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Listen in as Real Science Radio host Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney review and update some of Bob Enyart's legendary list of not so old things! From Darwin's Finches to opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, to carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations simply defy the claim that the earth is billions of years old. Real science demands the dismissal of the alleged million and billion year ages asserted by the ungodly and the foolish.     * Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner.  * Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds?  Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin's Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?" * Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist. * Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today." * Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!   * After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins. As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft. * Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including: - in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat - the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain - hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial - those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to Bob@rsr.org) - hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa.   - and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. * Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old! * National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens. * Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong. * Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few. * Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include: - Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years. - Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts. - The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition. - A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies evolving too quickly, 

Listen in as Real Science Radio host Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney review and update some of Bob Enyart's legendary list of not so old things! From Darwin's Finches to opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, to carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations simply defy the claim that the earth is billions of years old. Real science demands the dismissal of the alleged million and billion year ages asserted by the ungodly and the foolish.   * Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner.  * Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds?  Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin's Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?" * Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist. * Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today." * Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!   * After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins. As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft. * Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including: - in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat - the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain - hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial - those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to Bob@rsr.org) - hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa.   - and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. * Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old! * National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens. * Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong. * Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few. * Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include: - Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years. - Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts. - The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition. - A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies e

Subscriber-only episodeSend us a textWelcome back to the Ones Ready Podcast—where we break down the latest military clown show for your entertainment. Today, we're talking about how DEI scrubbing went off the rails, the insane amount of Pentagon budget waste, and why owning a Tesla apparently makes you a Nazi now.

Send us a textWelcome back to the Ones Ready Podcast—where we cut through the BS and break down the real stories that actually matter, instead of whatever nonsense the Pentagon is pushing today.Here's what's on deck:

This article by Richard Gowan was published at worldpoliticsreview.com on March 19, 2025. It is now almost exactly two months since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House and set about weakening the United Nations. On his first day in office, Trump announced that the U.S. would quit the Paris Agreement on climate change as well as the World Health Organization. At the time, I argued that these were predictable maneuvers, as he had taken similar steps in his first term. Diplomats and international officials in New York were resigned to Trump taking early pot-shots at the U.N. but hoped that he would move on to other targets. Two months later, U.N. insiders admit that the new administration has done far more harm to the institution than they had expected. And they worry that it will do even greater damage before long. While the administration's cuts to foreign aid have hit U.N. agencies hard, U.N. officials had expected to face financial strains. But Washington has also blocked information-sharing by U.S. government entities with their U.N. counterparts on issues ranging from epidemics to indicators of famine. That has stopped the flow of data that U.N. agencies often relied on more than they would care to admit. In parallel, U.S. diplomats in New York and Geneva have instructions to purge multilateral documents of references to words the Trump administration dislikes, like "gender" and "diversity." These strictures have upset routine U.N. committee processes on issues ranging from children's wellbeing to peacekeeping, as U.S. negotiators have focused on these semantic points to the exclusion of all other topics. Their foreign counterparts quip that U.S. diplomats simply use the "Ctrl+F" keyboard shortcut to search draft texts for offending nouns and verbs to cut, in order to win credit with Washington. Foreign officials in New York had always expected the Trump administration to be transactional rather than principled in its multilateral diplomacy. But its obsession with rooting out supposedly leftist notions has convinced many that it is ultimately following a right-wing ideological template, making it significantly harder to bargain with. The U.S. has reinforced this view by circulating a questionnaire to U.N. agencies asking if they have had any association with communists or other anti-American forces. While senior figures in New York have tracked the White House's attacks, they have had few real openings to understand U.S. thinking. The Senate confirmation of Trump's nominee as ambassador to the U.N., Rep. Elise Stefanik, has been put on hold to allow Stefanik to remain in Congress, as the slim and unruly Republican majority makes her vote indispensable for upcoming budgetary negotiations. Beleaguered diplomats at the U.S. mission to the U.N. have tended to postpone big decisions until her eventual arrival, which is now expected in early April but could slip further into the future. Some major U.S. initiatives - such as the decision to side with Moscow rather than Kyiv in a series of General Assembly and Security Council votes in February marking the anniversary of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine - have seemed quite haphazardly put together. The bleakest observers suspect that the Trump administration not only does not care about the U.N. but actively wants to subvert it. Worried U.N. member states have been urging the organization's leaders to try to get ahead of this burgeoning crisis. In February and early March, major financial donors to the U.N. fretted that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres - who handled Trump quite successfully in his first term - was not taking the scale of the current U.S. threat seriously. Last week, Guterres announced a review of the U.N.'s mandates and structures to identify savings and efficiencies. He has, rather unconvincingly, tried to present this as an independent initiative rather than a stop-gap response to Trump. Looking ahead, denizens of the U.N. bubble broa...

They end up sounding ridiculous whenever they try—like the treasury secretary saying that access to cheap goods is not part of the American dream. At the same time, Trump's circle of plutocrats don't seem to mind that the stock market is tanking. And while the administration is cutting Ukraine off from US intelligence to serve up an unjust peace, the Pentagon is on a CTRL-F "gay" delete rampage. Plus, Dems need to skip the kooky TikToks, and the SpaceX rocket explosion was only one part of Elon's very bad day.  Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes Tom's piece about Dems acting too normal (gifted) Tim's interview with a reporter in Ukraine Clip from French senator's speech calling out Trump and Elon MAGA hat guy thinking he's gone into the lion's den at Disney World Debris from the latest SpaceX rocket explosion reentering the atmosphere over the Bahamas Tim's playlist

In this episode, Jim and Derek are joined by Mark to destroy Saturn's rings once and for all. Then, we desperately try to search through a print book by using Ctrl+F and come up short.  Panelists: Jim, Derek, Mark

Summary Brett Forrest and Warren Strobel join Andrew to discuss reporting intelligence. Brett and Warren are national security reporters for The Wall Street Journal.  What You'll Learn Intelligence The intelligence learning curve  Stories from the front lines of modern conflicts and critical moments  The unique challenges that come with reporting on intelligence, and ... The risks, including being a target of espionage Reflections Privacy and protection  The power, and danger, of sharing information And much, much more … Episode Notes This week on SpyCast, Andrew was joined in the studio by Brett Forrest and Warren Strobel, intelligence correspondents at the Wall Street Journal. As SpyCast listeners will know, issues of intelligence and espionage are constantly going on all around us – But how does the public stay in the know and up to date on the latest cases and news from around the world? Well, that's where these two come in.  Quotes of the Week “It's about knocking on every possible door that you can imagine, that you can come up with, that you can dig up. And, all you're hoping for is one of those doors to open. You know, you knock on a hundred doors, you get 99 doors to open. You just want that one door to open because that's where the information is. That's where the source is. So, I don't know if I would call that luck, I would call that persistence.” - Brett Forrest Resources  SURFACE SKIM *SpyCasts* Zelensky, Ukraine, and Intelligence with Simon Shuster (2024) China's Corporate Spy War with CNBC's Eamon Javers (2023) My Life Looking at Spies & the Media with Paul Lashmar (2021) The Women of NatSec Journalism – 6 Leading Journalists (2017) *Beginner Resources* A Brief History of Journalism in America, M. A. McIntosh, Brewminate (2022) [Short article] A History of The Wall Street Journal, G. Hughes, Historic Newspapers (2021) [Short article] What Is Journalism and Why Does it Matter? CTRL-F, YouTube (2018) [3 min. Video] DEEPER DIVE Books Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate, P. Lashmar (EUP, 2021) Spies and the Media in Britain, R. Norton-Taylor (IBT, 2018) Spinning Intelligence, R. Dover and M. Goodman (CUP, 2009) Articles How Cuba Recruits Spies to Penetrate Inner Circles of the U.S. Government, B. Forrest & W. Strobel, The Wall Street Journal (2024) Reporters who covered U.S. invasion of Iraq reflect on impact of war, N. Schifrin & Z. Warsi, PBS News (2023) Russian Spy or Ukrainian Hero? The Strange Death of Denys Kiryeyev, B. Forrest, The Wall Street Journal (2023) In Ukraine, New Reports of War Crimes Emerge as Russians Retreat From Kyiv Area, B. Forrest, The Wall Street Journal (2022) Questioning the Case for War, C. A. Preble, CATO Institute (2018)  CIA Intercepts Underpin Assessment Saudi Crown Prince Targeted Khashoggi, W. Strobel, The Wall Street Journal (2018) Video Lost Son with Brett Forrest, International Spy Museum, YouTube (2023)  Ukrainians in Bucha reflect on horrors and brutality suffered at hands of Russian forces, PBS News (2023) Primary Sources  It is time to do everything to make the war crimes of the Russian military the last manifestation of this evil on earth - address by the President of Ukraine (2022)  UN Report on the Killing of Civilians in Ukraine (2022) McClatchy (Knight Ridder) Iraq Intelligence Archive (2001-2007) Reporting the War (2005) *Wildcard Resource* Shock and Awe (2017) Starring James Marsden as Warren Strobel!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We spoke with Sandesh Chitnis, CEO of Core Integra, a regulatory technology company offering labour law compliance, payroll processing, permanent hiring, staffing, and employee benefit solutions to its clients. Ctrl F is Core Integra's flagship ERP-based software tool whose core features include automated statutory compliance management, risk management, regulatory compliance, and audit software to optimize business performance. Additionally, the platform has a comprehensive library of Indian laws and acts, facilitating easy search and indexing. Sandesh shares his take on how technology can play role in digitizing and cracking labour law compliances in a complex country such as India with multiple jurisdictions and vernacular elements, taking into account the rising role of AI driven automation.  Hope you enjoy this TRANSFIN. Podcast with Nikhil Arora and Sharath Toopran, where we converse with entrepreneurs and business operators running successful startups, profitable SMEs and family promoted firms on one end, and top investment professionals representing VC/PE/credit funds on the other. The objective is to bring out an "actionable" perspective converging the world of business and investing.   If you're a founder and if you'd like us to drill down your model, feel free to drop us a line at edit@transfin.in 

