Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Active evolution? Hardly

From Discover Magazine.

1 Minute - The amount of time, on average per night, that a group of modern Tanzanian hunter-gatherers were all asleep at the same time.  Experts say the minuscule overlap supports the notion that humans evolved different sleep patterns as a way to ensure someone was up to alert others of nighttime threats, such as predators.

Pet peeve of mine, a lot of descriptions are like this where the implications are that the evolution was directed and intentional (as a way to ensure someone was up).  In reality it's less glamorous.  The humans who happened to be randomly de-synchronized in their sleep patterns didn't get eaten by tigers or murdered by bands of ruffians.  The ones who all slept at the same time ended up dying and didn't pass on these 'sleep at the same time' genes to their offspring.  That's the evolutionary pressure, not some sort of evolving different patterns as a way to ensure someone was up to alert others.  That sounds so carefully planned out.

Really what we think happens is random mutations give a survival advantage.

Strange conventions

Reading some non-fiction (Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible), I noticed that a paragraph describing metamaterials described properties of metamaterials and then the next paragraph started:

What are these metamaterials?  They are substances that have ...

What's interesting here is that this conversational method "what are..." seems perfectly normal in a book, makes the language interesting like it's really a conversation, yet when I'm reading a book and I'm reading facts it's very strange to think of this as a conversation.  What are metamaterials does absolutely nothing to tell me what they are, the sentence is pure throw away but yet it feels natural, even in written form.

I think this might be like when somebody calls you up and says "Hello, it's Joe", when we all know that I know it's Joe since the ID on the calls said so.  But, if Joe started up right away with the talking, the conversation would be thrown off.  Like I'm expecting an announcement of who it is.  I wonder if younger kids start off phone calls this way or if they just launch into it since they never had a time before caller ID...  (Plot twist, younger kids don't seem to call each other on the phone, they just text.  Plus they don't announce who they are at the beginning of the text.)


Sunday, November 19, 2017

Planning Poker

https://www.planningpoker.com/ - online free planning poker (for up to 5 people) that can be used to estimate sizes of things, typically used in agile/scrum.  Doing it as poker avoids anchoring or influence across the team.


Saturday, November 18, 2017

AI

Amusing yet very helpful AI info.  http://aiweirdness.com/faq