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thewayfarer | 5 years ago | on: Ergodicity, What's It Mean

If the loss amount is adjusted to 33%, then on average over time individuals will make a net profit. A 50% win will more than compensate for a 33% loss (0.67 * 1.5 = 1.005).

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Opinion: How Apple could have prevented the iPhone-slowdown controversy

Because we shouldn't think about the media categorically one way or the other, as if it's either all fake or everything in the media is true. The media gets things wrong, and we should correct their mistakes.

However, the political aspects of discrediting entire news outlets or the entire news community because of critical or negative coverage of certain politicians or political parties is an attitude that promotes mistrust in our society and creates an environment where nefarious political actors can successful avoid scrutiny.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

> Under iOS 11.2.0 the effect is even more pronounced.

No, the effect is exactly the same as you can see from the charts since they peak at the same benchmark scores. It is the distribution of those effects that is different, with the performance being negatively affected for more phones. But keep in mind that under iOS 11.2.0, most iPhone 6S's that are tested are probably about 2 years old. Under iOS 10.x, most iPhone 6S's probably about 1 year old. I'd like to know the distribution of the times that these Geekbench benchmarks were run. If scores for one phone model in one month are one average score under iOS (x) but is substantially lower the next month under iOS (x+1), then I would consider that to be a significant act of "planned obsolescence".

But really Apple should probably be more transparent about this. And the bottom line for users is that if you notice any kind of significant performance degradation, whether it is fast battery drainage or sluggish performance, you should consider taking the phone in.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Type Erasure in Swift

> Wasting half your energy-budget on spoon feeding the compiler is just as bad as spending it on managing memory manually in C.

This isn't quite a fair comparison. Manual memory management increases the risk of producing incorrect or buggy programs. Satisfying a strict compiler increases the chance that your program is written correctly.

And for what it's worth, this boilerplate dance for "type erasure" will be solved with what the Swift team calls generalized existentials, where you'll be able to use nominal types like Any<Sequence where .Iterator.Element == String>. "Type erasure" isn't the result of "aiming so hard for perfection" as you say, but because Swift is still a young language and there is only so much the creators can work on at any one time. Most Swift devs (think iOS apps) aren't running up against this problem much, and I haven't seen a single situation in an app where implementing a "type erased" generic type was necessary. At this point in the Swift timeline, just making Swift code compile faster would make devs much happier.

> it's still a mine field of exceptions

Unlike languages that actually use exceptions, which really are mine fields of exceptions in a different sense :P

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Type Erasure in Swift

Strictly speaking, AnySequence is a generic type, whereas AnySequence<Int>, AnySequence<String>, and AnySequence<Any> would be three different concrete types.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: How to Know If an Idea Is Worth Pursuing

Our educational culture has us convinced that we need to have some kind of complete mental process before we produce an answer for some problem. In school, you answer a question by recalling information, making deductions, and only after eliminating your doubts to a sufficient degree do you scratch your answer on a piece of paper. Oh, and a good student is always afraid of being wrong. It's a mentality that we carry into adulthood only to be paralyzed by it. If only we taught kids to instinctively do and produce even at the risk of being wrong or looking like a fool later. We should habitually be exploring, doing, and engaging with problems and ideas. Pursuing the right ideas in your career should amount to selecting from your experiences and the experiences that others have shared with you. What ideas worked and what didn't? How did the outcome conform to your expectations? It doesn't have to be a complete and finished product. What did you learn from making this prototype? What surprised you? No doubt you've have many bad ideas over the years. We all have them. What projects are providing value to you because you enjoy working on them, and what projects look like they could provide real value to others in the world? Those are the projects worth pursuing for the long run.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Orcas have learned how to drown great white sharks

Exactly. I have no idea. It would make sense for a large, capable predator to try out eating a human, but they just don't. Maybe humans don't have enough fat on them to be appealing? ...but orcas also eat birds, which don't have a lot of fat. Maybe because orcas are intelligent collaborative hunters, they have instincts not to eat other intelligent species like humans? ...but orcas also eat dolphins, which are similarly intelligent hunters.

I would also expect any large predator to spontaneously act aggressive at times, but this very rarely happens. Or at some point I would expect it to make a mistake and kill a human even though it doesn't actually want to eat him/her, but this has apparently never happened.

I find it all very interesting, but I'm at a loss to explain it.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Orcas have learned how to drown great white sharks

Some human beings that live near the ocean do go in the water.

Here are some more facts:

Great white sharks

world population: <3,500 [1]

fatal attacks on humans from 1990-2013: 35 [2]

Orcas

world population: >50,000[3]

fatal attacks on humans in the wild since the beginning of recorded history: apparently zero

Here are some bonus videos of people swimming with orcas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ3mDXF3bcE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNtbaQyJx-0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErCfpYYuWuo

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/19/great-wh...

[2] https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/fish/isaf/contributing-fac...

[3] http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15421/0

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Orcas have learned how to drown great white sharks

Despite being a very intelligent apex predator with a diverse diet[1], orcas apparently have never killed a human in the wild before in recorded history, and there is only one recorded case of an orca even biting a human[2]. Of course fatal attacks by captive orcas are well known.

