Extenuating Circumstances

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for August 4th from 19:22 to 12:52:

• Closed Loophole Confirms the Unreality of the Quantum World | Quanta Magazine – “Chaves’s team then proposed a twist to Wheeler’s experiment to test the loophole. With unusual alacrity, three teams raced to do the modified experiment. Their results, reported in early June, have shown that a class of classical models that advocate realism cannot make sense of the results. Quantum mechanics may be weird, but it’s still, oddly, the simplest explanation around.”
• How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism) – “I submit that we have two big biases when we talk about technology. First, we think about it too much in terms of tools and recipes, when really we should think about it more in terms of process knowledge and technical experience. Second, most of us focus too much on the digital world and not enough on the industrial world. Our obsession with the digital world has pushed our expectation of the technological future in the direction of cyberpunk dystopia; I hope instead that we can look forward to a joyful vision of the technological future, driven by advances in industry.”
• Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains – Florenta Teodoridis, Michaël Bikard, Keyvan Vakili, 2018 – “We show that generalist scientists performed best when the pace of change was slower and their ability to draw from diverse knowledge domains was an advantage in the field, but specialists gained advantage when the pace of change increased and their deeper expertise allowed them to use new knowledge created at the knowledge frontier.”
• Why does tech have so many political problems? – Marginal REVOLUTION – “9. The media increasingly hates tech. (In part because tech is such a threat, in part because of a deeper C.P. Snow-style cultural mismatch.)”
• A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards?The Asahi Shimbun – “The reason is clear. As smartphones have become extremely convenient, a growing number of students have never laid their hands on a personal computer.”
• A Public Statement from My Wife, Rai King, about the Attacks on Our Family –
• County Welfare Office Violated Accountability Rules While Surveilling Benefits Recipients | Electronic Frontier Foundation –
• Meet Sphinx: The 30-Year-Old Soviet Smart Home Concept – Soviet Visuals – Named the Sphinx Station, with ‘Sphinx’ in Russian serving as an abbreviation for Short for Super Functional Integrated Communicative System, the system was designed by Azrikan in 1987 in collaboration with A.Kolotushkin and V. Goessen, following an assignment from the Soviet State Committee for Science and Technology to create a ‘revolutionary computer’