21st Century Life Skills

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

David's talk is interesting.  I watched at 1.5 speed.  10 minutes well worth the time. 

NeurIPS 2019 in Vancouver

In Vancouver this week (2019 week 50), over 13,000 of your closest personal friends are at NeurIPS-2019.  New this year, videos of the talks and their slides are webcast and recorded in real time here. The exponential growth of the conference predicts there will be over a million papers in four years. Personally, I attend neither NIPS NeurIPS, nor the international conference for machine learning (ICML) anymore unless I have a paper accepted, or I get sent there by my company to recruit.  In the words of Yogi Berra, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."  

One theme that hit the twitterverse live blogging about NeurIPS-19 is that neural network deep learning research (but not application) is "hitting the wall" because of the narrow set of problems it solves (optimization with clear objective and loss functions).  At least two keynote talks highlighted the limits in current approaches and our woefully inadequate capabilities to solve more interesting "general AI" problems. In particular, this fantastic talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas proposes a deeper simulation of biological systems (including neurons, evolution, & biological systems' learning) together with long-term short-term memory (LSTM) units in a simple topology as the basis for adaptable metalearning.  And in this talk, Yoshua Bengio explains some ideas for abstraction that he hopes will bring AI closer to general AI, including attention, consciousness, and causality.

The Nebula Awards 19 (1984) by various writers

Some of the stories are good.  I really don't like Greg Bear.  Post apocalyptic (nuclear war) was still dominating; half the stories are bad, 2/5 stars (dated, not worth reading anymore).

Auberon by James S.A. Corey

I wish the authors and publishers could get more of the their works out faster and sooner.  The tv show is a completely different experience from the awesome books and novellas. 5/5 stars.  Best space opera of this decade.

Mare Internum by Der-Shing Helmer

I recommend the web comic (soon to be a graphic novel) Mare Internum. Read it soon before it is deleted.  I followed each new page as it was being written.  The story is imaginative and gripping.  4/5 stars.

Invasion (book 9 blood on the stars) by Jay Allan

I am getting a little bored with the series and may wait a few years before reading the last few. The story line is exciting but the melodrama and repetition are grating.  He writes as if he were paid by the word.  3/5 stars

Salvation Lost by Peter F Hamilton

Fantastic!  I recommend buying all three books so that the tantalizing preludes and story interruptions are less jarring. 5/5 stars.

Die Tagesordnung by Eric Vulliard

Französisches preisgekröntes Buch ins Deutsche übersetzt und sehr beliebt. Dieses Buch wurde von meiner Schwägerin empfohlen. Die historischen Dokumente mit einigen der Spekulationen und Spekulationen des Autors geben einen grimmigen Überblick über die Ereignisse, die vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg stattfanden, und über die Erfolge unserer herrschenden Klasse bei der Schuldumleitung und -manipulation. Ich mag Geschichten aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg nicht mehr besonders, weil ich in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren mit zu vielen bombardiert wurde. 3/5 Sterne.

3 minutes, 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks

Late one evening this week I received a phone call from one of my children, asking what to pack as he was evacuating his house to escape a fire.  Without giving it much thought I told him to pack dust masks (3 minutes without air), water (3 days without water), and a power bank for his phone.

Now that he is safe, I am thinking that for urban survival in the event of natural disasters, we should think about preparedness much differently from outdoor survival.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

A Russian co-worker who shares my passion for science fiction recommended Arkady Strugalsky's books so I picked this one up.  It is fantastic. I missed the second wave of Soviet Science Fiction from the late 1970s but I caught the first wave because Isaac Asimov was a champion of the translations.  If you, like me, have not read Arkady Strugatsky, you are in for a treat. 5/5 stars.