Show Notes: Dimitris Samouris discusses the development of a tool called Junior, an SaaS tool built on large language models and speech to text models. It leverages AI to help process primary research workstreams, particularly in the due diligence process, especially for primary interviews. How Junior Works - A SaaS Tool to Clean Transcripts Junior helps automate a significant portion of the administrative tasks associated with research execution, allowing users to focus more on the big picture answer rather than the execution side of things. The tool provides a highly accurate transcript of each call, including the name, segment, company, customer size, date and time of the interview, call status, and review status. The call tracker is a knowledge repository that displays the names, segments, job title, company, customer size, country, date and time of the interview, call status, and review status. The call screen is a customizable project management tool for running the call workstream. Junior has three parts: a call drawer, which has three parts: verbatim transcript, clean transcript, and audio file backup. The first step is to chunking the verbatim transcript into relevant question and answer pairs, then cleaning those pairs for colloquialisms and repetition interruptions. This process typically strips out about half of the text in the verbatim transcript, making it more digestible. The Benefits of Using Junior - Workflow Tools for Consultants Junior allows users to create a clean transcript of a call and then convert it into a call summary. The tool has two components: a stats box that extracts every numerical data point referenced in the call and stores it in one place for review after the call, and a set of key takeaways that are AI-generated summaries of the key points of the call. The tool leverages information from the beginning of a project, such as a scope document or interview guide, to help guide the summary. The tool also offers workflow tools specifically designed for the consulting industry to help get to the slide output faster. One of the main features is Ctrl. F. This feature helps users find relevant quotes and questions related to the topic, such as contract structure, pricing, implementation, and renewal processes. This feature is particularly useful for human consultants who may struggle to trace quotes due to sanitization or paraphrasing issues. An AI native spreadsheet table automates data input for questions that need to be tracked systematically across research or used in market models. It allows users to set up questions and track transcripts, with the source information attached for verification. The data is exportable into Excel for further analysis. Junior also has a chatbot that handles transcripts for consulting and investment research use cases. It produces structured answers with evidence attached to each argument, providing a comprehensive data access and customization tool.  Pricing and Signup for Junior The presentation also touches on the pricing and signup process for clients, including six of the top 10 consulting firms, boutiques, and private equity funds. The pricing is $100 per transcript, which typically gets billed back to the client as part of the research expenditure along with the extra networks used to source calls. Overall, the presentation emphasizes the importance of auditability and traceability when using Gen AI tools in procurement research. Junior saves time on analysis and synthesis for clients who are already paying for interviews on big alpha sites or GLG. The tool is priced at an extra 100 dollars per interview, but it can be refunded back to the client. The signup process involves reaching out to the company, who spin up a new instance for each user due to data security concerns. The platform can be set up within a day of reaching out.  Timestamps: 01:02 Using AI to automate due diligence process, including transcription and summarization of calls.  05:53 Using AI to summarize and analyze audio calls for consulting industry research 09:02 Ctrl F functions 12:57 AI-powered tool for analyzing audio interviews and providing structured insights 14:26: SWOT analysis capabilities Links: Email: Dimitris@myjunior.ai Website: https://www.myjunior.ai/   Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which has a mission of connecting independent management consultants with one another, creating opportunities for members to meet, build relationships, and share lessons learned. Learn more at www.umbrex.com.

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:www.patreon.com/LWCuratedYou can't optimise an allocation of resources if you don't know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet, no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relates to what, what is going on. This post is mostly just a big index: a link-dump for as many currently active AI safety agendas as we could find. But even a linkdump is plenty subjective. It maps work to conceptual clusters 1-1, aiming to answer questions like “I wonder what happened to the exciting idea I heard about at that one conference” and “I just read a post on a surprising new insight and want to see who else has been working on this”, “I wonder roughly how many people are working on that thing”. This doc is unreadably long, so that it can be Ctrl-F-ed. Also this way you can fork the list and make a smaller one. Most of you should only read the editorial and skim the section you work in.Source:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zaaGsFBeDTpCsYHef/shallow-review-of-live-agendas-in-alignment-and-safety#More_metaNarrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.Share feedback on this narration.[125+ Karma Post] ✓[Curated Post] ✓

Live from LeakyCon Orlando 2022, it's Potterless Live! Schubes is joined by Chris Rankin (Percy Weasley in the Harry Potter films) and Chanel Williams (McGonagall TikTok impressionist) to see what situations would be like if Percy Weasley was in McGonagall's shoes and vice versa! Topics include: CTRL+F, weekend McGonagall, bossing about, genius 8-year-olds, reading, Percy's patronus, Popscotch, love letters, ghostbusters, Hogwarts parents, ACAB Percy, Will Smith, one-trick cats, mojitos, airy fairy magic, Sassy Burns, J Jonah Jameson, shirty, McG vs. Ludo, vengeance, interrogations, Sense & Sensibility, Prefect's bathroom, and more! Get access to every past Potterless patreon post for just $4 at www.patreon.com/potterless POTTERLESS LIVE IN TX, FL, and CO: www.potterlesspodcast.com/live POTTERLESS LIVE SHOW VLOGS: www.youtube.com/@potterless Thanks to our sponsor, Bombas! Get 20% off your first order with code POTTERLESS at www.bombas.com/potterless — Thanks for listening to this episode of Potterless! Don't want the journey to stop? Check out the links below and as always, Wizard On! WEBSITE: www.potterlesspodcast.com (LEARN ABOUT THE SHOW!) PATREON: www.patreon.com/potterless (SUPPORT THE SHOW!) TWITTER: www.twitter.com/potterlesspod (TWEET THE SHOW!) INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/potterlesspodcast (PICTURES OF THE SHOW!) FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/potterless (HOME OF THE FANCY PRIVATE GROUP!) MERCH: www.potterlesspodcast.com/merch (REP THE SHOW!) Created/Hosted/Edited/Produced by Mike Schubert (http://schub.es), Music by Bettina Campomanes, Web Design/Art by Kelly Schubert Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Explore the profound impacts of digital literacy and political engagement initiatives by CIVIX, and discover resources that can transform classrooms into hubs of critical thought and respectful discourse. This week Tricia switches gears and points you to an episode from her other show: Shifting Schools podcast with her co-host Jeff Utecht. Learn more at www.shiftingschools.com We sit down with Dimitri Pavlounis, the Director of Research at CIVIX. Our discussion unravels around two pivotal programs at CIVIX: CTRL-F and PoliTalks, which are meticulously crafted to bolster digital literacy and political awareness among the youth. Our guest explores the resources and tools available for educators aiming to ignite engaging political discussions in classrooms. They share a vision of nurturing students to practice active listening, perspective-taking, and respectful self-expression, laying down a robust foundation for contextual awareness in political discourse. Links: - [CIVIX Official Website](https://civix.ca) - [CTRL-F Program Overview](https://civix.ca/programs/ctrl-f/) - [PoliTalks Program Overview](https://civix.ca/programs/politalks/) - [Center for Research And Evidence on Security Threats](https://www.crestresearch.ac.uk) Dimitri Pavlounis is the Research Director at CIVIX, a Canadian educational charity dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship among youth through experiential learning opportunities. As part of his work, he helped manage the development and evaluation of CTRL-F, a digital literacy program aimed at helping students navigate our polluted information environment. Prior to joining CIVIX, he completed his PhD in Media Studies at the University of Michigan.

Explore the profound impacts of digital literacy and political engagement initiatives by CIVIX, and discover resources that can transform classrooms into hubs of critical thought and respectful discourse.  We sit down with Dimitri Pavlounis, the Director of Research at CIVIX. Our discussion unravels around two pivotal programs at CIVIX: CTRL-F and PoliTalks, which are meticulously crafted to bolster digital literacy and political awareness among the youth. Our guest  explores the resources and tools available for educators aiming to ignite engaging political discussions in classrooms. They share a vision of nurturing students to practice active listening, perspective-taking, and respectful self-expression, laying down a robust foundation for contextual awareness in political discourse. Links: - [CIVIX Official Website](https://civix.ca) - [CTRL-F Program Overview](https://civix.ca/programs/ctrl-f/) - [PoliTalks Program Overview](https://civix.ca/programs/politalks/) - [Center for Research And Evidence on Security Threats](https://www.crestresearch.ac.uk) Dimitri Pavlounis is the Research Director at CIVIX, a Canadian educational charity dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship among youth through experiential learning opportunities. As part of his work, he helped manage the development and evaluation of CTRL-F, a digital literacy program aimed at helping students navigate our polluted information environment. Prior to joining CIVIX, he completed his PhD in Media Studies at the University of Michigan. Huge thanks to our amazing sponsor: Mackin! https://home.mackin.com/ Want to continue your learning with Jeff and Tricia this week? Their three week AI playground kicks off this Tuesday, November 7th Learn more: www.shiftingschools.com

