cruz, mostly everybody who has ever had to live or work with you. His Princeton roommate blames himself for not smothering him in his sleep.

Ted Cruz, Presidential Candidate, U S Senator, and allegedly brilliant lawyer, a guy with access to all the generous taxpayer subsidized health insurance plans provided to Congress, could not figure out how to get his family health insurance. He blames Obama. Should be great at running the country.