👓 Smelvetica | Tims Curious Creations

Read Smelvetica by Tim Holman (tholman.com)
Smelvetica is an experimentation in taking one of the worlds most beloved fonts, and turning it into a morbid monstrocity.
We need more fonts like this so people appreciate the good ones a bit more.

🔖 Efficient Algorithms for Searching the Minimum Information Partition in Integrated Information Theory

Bookmarked Efficient Algorithms for Searching the Minimum Information Partition in Integrated Information Theory by Jun Kitazono, Ryota Kanai, Masafumi Oizumi (MDPI)
The ability to integrate information in the brain is considered to be an essential property for cognition and consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) hypothesizes that the amount of integrated information ( Φ ) in the brain is related to the level of consciousness. IIT proposes that, to quantify information integration in a system as a whole, integrated information should be measured across the partition of the system at which information loss caused by partitioning is minimized, called the Minimum Information Partition (MIP). The computational cost for exhaustively searching for the MIP grows exponentially with system size, making it difficult to apply IIT to real neural data. It has been previously shown that, if a measure of Φ satisfies a mathematical property, submodularity, the MIP can be found in a polynomial order by an optimization algorithm. However, although the first version of Φ is submodular, the later versions are not. In this study, we empirically explore to what extent the algorithm can be applied to the non-submodular measures of Φ by evaluating the accuracy of the algorithm in simulated data and real neural data. We find that the algorithm identifies the MIP in a nearly perfect manner even for the non-submodular measures. Our results show that the algorithm allows us to measure Φ in large systems within a practical amount of time.
h/t Christoph Adami, Erik Hoel, and @kanair

🔖 Black hole explosions? by Stephen Hawking | Nature

Bookmarked Black hole explosions? by Stephen Hawking (Nature)
QUANTUM gravitational effects are usually ignored in calculations of the formation and evolution of black holes. The justification for this is that the radius of curvature of space-time outside the event horizon is very large compared to the Planck length (Għ/c3)1/2 ≈ 10−33 cm, the length scale on which quantum fluctuations of the metric are expected to be of order unity. This means that the energy density of particles created by the gravitational field is small compared to the space-time curvature. Even though quantum effects may be small locally, they may still, however, add up to produce a significant effect over the lifetime of the Universe ≈ 1017 s which is very long compared to the Planck time ≈ 10−43 s. The purpose of this letter is to show that this indeed may be the case: it seems that any black hole will create and emit particles such as neutrinos or photons at just the rate that one would expect if the black hole was a body with a temperature of (κ/2π) (ħ/2k) ≈ 10−6 (M⊙/M)K where κ is the surface gravity of the black hole1. As a black hole emits this thermal radiation one would expect it to lose mass. This in turn would increase the surface gravity and so increase the rate of emission. The black hole would therefore have a finite life of the order of 1071 (M⊙/M)−3 s. For a black hole of solar mass this is much longer than the age of the Universe. There might, however, be much smaller black holes which were formed by fluctuations in the early Universe2. Any such black hole of mass less than 1015 g would have evaporated by now. Near the end of its life the rate of emission would be very high and about 1030 erg would be released in the last 0.1 s. This is a fairly small explosion by astronomical standards but it is equivalent to about 1 million 1 Mton hydrogen bombs.
In honor of pi day and the passing of Stephen Hawking, here’s one of his seminal papers published just before I was born.

👓 Pennsylvania’s special election should have been a cakewalk for the GOP | The Economist

Read Pennsylvania’s special election should have been a cakewalk for the GOP (The Economist)
“MARINE, prosecutor, patriot, Catholic.

👓 Do you live in a bubble? A quiz | PBS NewsHour

Read Do you live in a bubble? A quiz (PBS NewsHour)
There's a new upper class that's completely disconnected from the average American and American culture at large, says Charles Murray. Take this 25-question quiz to find out just how thick your bubble is.
I’m not one for quizzes, but I’ve scored a 66 on this–on the far side of being stuck in a bubble apparently. I’m glad I can manage to see many sides of our culture.