-- Finches Diversify in Decades, Opals Form in Months,  Man's Genetic Diversity in 200 Generations, C-14 Everywhere: Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams present their classic program that led to the audience-favorites rsr.org/list-shows! See below and hear on today's radio program our list of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things! From opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, and with carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations fill the guys' most traditional list challenging those who claim that the earth is billions of years old. Many of these scientific finds demand a re-evaluation of supposed million and billion-year ages. * Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner. * Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist. * Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds?  Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin's Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?" * Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today." * Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitiously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!   * After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins. As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft. * Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including:- in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat - the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain - hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial - those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to Bob@rsr.org) - hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa.   - and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. * Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old! * National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens. * Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong. * Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few. * Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include: - Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years. - Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts.- The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition. - A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies evolving too quickly, galaxy clusters, and even human feet (which, like Mummy DNA, challenge the Out of Africa paradigm), jellyfish have gotten into the act squeezing evolution's timeline, here by 200 million years when they were found in strata allegedly a half-a-billion years old. Other examples, ironically referred to as Medusoid Problematica, are even found in pre-Cambrian strata. - 171 tadpoles of the same species buried in diatoms. - Leaves buried vertically through single-celled diatoms powerfully refute the claimed super-slow deposition of diatomaceous rock. - Many fossils, including a Mesosaur, have been buried in multiple "varve" layers, which are claimed to be annual depositions, yet they show no erosional patterns that would indicate gradual burial (as they claim, absurdly, over even thousands of years). - A single whale skeleton preserved in California in dozens of layers of diatom deposits thus forming a polystrate fossil. - 40 whales buried in the desert in Chile. "What's really interesting is that this didn't just happen once," said Smithsonian evolutionist Dr. Nick Pyenson. It happened four times." Why's that? Because "the fossil site has at least four layers", to which Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart replies: "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha", with RSR co-host Fred Williams thoughtfully adding, "Ha ha!" * Polystrate Trees: Examples abound around the world of polystrate trees:  - Yellowstone's petrified polystrate forest (with the NPS exhibit sign removed; see below) with successive layers of rootless trees demonstrating the rapid deposition of fifty layers of strata. - A similarly formed polystrate fossil forest in France demonstrating the rapid deposition of a dozen strata. - In a thousand locations including famously the Fossil Cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia, polystrate fossils such as trees span many strata. - These trees lack erosion: Not only should such fossils, generally speaking, not even exist, but polystrates including trees typically show no evidence of erosion increasing with height. All of this powerfully disproves the claim that the layers were deposited slowly over thousands or millions of years. In the experience of your RSR radio hosts, evolutionists commonly respond to this hard evidence with mocking. See CRSQ June 2006, ICR Impact #316, and RSR 8-11-06 at KGOV.com. * Yellowstone Petrified Trees Sign Removed: The National Park Service removed their incorrect sign (see left and more). The NPS had claimed that in dozens of different strata over a 40-square mile area, many petrified trees were still standing where they had grown. The NPS eventually removed the sign partly because those petrified trees had no root systems, which they would have had if they had grown there. Instead, the trees of this "fossil forest" have roots that are abruptly broken off two or three feet from their trunks. If these mature trees actually had been remnants of sequential forests that had grown up in strata layer on top of strata layer, 27 times on Specimen Ridge (and 50 times at Specimen Creek), such a natural history implies passage of more time than permitted by biblical chronology. So, don't trust the National Park Service on historical science because they're wrong on the age of the Earth. * Wood Petrifies Quickly: Not surprisingly, by the common evolutionary knee-jerk claim of deep time, "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood". Our List of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things includes the work of five Japanese scientists who proved creationist research and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Sedimentary Geology showing that wood can and does petrify rapidly. Modern wood significantly petrified in 36 years these researchers concluded that wood buried in strata could have been petrified in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years." * The Scablands: The primary surface features of the Scablands, which cover thousands of square miles of eastern Washington, were long believed to have formed gradually. Yet, against the determined claims of uniformitarian geologists, there is now overwhelming evidence as presented even in a NOVA TV program that the primary features of the Scablands formed rapidly from a catastrophic breach of Lake Missoula causing a massive regional flood. Of course evolutionary geologists still argue that the landscape was formed over tens of thousands of years, now by claiming there must have been a hundred Missoula floods. However, the evidence that there was Only One Lake Missoula Flood has been powerfully reinforced by a University of Colorado Ph.D. thesis. So the Scablands itself is no longer available to old-earthers as de facto evidence for the passage of millions of years. * The Heart Mountain Detachment: in Wyoming just east of Yellowstone, this mountain did not break apart slowly by uniformitarian processes but in only about half-an-hour as widely reported including in the evolutionist LiveScience.com, "Land Speed Record: Mountain Moves 62 Miles in 30 Minutes." The evidence indicates that this mountain of rock covering 425 square miles rapidly broke into 50 pieces and slid apart over an area of more than 1,300 square miles in a biblical, not a "geological," timeframe.  * "150 Million" year-old Squid Ink Not Decomposed: This still-writable ink had dehydrated but had not decomposed! The British Geological Survey's Dr. Phil Wilby, who excavated the fossil, said, "It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimensions, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old." And the Daily Mail states that, "the black ink was of exactly the same structure as that of today's version", just desiccated. And Wilby added, "Normally you would find only the hard parts like the shell and bones fossilised but... these creatures... can be dissected as if they are living animals, you can see the muscle fibres and cells. It is difficult to imagine... The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it..." Why is this difficult for evolutionists to imagine? Because as Dr. Carl Wieland writes, "Chemical structures 'fall apart' all by themselves over time due to the randomizing effects of molecular motion."Decades ago Bob Enyart broadcast a geology program about Mount St. Helens' catastrophic destruction of forests and the hydraulic transportation and upright deposition of trees. Later, Bob met the chief ranger from Haleakala National Park on Hawaii's island of Maui, Mark Tanaka-Sanders. The ranger agreed to correspond with his colleague at Yellowstone to urge him to have the sign removed. Thankfully, it was then removed. (See also AIG, CMI, and all the original Yellowstone exhibit photos.) Groundbreaking research conducted by creation geologist Dr. Steve Austin in Spirit Lake after Mount St. Helens eruption provided a modern-day analog to the formation of Yellowstone fossil forest. A steam blast from that volcano blew over tens of thousands of trees leaving them without attached roots. Many thousands of those trees were floating upright in Spirit Lake, and began sinking at varying rates into rapidly and sporadically deposited sediments. Once Yellowstone's successive forest interpretation was falsified (though like with junk DNA, it's too big to fail, so many atheists and others still cling to it), the erroneous sign was removed. * Asiatic vs. European Honeybees: These two populations of bees have been separated supposedly for seven million years. A researcher decided to put the two together to see what would happen. What we should have here is a failure to communicate that would have resulted after their "language" evolved over millions of years. However, European and Asiatic honeybees are still able to communicate, putting into doubt the evolutionary claim that they were separated over "geologic periods." For more, see the Public Library of Science, Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. (Oh yeah, and why don't fossils of poorly-formed honeycombs exist, from the millions of years before the bees and natural selection finally got the design right? Ha! Because they don't exist! :) Nautiloid proves rapid limestone formation. * Remember the Nautiloids: In the Grand Canyon there is a limestone layer averaging seven feet thick that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers hundreds of square miles and contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter. Along with many other dead creatures in this one particular layer, 15% of these nautiloids were killed and then fossilized standing on their heads. Yes, vertically. They were caught in such an intense and rapid catastrophic flow that gravity was not able to cause all of their dead carcasses to fall over on their sides. Famed Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin is also the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils and has worked in the canyon and presented his findings to the park's rangers at the invitation of National Park Service officials. Austin points out, as is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, that this enormous nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids, standing on their heads, literally, would beg to differ. At our sister stie, RSR provides the relevant Geologic Society of America abstract, links, and video. *  Now It's Allegedly Two Million Year-Old Leaves: "When we started pulling leaves out of the soil, that was surreal, to know that it's millions of years old..." sur-re-al: adjective: a bizarre mix of fact and fantasy. In this case, the leaves are the facts. Earth scientists from Ohio State and the University of Minnesota say that wood and leaves they found in the Canadian Arctic are at least two million years old, and perhaps more than ten million years old, even though the leaves are just dry and crumbly and the wood still burns! * Gold Precipitates in Veins in Less than a Second: After geologists submitted for decades to the assumption that each layer of gold would deposit at the alleged super slow rates of geologic process, the journal Nature Geoscience reports that each layer of deposition can occur within a few tenths of a second. Meanwhile, at the Lihir gold deposit in Papua New Guinea, evolutionists assumed the more than 20 million ounces of gold in the Lihir reserve took millions of years to deposit, but as reported in the journal Science, geologists can now demonstrate that the deposit could have formed in thousands of years, or far more quickly! Iceland's not-so-old Surtsey Island looks ancient. * Surtsey Island, Iceland: Of the volcanic island that formed in 1963, New Scientist reported in 2007 about Surtsey that "geographers... marvel that canyons, gullies and other land features that typically take tens of thousands or millions of years to form were created in less than a decade." Yes. And Sigurdur Thorarinsson, Iceland's chief  geologist, wrote in the months after Surtsey formed, "that the time scale," he had been trained "to attach to geological developments is misleading." [For what is said to] take thousands of years... the same development may take a few weeks or even days here [including to form] a landscape... so varied and mature that it was almost beyond belief... wide sandy beaches and precipitous crags... gravel banks and lagoons, impressive cliffs… hollows, glens and soft undulating land... fractures and faultscarps, channels and screes… confounded by what met your eye... boulders worn by the surf, some of which were almost round... -Iceland's chief geologist * The Palouse River Gorge: In the southeast of Washington State, the Palouse River Gorge is one of many features formed rapidly by 500 cubic miles of water catastrophically released with the breaching of a natural dam in the Lake Missoula Flood (which gouged out the Scablands as described above). So, hard rock can be breached and eroded rapidly. * Leaf Shapes Identical for 190 Million Years?  From Berkley.edu, "Ginkgo biloba... dates back to... about 190 million years ago... fossilized leaf material from the Tertiary species Ginkgo adiantoides is considered similar or even identical to that produced by modern Ginkgo biloba trees... virtually indistinguishable..." The literature describes leaf shapes as "spectacularly diverse" sometimes within a species but especially across the plant kingdom. Because all kinds of plants survive with all kinds of different leaf shapes, the conservation of a species retaining a single shape over alleged deep time is a telling issue. Darwin's theory is undermined by the unchanging shape over millions of years of a species' leaf shape. This lack of change, stasis in what should be an easily morphable plant trait, supports the broader conclusion that chimp-like creatures did not become human beings and all the other ambitious evolutionary creation of new kinds are simply imagined. (Ginkgo adiantoides and biloba are actually the same species. Wikipedia states, "It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished." For oftentimes, as documented by Dr. Carl Werner in his Evolution: The Grand Experiment series, paleontogists falsely speciate identical specimens, giving different species names, even different genus names, to the fossil and living animals that appear identical.) * Box Canyon, Idaho: Geologists now think Box Canyon in Idaho, USA, was carved by a catastrophic flood and not slowly over millions of years with 1) huge plunge pools formed by waterfalls; 2) the almost complete removal of large basalt boulders from the canyon; 3) an eroded notch on the plateau at the top of the canyon; and 4) water scour marks on the basalt plateau leading to the canyon. Scientists calculate that the flood was so large that it could have eroded the whole canyon in as little as 35 days. See the journal Science, Formation of Box Canyon, Idaho, by Megaflood, and the Journal of Creation, and Creation Magazine. * Manganese Nodules Rapid Formation: Allegedly, as claimed at the Wikipedia entry from 2005 through 2021: "Nodule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena – in the order of a centimeter over several million years." Wow, that would be slow! And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation says, “They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old", with RWU's oceanography textbook also putting it at "0.001 mm per thousand years." But according to a World Almanac documentary they have formed "around beer cans," said marine geologist Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. There are also reports of manganese nodules forming around ships sunk in the First World War. See more at at youngearth.com, at TOL, in the print edition of the Journal of Creation, and in this typical forum discussion with atheists (at the Chicago Cubs forum no less :). * "6,000 year-old" Mitochondrial Eve: As the Bible calls "Eve... the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20), genetic researchers have named the one woman from whom all humans have descended "Mitochondrial Eve." But in a scientific attempt to date her existence, they openly admit that they included chimpanzee DNA in their analysis in order to get what they viewed as a reasonably old date of 200,000 years ago (which is still surprisingly recent from their perspective, but old enough not to strain Darwinian theory too much). But then as widely reported including by Science magazine, when they dropped the chimp data and used only actual human mutation rates, that process determined that Eve lived only six thousand years ago! In Ann Gibbon's Science article, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," rather than again using circular reasoning by assuming their conclusion (that humans evolved from ape-like creatures), they performed their calculations using actual measured mutation rates. This peer-reviewed journal then reported that if these rates have been constant, "mitochondrial Eve… would be a mere 6000 years old." See also the journal Nature and creation.com's "A shrinking date for Eve," and Walt Brown's assessment. Expectedly though, evolutionists have found a way to reject their own unbiased finding (the conclusion contrary to their self-interest) by returning to their original method of using circular reasoning, as reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, "calibrating against recent evidence for the divergence time of humans and chimpanzees,"  to reset their mitochondrial clock back to 200,000 years. * Even Younger Y-Chromosomal Adam: (Although he should be called, "Y-Chromosomal Noah.") While we inherit our mtDNA only from our mothers, only men have a Y chromosome (which incidentally genetically disproves the claim that the fetus is "part of the woman's body," since the little boy's y chromosome could never be part of mom's body). Based on documented mutation rates on and the extraordinary lack of mutational differences in this specifically male DNA, the Y-chromosomal Adam would have lived only a few thousand years ago! (He's significantly younger than mtEve because of the genetic bottleneck of the global flood.) Yet while the Darwinian camp wrongly claimed for decades that humans were 98% genetically similar to chimps, secular scientists today, using the same type of calculation only more accurately, have unintentionally documented that chimps are about as far genetically from what makes a human being a male, as mankind itself is from sponges! Geneticists have found now that sponges are 70% the same as humans genetically, and separately, that human and chimp Y chromosomes are  "horrendously" 30%

