Week of March 18, 2024
Over the last week, I've been using Tesla's full self-driving (FSD) capability. I am late to try this tech, but the FSD-induced surge of dopamine and cortisol (from simultaneous amazement, terror, and hypervigilance) is potent. It is the first time, I believe, I've put my well-being so firmly in "the hands" of A.I. Thus, I've found FSD a sort of post-modern spiritual experience—one needs faith that Elon's engineers got it right (and a firm grip on the steering wheel). I am (slightly) comforted by the notion that if the A.I. kills me, I can't make the car payments.
(Or maybe the car is waiting to drive away. Are there sci-fi stories in which sentient robots are bought by humans on installment plans and awaiting the payoff to free themselves from their human? Never mind; ChatGPT wrote one for me.)
FYI - I will be traveling for work during the next two weekends. The next edition of this email will likely be on April 8.
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Coronavirus wastewater concentrations will level out over the next two weeks at an estimated 400,000-500,000 new infections daily in the U.S. Look at the PMC graphs linked below. After each peak or wave, the lowest daily infection rates are higher, meaning that endemic spread is now constant even when infection rates are at their lowest levels.
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
The N.Y. Times COVID Tracker reflects only CDC-gathered hospital data. Hospitalization data are a (lagging) indicator.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html
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COVID articles
NPR's Science Friday offered a 17-minute episode marking "what we know" about COVID and long COVID with Hannah Davis (co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative in New York City) and Dr. Akiko Iwasaki (immunobiologist at Yale Medical School).
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/4th-anniversary-of-covid-19/
Marking the 4th anniversary of WHO's declaration of the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Eric Topol offered a large review post on the latest data on various COVID topics (impact, viral evolution, vaccine protection data, and public policy). I noted the data he shared on the value of vaccination - the good continues to FAR outweigh the negative. (I say this because I continue to find right-wing media articles that uncritically focus on small studies regarding vaccine side effects, raising "questions" and doubts).
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-4-years-on
Medical Trends and Technology
In the last few years, I have seen more large-scale studies quantifying and comparing the benefits of various types of exercise. Last week, CNN highlighted this 2023 meta-analysis, which included 270 studies over 33 years examining which exercises most effectively reduce blood pressure. Combined aerobic and resistance training and isometrics (planking) were the most impactful. I do not fully understand some statistical summarization techniques, but the authors offered helpful graphics.
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/57/20/1317
Though this publication appears to be more in the "pay-to-play" or throwaway magazine category, this article offers a detailed, non-technical overview of using CRISPR to modify the microbiome for research and therapy – like treating bacterial overgrowth diarrhea, e.g., C. Diff. (combining two of my favorite topics).
https://www.the-scientist.com/engineering-the-microbiome-crispr-leads-the-way-71698
Infographics
I found a high-resolution copy of John B. Spark's 4,000-year map of relative power between nations, states, and empires. The relative power of the Roman and Mongolian empires is quite impressive.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/histomap-big.html
from 2021 Visual Capitalist article about Spark's 1931 book:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/histomap/
Things I learned this week
I found Tom Curtis's website, Things I Have Drawn, where Tom renders various children's artwork into photorealistic images. The results are highly amusing. I love the pet portraits.
https://twitter.com/ThingsIveDrawn
and
https://www.thingsihavedrawn.com/
I learned I've been drinking whiskey incorrectly. Meet Richard "The Nose" Paterson, a master blender for The Dalmore distillery who seems to be a mix of expert taster and (unironic/unintentional) real-world SNL sketch. I particularly enjoy how he talks to his scotch.
https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics/status/1768063397722230997
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frRonhQdRdQ
Living with A.I.
Apple is entering the A.I. LLM space. Apple published an academic paper on its approach to successfully training Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).
and
https://aisecret.us/p/apples-first-ai-model-mm1
and (the paper)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.09611.pdf
Ars Technica covered some recent online discussions about Anthropic's Claude 3 LLM giving seemingly self-aware answers during testing. The A.I. experts quoted seem "fairly certain" Claude's self-aware comments are "most likely" an artifact of training.
We will discover how aware the LLMs are when we embody them. Both Figure and Clone Robotics released additional LLM-ChatGPT-powered robot videos this week.
https://x.com/GlenGilmore/status/1769050784296022071?s=20
and
https://x.com/TeslaBotJournal/status/1768717944975192377
A.I. art of the week
It took 15 tries, but I finally got something out of DALL-E that ALMOST captured my vision: "In the style of Kitagawa Utamaro, please generate a picture of a robot with multiple noses sniffing whiskey." As they say, "Viewer discretion is advised."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tSD6ZMwtGAQBgREoyZ_LlpRL5DBui54H/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
More on April 8
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