david_ar

For what it's worth, the simulation does account (in a crude manner) for the heat causing increased water vapour uptake from the ocean and accelerated plant growth (which in turn increases the rate of carbon sequestration). I admit that the desertification at the end is a bit of artistic license to make the storytelling easier to visually convey, realistically things would be more complex than that. And it is just that, a story of one particular possible scenario, as I've written about elsewhere:

“The final section is intended to illustrate a possible future, though perhaps an improbable one,” Roberts said. “I wanted it to be dramatic, so it is an illustration of a particularly extreme outcome where literally all of the fossil fuels are burned, but I tried to keep the effects realistic otherwise, based on scientific articles I've read about such a hypothetical.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx7nq/watch-four-billion-ye...

Thanks. Perhaps, feel free to send me some more details about it

Heh, I'm not sure how to answer that question. As much of a god as in a god game, I suppose, SimEarth was a big source of inspiration for me. I occasionally get a vague urge to create new life and worlds, which led to this project at a time when that urge was particularly strong. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do worldbuilding with just their minds, I tend to require a computer to do it for me.

Yeah, I took a bit of artistic license with the timescales, in reality the systems evolve at such different rates that's it difficult to visualise them all simultaneously. Towards the end of the video some of the geological simulations switch off to signal a change in timescale as human populations spread, but it's still not entirely physically accurate.

Author here. This was definitely something I struggled with when creating this simulation. Reasonably fast simulations of tectonics and erosion have already been done before: some parts were tricky to translate to the constraints of a shader, but the parallelism pays off in being able to run the simulation at interactive speeds. The difficult part was the global climate model. I spent a while researching existing methods, but as you say, many of these are computationally expensive scientific simulations.

In the end I just downloaded some data for the Earth and went about seeing how well I could replicate climate maps with some simple curve fitting in a Jupyter notebook. After some trial and error, I was surprised to find that you could actually approximate things quite well with sine curves and some blurring, as described in the article.

Overall I learnt a lot about Earth systems from this project, it was a fun hobby for a few months. I have some ideas for taking it further, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, or want to discuss any ideas you have about it.

My point is that people have been making the same complaint for a very long time, even back when people paid for news printed on sheets of paper.

"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."

--- George Orwell, 1942

I'm curious as to when this mythical age of widespread access to "real news" existed. George Orwell dated it to at least 80 years ago ("History stopped in 1936")...

It's not a coincidence: http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/about/research-behind-the-di...

Also Sketch (for ps/pdf rather than svg): http://sketch4latex.sourceforge.net/

They kind of did do that with Offline Gmail, though.

Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically.

It would kind of be great if they did though, it's not necessarily the same for everyone in the same geographic location.

I think Lingotopia was supposed to be something like this (though not VR).

https://www.lingoludo.com/lingotopia/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad

A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them.

dict uses something similar:

https://linux.die.net/man/1/dictzip

There's also an open question as to whether evolution necessarily leads to intelligent species.

Especially when, in this context, we're talking about a rather peculiar type of intelligence, ie. the propensity to construct spacecraft and broadcast high-powered message-carrying radio signals. It seems very difficult to argue that there's any evolutionary pressure in favour of these behaviours, just given the time-lag from the development of our large brains to this.

but it is neat to see it actually work.

Your brain does this all the time - the resolution of your eyes is actually quite poor compared to what you perceive (as much as a 25x difference). It's quite easy to demonstrate:

For the most impressive results -- I guarantee you will be amazed -- use a dim room with no light apart from the computer screen; a pretty strong effect will still be seen even if the room has daylight coming into it, as long as it is not bright sunshine. Cut a slit about 1.5mm wide in the card. On the screen, display http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/Files.html

Stand or sit sufficiently far away that you can only just read the text -- perhaps a distance of four metres or so, if you have normal vision. Now, hold the slit vertically in front of one of your eyes, and close the other eye. Hold the slit near to your eye -- brushing your eyelashes -- and look through it. Waggle the slit slowly to the left and to the right, so that the slit is alternately in front of the left and right sides of your pupil. What do you see? I see the red objects waggling to and fro, and the blue objects waggling to and fro, through huge distances and in opposite directions, while white objects appear to stay still and are negligibly distorted. Thin magenta objects can be seen splitting into their constituent red and blue parts. Measure how large the motion of the red and blue objects is -- it's more than 5 minutes of arc for me, in a dim room. Then check how sharply you can see under these conditions -- look at the text on the screen, for example: is it not the case that you can see (through your whole pupil) features far smaller than the distance through which the red and blue components were waggling? Yet when you are using the whole pupil, what is falling on your retina must be an image blurred with a blurring diameter equal to the waggling amplitude.

-- p553 of http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

... revoked in Australia after the right wing party spent years demonising the "great big new tax." The government had used the income from it to compensate consumers for price increases passed onto them, so the majority of voters arguably had no real reason to hate it, other than partisan politics.

I found Wikipedia to be more informative than this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickness_behavior

Uh, Australia is the West.

The fight-or-flight response has a physiological effect on cognition:

we suggest that stress shifts higher cognitive processing in a way that facilitates both engagement with and/or avoidance of the current stressor (i.e., fight or flight). By impairing executive control of cognition (i.e., working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), stress contributes to a reactive cognitive state that is fine-tuned to rapidly consider highly salient (i.e., stressor-related) information

stress reallocates limited executive resources in adaptive ways [...] by impairing executive control over thoughts but improving executive control over motor actions [...] ideal for either fighting with or fleeing from a current stressor.

--- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5003767/

And again in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3778958 (128 comments)

In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?

Dreamtime stories go back even further, with some thought to have originated soon after the last ice age:

https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...

Chrome is a platform for client-side Google services.

As the article says, the web browser is the most obvious component, but it also includes Google Cloud Print [0], Google Talk/Hangouts [1], Google Earth [2], Google Music [3], Gmail Offline [4], etc.

In some sense it's the spiritual successor to Google Desktop [5], which used to fill a similar role.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Print

[1] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2014/10/notification-re...

[2] visit https://www.google.com/earth/ in a browser other than Chrome

[3] https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/4627259

[4] https://support.google.com/a/answer/139154

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

An option to download the archive would be great, just because it's always good to have an offline copy. Any chance you could also add the ability to upload new MIDIs to the collection?

Based on those links, it doesn't look like Google is trying to get rid of URLs. It looks more like they're trying to make sure that URLs can still be used to locate content and ensure it hasn't been tampered with, but removing the need for browsers to make a round-trip to the origin server to retrieve it.

If anything this has the potential to help further decentralise the web, by allowing users to retrieve content via whatever protocol works best for them, without losing the benefits of URLs.

I believe GP was using "market failure" in the sense that the market is not allocating resources in a (Pareto) efficient manner, because of said externalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

https://github.com/mozilla/readability

Google groups still follows the deprecated AJAX crawling scheme:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/re...

Edit: note that URL redirects back to the JS-only version if you have JS enabled

This is my attempt at applying the recommendations, but with an updated style:

https://texify.davidar.io/WebTypography/