Spoilers, profanity, Jaime x Brienne. We have gathered here together to pray at the Church of Holy Weirwood Dreams. Ctrl F or GTFO. In one of ASoIaF's most epic chapters we've got bears, maidens, Bloodraven and some of the most swoonworthy lines in the series. A Song of Ice and Fire. A Storm of Swords Jaime VI (repost). Originally recorded in 2019.   Close The Door And Come Here - Episode 494

Olivia and Aran take on their greatest challenge to date: two bags of doritos. We attempt to answer with as much rigour as possible the question of whether a medieval peasant would be knocked dead by a taste of the delightful snack. Then, we explore why medieval people loved spices so much that they took over half the world looking for them. Also discussed are the secrets to good soup, the ports and gals of Portugal, and where Italians go when they die. For more information about what we cover, check out:Boccacio's Decameron translated into modern English (see "THE THIRD STORY" for a description of parmesan cheese mountain, or just Ctrl-F for "parmesan")https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23700/23700-h/23700-h.htmA fun list of prices of various goods in medieval Europe, including several spices, compiled by Berkeley professor Kenneth Hodgeshttp://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.htmlA quick look at salt in the Middle Ages on medievalists.nethttps://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/using-salt-in-the-middle-ages/A more detailed look at the social role of spices in the Middle Ages by Stefan Halikowski Smithhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/40110784An English Translation of Le Viandier de Taillevent, one of the most significant medieval cookbooks, featuring recipes such as "bright green soup" and "red deer testicle"https://jpnet.ca/data/viandier/viandier1.html Follow us on Twitter!Weird Medieval Guys @WeirdMedievalOlivia @olivia__msAran @aranptappers

Cece Xie is a lawyer, writer, and content creator who became wildly popular on social media while working as an associate at a big law firm. She joins Ben & Nathan to talk about her upcoming book. They discuss why law schools push students toward big law and what it takes to climb the law firm hierarchy. LSAT Demon LSAT Demon iOS App LSAT Demon Daily Watch Episode 414 on YouTube Thinking LSAT YouTube LSAT Demon YouTube Follow Cece on Substack, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and her website. 0:00 - Introducing Cece Xie - Ben and Nathan welcome Cece to the show and ask what she's been up to after leaving her job in big law last year. 8:22 - Cece's Book - Cece shares some details about her upcoming book: part memoir, part exposé of big law culture. 17:56 - The Big Law Pipeline - Cece describes the mutualistic relationship between law schools and big law recruiting. She warns listeners that career services offices don't have students' best interests at heart. And neither do law firms. 27:48 - Thriving in Big Law - The skills that make you a good junior associate won't help you make partner. Cece explains why business development is crucial to advancing your career in big law. 38:38 - Big Law Compensation - Cece breaks down the reality of big law compensation and explains why it's less stable than many people think. 42:45 - Making Connections - Knowing the law gets you only so far in big law. Cece shares how a successful lawyer forms strategic connections within the firm's hierarchy. She encourages listeners to schedule face time with lawyers to explore different practice areas. 55:11 - No More Ctrl+F - Starting with the August test, the LSAT will prohibit the use of keyboard commands, including Ctrl+F. Test takers will now have the option to use a search bar in the test interface. Nathan and Ben still don't recommend using the search function.

Pat and Mags manifest-o a new episode with Uncle Ted Kaczynski (No Relation) and we talk an 80s business boy, god juju, stranger butts, accidental Yelps, fingers too short for a firearm, BBMd, Elkhorn, the Arby's pimp, mouth numbers, and a bucket of silly parts. TW: men who write Aunt Pat - Colleen Doyle  Auntie Mags - Dana Quercioli  Uncle Ted - Dan White Theme Song - The Qs  Editor - Colleen Doyle Artwork - Jordan Stafford  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-babymakers/support

Phil wonders if you can pet the gator. Jason says that the wiener dog in a wheelchair is best companion. Kelley wishes there was CTRL+F in real life. Ryan wants a Trails of Cold Steel Wrestling Game. The post RPG Cast – Episode 679: “Some People Call Me Toe Fungus” appeared first on RPGamer.

How can educators nurture a functional democracy when young people struggle to find reliable sources of information? To dig into this question, I am joined by Ken Boyd from CIVIX Canada. For Full Shownotes, Visit: https://cohort21.com/teachingtomorrow/2023/05/29/episode80/ Ken Boyd is the Director of Education at CIVIX, a Canadian charity that develops experiential learning programs to help students develop skills and habits of informed citizenship. He researches and develops materials for two programs: PoliTalks, a program that helps students develop the skills needed to have constructive discussions about political and social issues, and CTRL-F, a digital media literacy skills program that helps students identify mis- and disinformation online. He also runs training sessions and workshops with teachers and students to teach them about digital media literacy and how to navigate an increasingly complex online world. Ken holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto. Before moving to the non-profit sector, he taught philosophy at a number of universities across Canada, and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern Denmark, where he worked on research projects about the barriers to communicating scientific information online. He is also a writer of public philosophy, and a regular contributor to The Prindle Post, a digital publication focused on ethical issues in the news.

Are Canadian students being set up for success as adults in a democratic society? A functional democracy requires its citizens to participate fully in its collective institutions, which exist to serve the public interest and create public value. In this episode, we are looking at the role that civics education plays in creating a healthy, happy society. We believe that a strong civics education provides up & coming citizens with the relevant knowledge and toolsets necessary for participating respectfully in the political process to achieve the social outcomes that they want. Some observers claim that current civics curricula are inadequate in preparing students for their adult roles as civic participants.    In this episode, we have invited two experts to join us for a conversation about the role of civics education in contemporary democracies. Our first guest, Rebecca Rajcak, will speak about the landscape of the modern civics classroom in Ontario, and what could be improved, from an educator's perspective. Our second speaker, Dimitri Pavlounis, will join at 11:30 to discuss the role of civics education more broadly, how civics education is linked to democratic outcomes, and his work with CIVIX - a non-profit organization which leads the popular student vote programs in civics classrooms across Canada.   Further Reading:   Hess, D. E., & McAvoy, P. (2014). The political classroom: Evidence and ethics in democratic education. Routledge.   Pavlounis, D., Johnston, J., Brodsky, J., & Brooks, P. The Digital Media Literacy Gap: How to build widespread resilience to false and misleading information using evidence-based classroom tools. CIVIX Canada, November 2021.   Guests:   Rebecca Rajcak is Program Leader of English, Canada & World Studies, Social Sciences & Humanities, First Nations, Métis & Inuit Studies, and Library Services at a high school in Burlington. She teaches English, Civics and Careers, special education, and I-STEM classes. She holds a Master's Degree in Literature from Queen's University, as well as Bachelor degrees in English (UofW) and Education (Western). Rebecca is a dedicated and passionate anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive educator, and chairs as a mentor on her school's student Equity Club.   Dimitri Pavlounis is the Research Director at CIVIX, a Canadian educational charity dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship among youth through experiential learning opportunities. He recently helped lead a large-scale national evaluation of CTRL-F, a digital literacy program aimed at helping students navigate our polluted information environment. Prior to joining CIVIX, he completed his PhD in Media Studies at the University of Michigan and taught numerous courses in media studies and digital studies at colleges and universities in the U.S.   Producers:   Connor Fraser - Executive Producer   Maria Cvetkova - Junior Producer