Still, orcas are magnificent animals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale#Feeding

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale_attacks_on_humans

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Pliny the Elder, “The Natural History”, Book I (79)

The people behind the Perseus project are singularly amazing. This project really enhances our ability to read and research these texts, and it has continually improved over time. Many people might not know that many of the great features like the vocabulary, navigation, and search tools are at least (from my experience) 13 years old. That's right: around the time the web development world was largely just putting on its "Web 2.0" hat, the remarkable people at Tufts already created this significant, dynamic web app that was easy to use, had deep tooling sophistication, hosted a large wealth of content, and enormously benefitted a generation of students and scholars.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ into English

"Complicated" is an interesting translation for πολύτροπον rather than the more literal "much-traveled." But then again, The Odyssey isn't some children's adventure story. It's a story about the brutal, strange, post-war Ancient Mediterranean and people lost, or without purpose, who have to constantly adapt to the challenges of that world while still staying true to their identity. It's all, well...complicated.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Exploring How and Why Trees ‘Talk’ to Each Other

Brilliant and fascinating!

I thought the sentences following your second quotation from the first paper, hypothesizing on the mechanism for kin selection, to be quite interesting:

> This may have been facilitated by the greater mycorrhizal colonization of kin than stranger seedlings (Asay 2013), creating a stronger sink in the MN, an effect also noted in the study by File et al. (2012). The greater colonization of kin seedlings may have arisen from complimentary genetics of the fungal genet and tree genotype (e.g. Rosado et al. 1994a, b). [...]although the mechanism through which the MN elicits the behavior response remains to be resolved.

This genetic mechanism makes sense to me.

The first paper talks about many rich, complex relationships. Two topics I thought were very interesting:

> A fungus can express a mutualism with one plant, while simultaneously exploiting a different plant. Mycoheterotrophic plants are perhaps the most extreme example of this type of exploitation, where a plant acquires all of its carbon by parasitizing fungi through the MN (e.g. Leake 1994; Massicotte et al. 2012). These plants link into the MN of a nearby tree and siphon off photosynthate, enabling them to survive and grow. Importantly this reveals the existence of a mechanism by which plants can acquire nutritional levels of carbon from mycorrhizal fungi. The fitness of all participants in this scenario is increased by the existence of the MN: (i) the mycorrhizal fungus acquires carbon from the tree (or multiple trees) and may use the mycoheterotroph as the staging ground for long-distance exploration and colonization, (ii) the mycoheterotroph acquires carbon from the fungus and (iii) the tree gains access to a wider pool of soil resources, and potentially connection to other trees facilitating the detection of defence signals.

> There is evidence for both tit-for-tat and reciprocal altruism in MNs in forests, both which would be resistant to cheaters (i.e. individuals that benefit without reciprocating). Tit-for-tat, distinct from mutualisms, is evident in bidirectional transfer between paper birch and Douglas-fir (Simard et al. 1997a, b; Philip et al. 2010) and between unrelated Douglas-fir (Teste et al. 2010). This cooperative bidirectional exchange occurs over a period of a few days and appears to be related to the behaviour and possibly fitness of the individuals involved in the network. However, reciprocal altruism, or repeated prisoners dilemma, occurs over longer time periods, and this explanation is more congruent with the highly variable disturbances and hiatus in forests. There is some evidence for reciprocal altruism through the switches in the direction of net carbon transfer between paper birch and Douglas-fir (Philip 2006) or maple and trout lily seedlings (Lerat et al. 2002) in response to differential changes in plant phenology over a period of several months.

Your second paper on kin selection appears to be mainly theoretical on the topic of competition theory, not an observational study of plants or fungi. It makes weak conclusions like "It is reasonable to hypothesize that traits expressed only in the presence of strangers may indicate competition or selfishness, while traits expressed in the presence of kin may indicate cooperation or altruism (Murphy & Dudley 2009; File et al. 2012)" and "It is too soon to know if plant kin recognition responses will demonstrate the breadth that has been found for kin selection in animal behaviour."

> But selection can also take place on the whole plant community.

No doubt.

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Exploring How and Why Trees ‘Talk’ to Each Other

Absolutely fascinating work! However, I'm not entirely sold on the usage of the term "mother tree." While Simard says

> That’s how we came up with the term “mother tree,” because they’re the biggest, oldest trees, and we know that they can nurture their own kin.

the interview doesn't reference any work that specifically states these mother trees will preferentially nurture kin over other species. For example, when she describes the more controlled greenhouse experiment with Douglas firs and Ponderosa pines, an injured mother tree Douglas fir dumped carbon into the network and the ponderosa pines still absorbed it. She may have other work that describes some kind of kin preference, but I don't see it cited and I don't quite understand what the mechanism to make this happen would be.

Rather, (as a layman without any knowledge of the work and published papers around this topic), I see this phenomenon not as the result of "mother trees" but from "farmer fungi." The fungi, because of their large networks and relationships with the trees, become "resource managers" of the forest. The fungi have an incentive to make sure that the trees are healthy and will continue to provide nutrients for the fungi. When younger trees are injured, that is a threat to the fungi's survival, and therefore one possibility is that they have evolved this mechanism that transports resources from older trees to the younger ones to help the younger trees survive. The relationship between these fungi and trees are normally symbiotic, but the older trees "tolerate" (or fail to evolve some immune response to) this mildly pathogenic behavior because it likely benefits its nearby offspring or close kin.

I think the concept of the "mother tree" might be slightly anthropomorphic, assuming that a large, multi-organ plant must be more intelligent and possibly be even more caring than small fungi that must only be able to perform simple functions. In reality, the fungi are the organisms in the best position to evolve this beneficial behavior.

Again, I'm a non-expert with zero knowledge on this topic. If anyone could provide a reference to a free online paper that describes these "mother trees" as preferentially nurturing kin, I could be persuaded. And that would be a very interesting read!

thewayfarer | 8 years ago | on: Misleading metaphors

"Metaphors are like models, only with unclear responsibilities." --Nick Rowe, talking about the use of metaphors to describe economic models.
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