👓 Stephen Hawking, Who Examined the Universe and Explained Black Holes, Dies at 76 | The New York Times

Read Stephen Hawking, Who Examined the Universe and Explained Black Holes, Dies at 76 by Dennis Overbye (nytimes.com)
A physicist and best-selling author, Dr. Hawking did not allow his physical limitations to hinder his quest to answer “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”
Some sad news after getting back from Algebraic Geometry class tonight. RIP Stephen Hawking.

🔖 A Twitter bot to find the most interesting bioRxiv preprints | Gigabase or gigabyte

Bookmarked A Twitter bot to find the most interesting bioRxiv preprints (Gigabase or gigabyte)
TLDR: I wrote a Twitter bot to tweet the most interesting bioRxiv preprints. Follow it to stay up to date about the most recent preprints which received a lot of attention. The past few months have…
h/t to

🔖 [1803.03443] Fake news propagate differently from real news even at early stages of spreading

Bookmarked Fake news propagate differently from real news even at early stages of spreading by Zilong Zhao, Jichang Zhao, Yukie Sano, Orr Levy, Hideki Takayasu, Misako Takayasu, Daqing Li, Shlomo Havlin (arxiv.org)
Social media can be a double-edged sword for modern communications, either a convenient channel exchanging ideas or an unexpected conduit circulating fake news through a large population. Existing studies of fake news focus on efforts on theoretical modelling of propagation or identification methods based on black-box machine learning, neglecting the possibility of identifying fake news using only structural features of propagation of fake news compared to those of real news and in particular the ability to identify fake news at early stages of propagation. Here we track large databases of fake news and real news in both, Twitter in Japan and its counterpart Weibo in China, and accumulate their complete traces of re-posting. It is consistently revealed in both media that fake news spreads distinctively, even at early stages of spreading, in a structure that resembles multiple broadcasters, while real news circulates with a dominant source. A novel predictability feature emerges from this difference in their propagation networks, offering new paths of early detection of fake news in social media. Instead of commonly used features like texts or users for fake news identification, our finding demonstrates collective structural signals that could be useful for filtering out fake news at early stages of their propagation evolution.

👓 Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don’t stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review | The Guardian

Read Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don't stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review by Jay Rayner (the Guardian)
The food was so bad, says Jay Rayner, a nearby Yorkshire terrier started to look more appetising
It’s got to be difficult to write a restaurant review that’s more scathing than this. Wow!

👓 Trump’s Abrupt ‘Yes’ to North Korea: The 45 Minutes That Could Alter History | The New York Times

Read With Snap ‘Yes’ in Oval Office, Trump Gambles on North Korea by Peter Baker and Choe Sang-Hun (nytimes.com)
How President Trump threw aside caution and agreed to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in a daring and risky diplomatic gambit to end a nuclear standoff.
It kills me that a year and change in, they still can’t get their act together to coordinate major moves like this. Our country is not a race car that stops on a dime or turns very quickly. Trump may want it to, but it’s not going to do it easily. He’s also likely to destroy a lot of value in our economies by playing bull in the china shop.

I’m still astounded that he’s managed to keep any businesses afloat when making snap decisions like this. It’s really his family’s incredible wealth that in large part has prevented him from reverting to the mean over his lifetime. I can only imagine what additional damage he might do if he actually had any executive capabilities.

If I were his Secretary of State, I’d be resigning and then doing some additional speaking out of school.

👓 ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee | The Daily Beast

Read ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee (The Daily Beast)
Months after losing his wife, the 95-year-old comic book legend is surrounded by charlatans and mountebanks.
Apparently we need stronger laws to protect the elderly and infirm.

👓 Nun fighting sale of convent to Katy Perry dies in court | Reuters

Read Nun fighting sale of convent to Katy Perry dies in court (Reuters)
An 89-year-old Roman Catholic nun who has battled pop star Katy Perry for years over the sale of a Los Angeles convent collapsed and died during a court appearance, according to media reports and supporters.