Are Canadian students being set up for success as adults in a democratic society? A functional democracy requires its citizens to participate fully in its collective institutions, which exist to serve the public interest and create public value. In this episode, we are looking at the role that civics education plays in creating a healthy, happy society. We believe that a strong civics education provides up & coming citizens with the relevant knowledge and toolsets necessary for participating respectfully in the political process to achieve the social outcomes that they want. Some observers claim that current civics curricula are inadequate in preparing students for their adult roles as civic participants.    In this episode, we have invited two experts to join us for a conversation about the role of civics education in contemporary democracies. Our first guest, Rebecca Rajcak, will speak about the landscape of the modern civics classroom in Ontario, and what could be improved, from an educator's perspective. Our second speaker, Dimitri Pavlounis, will join at 11:30 to discuss the role of civics education more broadly, how civics education is linked to democratic outcomes, and his work with CIVIX - a non-profit organization which leads the popular student vote programs in civics classrooms across Canada.   Further Reading:   Hess, D. E., & McAvoy, P. (2014). The political classroom: Evidence and ethics in democratic education. Routledge.   Pavlounis, D., Johnston, J., Brodsky, J., & Brooks, P. The Digital Media Literacy Gap: How to build widespread resilience to false and misleading information using evidence-based classroom tools. CIVIX Canada, November 2021.   Guests:   Rebecca Rajcak is Program Leader of English, Canada & World Studies, Social Sciences & Humanities, First Nations, Métis & Inuit Studies, and Library Services at a high school in Burlington. She teaches English, Civics and Careers, special education, and I-STEM classes. She holds a Master's Degree in Literature from Queen's University, as well as Bachelor degrees in English (UofW) and Education (Western). Rebecca is a dedicated and passionate anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive educator, and chairs as a mentor on her school's student Equity Club.   Dimitri Pavlounis is the Research Director at CIVIX, a Canadian educational charity dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship among youth through experiential learning opportunities. He recently helped lead a large-scale national evaluation of CTRL-F, a digital literacy program aimed at helping students navigate our polluted information environment. Prior to joining CIVIX, he completed his PhD in Media Studies at the University of Michigan and taught numerous courses in media studies and digital studies at colleges and universities in the U.S.   Producers:   Connor Fraser - Executive Producer   Maria Cvetkova - Junior Producer

Demon tutors Chris and Ala take over the pod to bust common myths about LSAT Reading Comprehension. They discuss everything from using Ctrl+F and highlighting to reading more about the topics that come up on RC passages, and more! Read more on our website!  Email daily@lsatdemon.com with questions or comments.  Watch this episode on YouTube.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/issue-two-of-asterisk …the new-ish rationalist / effective altruist magazine, is up here. It's the food issue. I'm not in this one - my unsuitability to have food-related opinions is second only to @eigenrobot's - but some of my friends are. Articles include: The Virtue Of Wonder: Ozy (my ex, blogs at Thing of Things) reviews Martha Nussbaum's Justice For Animals. Beyond Staple Grains: In the ultimate “what if good things are bad?” article, economist Prabhu Pingali explains the downsides of the Green Revolution and how scientists and policymakers are trying to mitigate them. What I Won't Eat, by my good friend Georgia Ray (of Eukaryote Writes). I have dinner with Georgia whenever I'm in DC; it's a less painful experience than this article probably suggests. The Health Debates Over Plant-Based Meat, by Jake Eaton (is this nominative determinism?) There's no ironclad evidence yet that plant-based meat is any better or worse for you than animals, although I take the pro-vegetarian evidence from the Adventist studies a little more seriously than Jake does (see also section 4 here). There's a prediction market about the question below the article, but it's not very well-traded yet. America Doesn't Know Tofu, by George Stiffman. This reads like an excerpt from a cultivation novel, except every instance of “martial arts” has been CTRL-F'd and replaced with “tofu”. Read This, Not That, by Stephan Guyenet. I'm a big fan of Stephan's scientific work (including his book The Hungry Brain), and although I'm allergic to anything framed as “fight misinformation”, I will grudgingly agree that perhaps we should not all eat poison and die. Is Cultivated Meat For Real?, by Robert Yaman. I'd heard claims that cultivated (eg vat-grown, animal-cruelty-free) meat will be in stores later this year, and also claims that it's economically impossible. Which are true? This article says that we're very far away from cultivated meat that can compete with normal meat on price. But probably you can mix a little cultivated meat with Impossible or Beyond Meat and get something less expensive than the former and tastier than the latter, and applications like these might be enough to support cultivated meat companies until they can solve their technical obstacles. Plus superforecaster Juan Cambeiro on predicting pandemics, Mike Hinge on feeding the world through nuclear/volcanic winter.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Masterdocs of EA community building guides and resources, published by Irene H on March 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: I made a comprehensive overview of EA curricula, event organization guides, and syllabi, as well as an overview of resources on EA community building, communications, strategy, and more. The EA community builders I shared them with up to now found them really helpful. Context Together with Jelle Donders, I co-founded the university group at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands last summer. We followed the UGAP mentorship program last semester and have been thinking a lot about events and programs to organize for our EA group and about general EA community-building strategies. There is a big maze of Google docs containing resources on this, but none of them gives a complete and updated overview. I wanted to share two resources for EA community builders I've been working on over the past months. Both I made initially as references for myself, but when I shared them with other community builders, they found them quite helpful. Therefore, I'd now like to share them more widely, so that others can hopefully have the same benefits. EA Eindhoven Syllabi Collection There are many lists of EA curricula, event organization guides, and syllabi, but none of them are complete. Therefore, I made a document to which I save everything of that nature I come across, with the aim of getting a somewhat better overview of everything out there I also went through other lists of this nature and saved all relevant documents to this collection, so it should be a one-stop shop. It is currently 27 pages long and I don't know of another list that is more exhaustive. (Also compared to the EA Groups Resource Centre, which only offers a few curated resources per topic). I update this document regularly when I come across new resources. When we want to organize something new at my group, we have a look at this document to see whether someone else has done the thing we want to do already so we can save time, or just to get some inspiration. You can find the document here. Community Building Readings I also made a document that contains a lot of resources on EA community building, communications, strategy, and more, related to the EA movement as a whole and to EA groups specifically, that are not specific guides for organizing concrete events, programs, or campaigns, but are aimed at getting a better understanding of more general thinking, strategy and criticism of the EA community. You can find the document here. Disclaimers for both documents I do not necessarily endorse/recommend the resources and advice in these documents. My sole aim with these documents is to provide an overview of the space of the thinking and resources around EA community building, not to advocate for one particular way of going about it. These documents are probably really overwhelming, but my aim was to gather a comprehensive overview of all resources, as opposed to linking only 1 or 2 recommendations, which is the way the Groups Resources Centre or the GCP EA Student Groups Handbook are organized. The way I sorted things into categories will always remain artificial as some boundaries are blurry and some things fit into multiple categories. How to use these documents Using the table of contents or Ctrl + F + [what you're looking for] probably works best for navigation Please feel free to place comments and make suggestions if you have additions! When you add something new, please add a source (name of the group and/or person who made the resource) wherever possible to give people the credit they're due and to facilitate others reaching out to the creator if they have more questions. In case of questions, feedback or comments, please reach out to info@eaeindhoven.nl. I hope ...

This week we are being dragged into muddy traps by tree roots while we discuss “Schizogeny”! We're talking inhaling mud like a siphon, our new beloved Orchard Freak, what a shame it is that kids these days are too busy on their phones to share their cellar milk with corpses, the return of We're Done Here (!!!), how horrible it is that there is no David Duchovny “Got Milk?” poster, and really puzzle over what exactly happened in this episode. We're talking about how if you didn't die you didn't drown, Naruto teen running, Mulder canonically being a freak on gravestones, and desperately Ctrl+F for women writers. Also: Bobby isn't the stepson, he's the son that stepped up.Send us an email at scullynationpod@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Jon and Dave have once again reached into their sack of student questions, focusing their 10th mailbag episode exclusively on the topic of Reading Comprehension. Tune in to hear them answer 12 of the most common Reading Comp questions, including how to apply LR skills to RC, how to stay focused during the passage, how to best use CTRL-F, how to attack Comparative Reading, how to maximize points as time is running out, and many more!

Episode 549: Brett missed school working on the slitter. Who has school spirit? Is that contrarian or conformist? Finding religion. The Fetterman / Oz debate. Puke steps on a nail. Bio-Freeze. A drunken accident. Is it an S212 or a W212 Mercedes? Voting debate. Black man listens to soul music at the diner. Soul karaoke.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Covid 10/20/22: Wait, We Did WHAT?, published by Zvi on October 20, 2022 on LessWrong. The what, in this case, was the type of thing that could cause another pandemic: This has not made enough people very angry, and is insufficiently widely regarded as a bad move. It happened, and we are paying for similar things to happen again. There's a section on that below (you can Ctrl-F for Gain of Function). It was a surprisingly news-filled week for Covid in other ways as well. None of the other developments should scare you. Executive Summary We did Gain of Function research. Such research must stop. New variants are coming, unclear how big a wave might follow. CDC adds Covid-19 to childhood vaccination schedule. Let's run the numbers. The Numbers Predictions Prediction from last week: 234k cases (+0%) and 2,500 deaths (+2%). Result: 223k cases (-5%) and 2,319 deaths (-6%). Prediction for next week: 218k cases (-3%) and 2,160 deaths (-7%). Now that the decline sustained itself past the holiday and its aftermath, we can be confident that existing strains continue to be on their way down. The question now shifts to the new variants, and when, whether and to what extent they will cause trouble. See the variant section for further discussion of this. Once again, the pandemic is ‘resetting' in this fashion. Deaths Indiana didn't report deaths or cases last week and this week likely filled in the backlog, which is probably most of why the Midwest went up instead of down. Cases The south continues to decline, half of which is Mississippi and North Carolina not reporting cases. I chose not to adjust. Variants Paper says BA.2.75.2 ‘exhibits extensive escape from neutralizing antibodies,' which is not news. Which new variant will take over next? In the equilibrium model, any reproduction advantage is scary, since it will continue to compound until behaviors adjust or enough people get infected. What we have learned over the last few years is that there is a big reproduction advantage to being the new variant and starting from a small base. It takes a huge edge during growth to be the kind of game changer that Alpha, Delta and Omicron were. Here is a graph for America. It is clear that BA.5 has peaked and is in decline, with BQ.1.1 looking most likely to be next and looking like it has a higher reproductive advantage than Moritz is suggesting. That is enough relative growth to be somewhat worrying. It looks like more than the ‘10% advantage' I see quoted in places like this Andy Slavitt thread. If I was convinced the advantage was only ~10%, I would be at least as confident as the 80% Slavitt reports from scientists that the winter will be highly manageable. As an alternative perspective, looking at variant groups as levels rather than looking at individual variants. As we saw last week, this is very concentrated in Germany and Austria, and to a lesser extent France. Graphs like this are effectively somewhat misleading in isolation. He gives a variety of other charts, including many variants of the one above. The variations for other nations all look broadly similar. An underappreciated fact is that case counts effectively fully reset from scratch every time a new variant takes over. If Western Europe (or at least Germany) is experiencing a surge of Level 5 cases now, and the big winter wave is going to be Level 6, then the current case counts don't matter for the future local path of the pandemic. At all. Thus, we can make statements like this, which are relatively clear. Cornelius Roemer says on October 13 that variants like BA.4.6 are not yet impacting case counts much. This means that current case counts are still mostly irrelevant to future case counts. (Global cases count in terms of the mutation rate, and past cases matter for spread.) Think about the history of the pandemic in...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Covid 10/20/22: Wait, We Did WHAT?, published by Zvi on October 20, 2022 on LessWrong. The what, in this case, was the type of thing that could cause another pandemic: This has not made enough people very angry, and is insufficiently widely regarded as a bad move. It happened, and we are paying for similar things to happen again. There's a section on that below (you can Ctrl-F for Gain of Function). It was a surprisingly news-filled week for Covid in other ways as well. None of the other developments should scare you. Executive Summary We did Gain of Function research. Such research must stop. New variants are coming, unclear how big a wave might follow. CDC adds Covid-19 to childhood vaccination schedule. Let's run the numbers. The Numbers Predictions Prediction from last week: 234k cases (+0%) and 2,500 deaths (+2%). Result: 223k cases (-5%) and 2,319 deaths (-6%). Prediction for next week: 218k cases (-3%) and 2,160 deaths (-7%). Now that the decline sustained itself past the holiday and its aftermath, we can be confident that existing strains continue to be on their way down. The question now shifts to the new variants, and when, whether and to what extent they will cause trouble. See the variant section for further discussion of this. Once again, the pandemic is ‘resetting' in this fashion. Deaths Indiana didn't report deaths or cases last week and this week likely filled in the backlog, which is probably most of why the Midwest went up instead of down. Cases The south continues to decline, half of which is Mississippi and North Carolina not reporting cases. I chose not to adjust. Variants Paper says BA.2.75.2 ‘exhibits extensive escape from neutralizing antibodies,' which is not news. Which new variant will take over next? In the equilibrium model, any reproduction advantage is scary, since it will continue to compound until behaviors adjust or enough people get infected. What we have learned over the last few years is that there is a big reproduction advantage to being the new variant and starting from a small base. It takes a huge edge during growth to be the kind of game changer that Alpha, Delta and Omicron were. Here is a graph for America. It is clear that BA.5 has peaked and is in decline, with BQ.1.1 looking most likely to be next and looking like it has a higher reproductive advantage than Moritz is suggesting. That is enough relative growth to be somewhat worrying. It looks like more than the ‘10% advantage' I see quoted in places like this Andy Slavitt thread. If I was convinced the advantage was only ~10%, I would be at least as confident as the 80% Slavitt reports from scientists that the winter will be highly manageable. As an alternative perspective, looking at variant groups as levels rather than looking at individual variants. As we saw last week, this is very concentrated in Germany and Austria, and to a lesser extent France. Graphs like this are effectively somewhat misleading in isolation. He gives a variety of other charts, including many variants of the one above. The variations for other nations all look broadly similar. An underappreciated fact is that case counts effectively fully reset from scratch every time a new variant takes over. If Western Europe (or at least Germany) is experiencing a surge of Level 5 cases now, and the big winter wave is going to be Level 6, then the current case counts don't matter for the future local path of the pandemic. At all. Thus, we can make statements like this, which are relatively clear. Cornelius Roemer says on October 13 that variants like BA.4.6 are not yet impacting case counts much. This means that current case counts are still mostly irrelevant to future case counts. (Global cases count in terms of the mutation rate, and past cases matter for spread.) Think about the history of the pandemic in...

On the night after Google I/O, Kishore and Norm pod up to discuss the new Pixel devices announced and teased, and break down the augmented reality demos shown. We also share thoughts on the Moon Knight finale (spoilers within!) and compare notes on the technology of the Avatar 2 teaser. Plus, the end of the iPod era!

About TomTom enjoys being a bridge between people and technology. When he's not thinking about ways to make enterprise demos less boring, Tom enjoys spending time with his wife and dogs, reading, and gaming with friends.Links Referenced: LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com Heidi Waterhouse Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiredferret TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at LaunchDarkly. And it's always interesting when there's a promoted guest episode because they generally tend to send someone who has a story to tell in different ways.Sometimes they send me customers of theirs. Other times they send me executives. And for this episode, they have sent me Tom Totenberg, who's a senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. Tom, thank you for drawing the short straw. It's appreciated.Tom: [laugh]. Anytime. Thank you so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, you're a senior solutions engineer, which in many different companies is interpreted differently, but one of the recurring themes tends to pop up is often that is a different way of saying sales engineer because if you say sales, everyone hisses and recoils when you enter the conversation. Is that your experience or do you see your role radically differently?Tom: Well, I used to be one of those people who did recoil when I heard the word sales. I was raised in a family where you didn't talk about finances, you know? That's considered to be faux pas, and when you hear the word sales, you immediately think of a car lot. But what I came to realize is that, especially when we talk about cloud software or any sort of community where you start to run into the same people at conferences over and over and over again, turns out the good salespeople are the ones who actually try to form relationships and try to solve problems. And I realized that oh, I like to work with those people. It's pretty exciting. It's nice to be aspirational about what people can do and bring in the technical chops to see if you can actually make it happen. So, that's where I fit in.Corey: The way that I've always approached it has been rather different. Because before I got into tech, I worked in sales a bunch of times and coming up from the—I guess, clawing your way up doing telesales was a polite way of describing—back in the days before there were strong regulations against it, calling people at dinner to sell them credit cards. And what's worse is I was surprisingly effective at it for a kid who, like, you grew up in a family where we didn't talk about money. And it's easy to judge an industry by its worst examples. Another one of these would be recruiting, for example.When everyone talks about how terrible third-party recruiters are because they're referring to the ridiculous spray-and-pray model of just blasting out emails to everything that hold still long enough that meets a keyword. And yeah, I've also met some recruiters that are transformative as far as the conversations you have with them go. But some of that with sales. It's, “Oh, well, you can't be any fun to talk to because I had a really bad experience buying a used car once and my credit was in the toilet.”Tom: Yeah, exactly. And you know, I have a similar experience with recruiters coming to LaunchDarkly. So, not even talking about the product; I was a skeptic, I was happy where I was, but then as I started talking to more and more people here, I'm assuming you've read the book Accelerate; you probably had a hand in influencing part of it.Corey: I can neither confirm nor deny because stealing glory is something I only do very intentionally.Tom: Oh okay, excellent. Well, I will intentionally let you have some of that glory for you then. But as I was reading that book, it reminded me again of part of why I joined LaunchDarkly. I was a skeptic, and they convinced me through everyone that I talked to just what a nice place it is, and the great culture, it's safe to fail, it's safe to try stuff and build stuff. And then if it fails, that's okay. This is the place where that can happen, and we want to be able to continue to grow and try something new.That's again, getting back to the solutions engineer, sales engineer part of it, how can we effectively convey this message and teach people about what it is that we do—LaunchDarkly or not—in a way that makes them excited to see the possibilities of it? So yeah, it's really great when you get to work with those type of people, and it absolutely shouldn't be influenced by the worst of them. Sometimes you need to find the right ones to give you a chance and get in the door to start having those conversations so you can make good decisions on your own, not just try to buy whatever someone's—whatever their initiative is or whatever their priority is, right?Corey: Once upon a time when I first discovered LaunchDarkly, it was pretty easy to describe what you folks did. Feature flags. For longtime listeners of the show, and I mean very longtime listeners of the show, your colleague Heidi Waterhouse was guest number one. So, I've been talking to you folks about a variety of different things in a variety of different ways. But yeah, “LaunchDarkly. Oh, you do feature flags.”And over time that message has changed somewhat into something I have a little bit of difficulty to be perfectly honest with you in pinning down. At the moment we're recording this, if I pull up launchdarkly.com, it says, “Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece.”And I look at the last release I pushed out, which wound up basically fixing a couple of typos there, and it's like, “Well, shit. Is it going to make me sign my work because I'm kind of embarrassed by a lot of it.” So, it's aspirational, I get it, but it also somehow [occludes 00:05:32] a little bit of meaning. What is it you'd say it is you do here.Tom: Oh, Office Space. Wonderful. Good reference. And also, to take about 30 seconds back, Heidi Waterhouse, what a wonderful human. wiredferret on Twitter. Please, please go look her up. She's got just always such wonderful things to say. So—Corey: If you don't like Heidi Waterhouse, it is a near certainty it is because you've not yet met her. She's wonderful.Tom: Exactly. Yes, she is. So, what is it we'd say we do here? Well, when people think about feature flags—or at this point now, ‘feature management,' which is a broader scope—that's the term that we're using now, it's really talking about that last bit of software delivery, the last mile, the last leg, whatever your—you know, when you're pushing the button, and it's going to production. So, you know, a feature flag, if you ask someone five or ten years ago, they might say, oh, it's a fancy if statement controlled by a config file or controlled by a database.But with a sort of modern architecture, with global delivery, instant response time or fraction of a second response time, it's a lot more fundamental than that. That's why the word fundamental is there: Because it comes down to psychological safety. It comes down to feeling good about your life every day. So, whether it is that you're fixing a couple typos, or if you're radically changing some backend functionality, and trying out some new sort of search algorithm, a new API route that you're not sure if it's going to work at scale, honestly, you shouldn't have to stay up at night, you shouldn't have to think about deploying on a weekend because you should be able to deploy half-baked code to production safely, you should be able to do all of that. And that's honestly what we're all about.Now, there's some extra elements to it: Feedback loops, experimentation, metrics to make sure that your releases are doing well and doing what you anticipated that they would do, but really, that's what it comes down to is just feeling good about your work and making sure that if there is a fire, it's a small fire, and the entire audience isn't going to get part of the splash zone, right? We're making it just a little safer. Does that answer your question? Is that what you're getting at? Or am I still just speaking in the lingo?Corey: That gets it a lot closer. One of the breakthrough moments—of course I picked it up from one of Heidi's talks—is feature flag seems like a front end developer thing, yadda, yadda, yadda. And she said historically, yeah, in some ways, in some cases, that's how it started. But think about it this way. Think about separating out configuration from your deploy process. And what would that mean? What would that entail?And I look at my current things that I have put out there, and there is no staging environment, my feature branches main, and what would that change? In my case, basically nothing. But that's okay. Because I'm an irresponsible lunatic who should not be allowed near anything expensive, which is why I'm better at stateless things because I know better than to take my aura near things like databases.Tom: Yeah. So, I don't know how old you are Corey. But back—Corey: I'm in my mid-30s, which—Tom: Hey—Corey: —enrages my spouse who's slightly older. Because I'm turning 40 in July, but it's like, during the pandemic, as it has for many of us, the middle has expanded.Tom: There you go. Right. Exa—[laugh] exactly. Can neither confirm nor deny. You can only see me from about the mid-torso up, so, you know, you're not going to see whether I've expanded.But when we were in school doing group projects, we didn't have Google Docs. We couldn't see what other people were working on. You'd say, “Hey, we've got to write this paper. Corey, you take the first section, I'll take the second section, and we'll go and write and we'll try to squish it back together afterward.” And it's always a huge pain in the ass, right? It's terrible. Nobody likes group projects.And so the old method of Gitflow, where we're creating these feature branches and trying to squish them back later, and you work on that, and you work on this thing, and we can't see what each other are doing, it all comes down to context switching. It is time away from work that you care about, time away from exciting or productive work that you actually get to see what you're doing and put it into production, try it out. Nobody wants to deal with all the extra administrative overhead. And so yeah, for you, when you've got your own trunk-based development—you know, it's all just main—that's okay. When we're talking about teams of 40, 50, 100, 1000 suddenly becomes a really big deal if you were to start to split off and get away from trunk-based development because there's so much extra work that goes into trying to squish all that work back together, right? So, nobody wants to do all the extra stuff that surrounds getting software out there.Corey: It's toil. It feels consistently like it is never standardized so you always have to wind up rolling your own CI/CD thing for whatever it is. And forget between jobs; between different repositories and building things out, it's, “Oh, great. I get to reinvent the wheel some more.” It's frustrating.Tom: [laugh]. It's either that or find somebody else's wheel that they put together and see if you can figure out where all those spokes lead off to. “Is this secure? I don't know.”Corey: How much stuff do you have running in your personal stuff that has more or less been copied around for a decade or so? During the pandemic, I finally decided, all right, you know what I'm doing? That's right, being productive. We should fix that. I'm going to go ahead and redo my shell config—my zshrc—from scratch because, you know, 15 years of technical debt later, a lot of the things I used to really need it to do don't really apply anymore.Let's make it prettier, and let's make it faster. And that was great and all, but just looking through it, it was almost like going back in time for weird shell aliases that I don't need anymore. It's, well, that was super handy when I ran a Ruby production environment, but I haven't done that in seven years, and I haven't been in this specific scenario that one existed for since 2011. So maybe, maybe I can turn that one off.Tom: Yeah, maybe. Maybe we can get rid of that one. I mean, when's the last time you ran npm install on something you were going to try out here and paid attention to the warnings that came up afterward? “Hey, this one's deprecated. That one's deprecated.” Well, let's see if it works first, and then we'll worry about that later.Corey: Exactly. Security problems? Whatever. It's a Lambda function. What do I care?Tom: Yeah, it's fine. [laugh]. Exactly. Yeah. So, a lot of this is hypothetical for someone in my position, too, because I didn't ever get formal training as a software developer. I can copy and paste from Stack Overflow with the best of them and there's all sorts of resources out there, but really the people that we're talking to are the ones who actually live that day in, day out.And so I try to step into their shoes and try to feel that pain. But it's tough. Like, you have to be able to speak both languages and try to relate to people to see what are they actually running into, and is that something that we can help with? I don't know.Corey: The way that I tend to think about these things—and maybe it's accurate, and maybe it's not—it's just, no one shows up hoping to do a terrible job at work today, but we are constrained by a whole bunch of things that are imposed upon us. In some of the more mature environments, some of that is processes there for damn good reasons. “Well, why can't I just push everything I come up with to production?” “It's because we're a bank, genius. How about you think a little bit before you open your mouth?”Other times, it's because well, I have to go and fight with the CI/CD system, and I'm just going to go ahead and patch this one-line change into production. Better processes, better structure have made that a lot more… they've made it a lot easier to be able to do things the right way. But I would say we're nowhere near its final form, yet. There's so much yak-shaving that has to go into building out anything that it's frustrating, on some level, just all of the stuff you have to do, just to get the scaffolding in place to write nonsense. I mean, back when they announced Lambda functions it was, “In the future, the only code you'll write is business logic.”Yeah, well, I use a crap-ton of Lambda here and it feels like most of the code I write is gluing all of the weird formats and interchanges together in different APIs. Not a lot of business logic in that; and awful lot of JSON finickiness.Tom: Yeah, I'm with you. And especially at scale, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how all of that extra translation is possibly going to give the same sort of performance and same sort of long-term usability, as opposed to something that just natively speaks the same language end-to-end. So yeah, I agree, there's still some evolution, some standardization that still needs to happen because otherwise we're going to end up with a lot of cruft at various points in the code to, just like you said, translate and make sure we're speaking the same language.Getting back to process though, I spent a good chunk of my career working with companies that are, I would say, a little more conservative, and talking to things like automotive companies, or medical device manufacturers. Very security-conscious, compliant places. And so agile is a four-letter word for them, right, [laugh] where we're going faster automatically means we're being dangerous because what would the change control board say? And so there's absolutely a mental shift that needs to happen on the business side. And developers are fighting this cultural battle, just to try to say, hey, it's better if we can make small iterative changes, there is less risk if we can make small, more iterative changes, and convincing people who have never been exposed to software or know the ins and outs of what it takes to get something from my laptop to the cloud or production or you know, wherever, then that's a battle that needs to be fought before you can even start thinking about the tooling. Living in the Midwest, there's still a lot of people having that conversation.Corey: So, you are clearly deep in the weeds of building and deploying things into production. You're clearly deep into the world of explaining various solutions to different folks, and clearly you have the obvious background for this. You majored in music. Specifically, you got a master's in it. So, other than the obvious parallel of you continue to sing for your supper, how do you get from there to here?Tom: Luck and [laugh]. Natural curiosity. Corey, right now you are sitting on the desk that is also housing my PC gaming computer, right? I've been building computers just to play video games since I was a teenager. And that natural curiosity really came in handy because when I—like many people—realize that oh, no, the career choice that I made when I was 18 ended up being not the career choice that I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life, you have to be able to make a pivot, right, and start to apply some of the knowledge that you got towards some other industries.So, like many folks who are now solutions engineers, there's no degree for solutions engineering, you can't go to school for it; everyone comes from somewhere else. And so in my case, that just happened to be music theory, which was all pedagogy and teaching and breaking down big complex pieces of music into one node at a time, doing analysis, figuring out what's going on underneath the hood. And all of those are transferable skills that go over to software, right? You open up some giant wall of spaghetti code and you have to start following the path and breaking it down because every piece is easy one note at a time, every bit of code—in theory—is easy one line at a time, or one function at a time, one variable at a time. You can continue to break it down further and further, right?So, it's all just taking the transferable skills that you may not see how they get transferred, but then bringing them over to share your unique perspective, because of your background, to wherever it is you're going. In my case, it was tech support, then training, and then solutions engineering.Corey: There's a lot to be said for blending different disciplines. I think that there was, uh, the naughts at least, and possibly into the teens, there was a bias for hiring people who look alike. And no, I'm not referring to the folks who are the white dudes you and I clearly present as but the people with a similar background of, “Oh, you went to these specific schools”—as long as they're Stanford—“And you majored in a narrow list of things”—as long as they're all computer science. And then you wind up going into the following type of role because this is the pedigree we expect and everything, soup to nuts, is aligned around that background and experience. Where you would find people who would be working in the industry for ten years, and they would bomb the interview because it turns out that most of us don't spend our days implementing quicksort on whiteboards or doing other algorithmic-based problems.We're mostly pushing pixels around a screen hoping to make ourselves slightly happier than we were. Here we are. And that becomes a strange world; it becomes a really, really weird moment, and I don't know what the answer is for fixing any of that.Tom: Yeah, well, if you're not already familiar with a quote, you should be, which is that—and I'm going to paraphrase here—but, “Diverse backgrounds lead to diversity in thought,” right? And that presents additional opportunities, additional angles to solve whatever problems you're encountering. And so you're right, you know, we shouldn't be looking for people who have the specific background that we are looking for. How it's described in Accelerate? Can you tell that I read it recently?Which we should be looking for capabilities, right? Are you capable? Do you have the capacity to do the problem-solving, the logic? And of course, some education or experience to prove that, but are you the sort of person who will be able to tackle this challenge? It doesn't matter, right, if you've handled that specific thing before because if you've handled that specific thing before, you're probably going to implement it the same way, again, even if that's not the appropriate solution, this time.So, scrap that and say, let's find the right people, let's find people who can come up with creative solutions to the problems that we're facing. Think about ways to approach it that haven't been done before. Of course don't throw out everything with the—you know, the bathwater out with a baby or whatever that is, but come in with some fresh perspectives and get it done.Corey: I really wish that there was more of an acceptance for that. I think we're getting there. I really do, but it takes time. And it does pay dividends. I mean, that's something I want to talk to you about.I love the sound of my own voice. I wouldn't have two podcasts if I didn't. The counterargument, though, is that there's an awful lot of things that get, you know, challenging, especially when, unlike in a conference setting, it's most people consider it rude to get up and walk out halfway through. When we're talking and presenting information to people during a pandemic situation, well, that changes a lot. What do you do to retain people's interest?Tom: Sure. So, Covid really did a number on anyone who needs to present information or teach. I mean, just ask the millions of elementary, middle school, and high schoolers out there, even the college kids. Everyone who's still getting their education suddenly had to switch to remote learning.Same thing in the professional world. If you are doing trainings, if you're doing implementation, if you're doing demos, if you're trying to convey information to a new audience, it is so easy to get distracted at the computer. I know this firsthand. I'm one of those people where if I'm sitting in an airport lobby and there's a TV on my eyes are glued to that screen. That's me. I have a hard time looking away.And the same thing happens to anyone who's on the receiving end of any sort of information sharing, right? You got Slack blowing you up, you've got email that's pinging you, and that's bound to be more interesting than whatever the person on the screen is saying. And so I felt that very acutely in my job. And there's a couple of good strategies around it, right, which is, we need to be able to make things interactive. We shouldn't be monologuing like I am doing to you right now, Corey.We shouldn't be [laugh] just going off on tangents that are completely irrelevant to whoever's listening. And there's ways to make it more interactive. I don't know if you are familiar, or how much you've watched Twitch, but in my mind, the same sorts of techniques, the same sorts of interactivity that Twitch streamers are doing, we should absolutely be bringing that to the business world. If they can keep the attention of 12-year-olds for hours at a time, why can we not capture the attention of business professionals for an hour-long meeting, right? There's all sorts of techniques and learnings that we can do there.Corey: The problem I keep running into is, if you go stumbling down that pathway into the Twitch streaming model, I found it awkward the few experiments I've made with it because unless I have a whole presentation ready to go and I'm monologuing the whole time, the interactive part with the delay built in and a lot of ‘um' and ‘ah' and waiting and not really knowing how it's going to play out and going seat of the pants, it gets a little challenging in some respects.Tom: Yeah, that's fair. Sometimes it can be challenging. It's risky, but it's also higher reward. Because if you are monologuing the entire time, who's to say that halfway through the content that you are presenting is content that they want to actually hear, right? Obviously, we need to start from some sort of fundamental place and set the stage, say this is the agenda, but at some point, we need to get feedback—similar to software development—we need to know if the direction that we're going is the direction they also want to go.Otherwise, we start diverging at minute 10 and by minute 60, we have presented nothing at all that they actually want to see or want to learn about. So, it's so critical to get that sort of feedback and be able to incorporate it in some way, right? Whether that way is something that you're prepared to directly address. Or if it's something that says, “Hey, we're not on the same page. Let's make sure this is actually a good use of time instead of [laugh] me pretending and listening to myself talk and not taking you into account.” That's critical, right? And that is just as important, even if it feels worse in the moment.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they're calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you're using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They're also available now in the AWS marketplace if you'd prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Corey: From where I sit, one of the many, many, many problems confronting us is that there's this belief that everyone is like we are. I think that's something fundamental, where we all learn in different ways. I have never been, for example—this sounds heretical sitting here saying it, but why not—I'm not a big podcast person; I don't listen to them very often, just because it's such a different way of consuming information. I think there are strong accessibility reasons for there to be transcripts of podcasts. That's why every 300-and-however-many-odd episodes that this one winds up being the sequence in, every single one of them has a transcript attached to it done by a human.And there's a reason for that. Not just the accessibility wins which are obvious, but the fact that I can absorb that information way more quickly if I need to review something, or consume that. And I assume other people are like me, they're not. Other people prefer to listen to things than to read them, or to watch a video instead of listening, or to build something themselves, or to go through a formal curriculum in order to learn something. I mean, I'm sitting here with an eighth-grade education, myself. I take a different view to how I go about learning things.And it works for me, but assuming that other people learn the same way that I do will be awesome for a small minority of people and disastrous for everyone else. So, maybe—just a thought here—we shouldn't pattern society after what works for me.Tom: Absolutely. There is a multiple intelligence theory out there, something they teach you when you're going to be a teacher, which is that people learn in different ways. You don't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. We all learn in different ways and getting back to what we were talking about presenting effectively, there needs to be multiple approaches to how those people can consume information. I know we're not recording video, but for everyone listening to this, I am waving my hands all over the place because I am a highly visual learner, but you must be able to accept that other people are relying more on the auditory experience, other people need to be able to read that—like you said with the accessibility—or even get their hands on it and interact with it in some way.Whether that is Ctrl-F-ing your way through the transcript—or Command-F I'm sorry, Mac users [laugh]; I am also on a Mac—but we need to make sure that the information is ready to be consumed in some way that allows people to be successful. It's ridiculous to think that everyone is wired to be able to sit in front of a computer or in a little cubicle for eight hours a day, five days a week, and be able to retain concentration and productivity that entire time. Absolutely not. We should be recording everything, allowing people to come back and consume it in small chunks, consume it in different formats, consume it in the way that is most effective to them. And the onus for that is on the person presenting, it is not on the consumer.Corey: I make it a point to make what I am doing accessible to the people I am trying to reach, not to me. And sometimes I'm slacking, for example, we're not recording video today, so whenever it looks like I'm not paying attention to you and staring off to the side, like, oh, God, he's boring. No. I have the same thing mirrored on both of my screens; I just prefer to look at the thing that is large and easy to read, rather than the teleprompter, which is a nine-inch screen that is about four feet in front of my face. It's one of those easier for me type of things.On video, it looks completely off, so I don't do it, but I'm oh good, I get to take the luxury of not having to be presentable on camera in quite the same way. But when I'm doing a video scenario, I absolutely make it a point to not do that because it is off-putting to the people I'm trying to reach. In this case, I'm not trying to reach you; I already have. This is a promoted guest episode you're trying to reach the audience, and I believe from what I can tell, you're succeeding, so please keep at it.Tom: Oh, you bet. Well, thank you. You know this already, but this is the very first podcast I've ever been a guest on. So, thank you also for making it such a welcoming place. For what it's worth, I was not offended and didn't think you weren't listening. Obviously, we're having a great time here.But yeah, it's something that especially in the software space, people need to be aware of because everyone's job is—[laugh]. Whether you like it or not, here's a controversial statement: Everyone's job is sales. Are you selling your good ideas for your product, to your boss, to your product manager? Are you able to communicate with marketing to effectively say, “Hey, this is what, in tech support, I'm seeing. This is what people are coming to me with. This is what they care about.”You are always selling your own performance to your boss, to your customers, to other departments where you work, to your spouse, to everybody you interact with. We're all selling ourselves all the time. And all of that is really just communication. It's really just making sure you're able to meet people where they are and, effectively, bridge your point of view with theirs to make sure that we're on the same page and, you know, we're able to communicate well. That's so especially important now that we're all remote.Corey: Just so you don't think this is too friendly of a place, let's go ahead and finish out the episode with a personal attack. Before you wound up working at LaunchDarkly. You were at Perforce. What's up with that? I mean, that seems like an awfully big company to cater to its single customer, who is of course J. Paul Reed.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. Well, Perforce is a wonderful place. I have nothing but love for Perforce, but it is a very different landscape than LaunchDarkly, certainly. When I joined Perforce, I was supporting product called Helix ALM, which, they're still headquartered—Perforce is headquartered here in Minneapolis. I just saw some Perforce folks last week. It truly is a great place, and it is the place that introduced me to so many DevOps concepts.But that's a fair statement. Perforce has been around for a while. It has grown by acquisition over the past several years, and they are putting together new offerings by mixing old offerings together in a way that satisfies more modern needs, things like virtual production, and game development, and trying to package this up in a way that you can then have a game development environment in a box, right? So, there's a lot of things to be said for that, but it very much is a different landscape than a smaller cloud-native company. Which it's its own learning curve, let me tell you, but truly, yeah, to your Perforce, there's a lot more complexity to the products themselves because they've been around for a little bit longer.Solid, solid products, but there's a lot going on there. And it's a lot harder to learn them right upfront. As opposed to something like LaunchDarkly, which seems simple on the surface and you can get started with some of the easy concepts in implementation in, like, an hour, but then as you start digging deeper, whoof, suddenly, there's a lot more complexity hidden underneath the surface than just in terms of how this is set up, and some of those edge cases.Corey: I have to say for the backstory, for those who are unfamiliar, is I live about four miles away from J. Paul Reed, who is a known entity in reliability engineering, in the DevOps space, has been for a long time. So, to meet him, of course I had to fly to Israel. And he was keynoting DevOpsDays Tel Aviv. And I had not encountered him before, and it was this is awesome, I loved his talk, it was fun.And then I gave a talk a little while later called, “Terrible Ideas in Git.” And he's sitting there just glaring at me, holding his water bottle that is a branded Perforce thing, and it's like, “Do you work there?” He's like, “No. I just love Perforce.” It's like, “Congratulations. Having used it, I think you might be the only one.”I kid. I kid. It was great and a lot of different things. It was not quite what I needed when I needed it to but that's okay. It's gotten better and everyone else is not me, as we've discussed; people have different use cases. And that started a very long-running joke that J. Paul Reed is the entirety of the Perforce customer base.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. And to your point, there's definitely use cases—you're talking about Perforce Version Control or Helix Core.Corey: Back in those days, I don't believe it was differentiated.Tom: It was just called Perforce. Exactly right. But yeah, as Perforce has gotten bigger, now there's different product lines; you name it. But yeah, some of those modern scalable problems, being able to handle giant binary files, being able to do automatic edge replication for globally distributed teams so that when your team in APAC comes online, they're not having to spend the first two hours of their day just getting the most recent changes from the team in the Americas and Europe. Those are problems that Perforce is absolutely solving that are out there, but it's not problems that everybody faces and you know, there's just like everybody else, we're navigating the landscape and trying to find out where the product actually fits and how it needs to evolve.Corey: And I really do wish you well on it. I think there's going to be an awful lot of—Tom: Mm-hm.Corey: —future stories where there is this integration. And you'd say, “Oh, well, what are you wishing me well for? I don't work there anymore.” But yeah, but isn't that kind of we're talking about, on some level, of building out things that are easy, that are more streamlined, that are opinionated in the right ways, I suppose. And honestly, that's the thing that I found so compelling about LaunchDarkly. I have a hard time imagining I would build anything for production use that didn't feature it these days if I were, you know, better at computers?Tom: Sure. Yeah. [laugh]. Well, we do have our opinions on how some things should work, right? Where the data is exposed because with any feature flagging system or feature management—LaunchDarkly included—you've got a set of rules, i.e. who should see this, where is it turned on? Where is it turned off? Who in your audience or user base should be able to see these features? That's the rules engine side of it.And on the other side, you've got the context to decide, well, you know, I'm Corey, I'm logging in, I'm in my mid-30s. And I know all this information about Corey, and those rules need to then be able to determine whether something should be on or off or which experience Corey gets. So, we are very opinionated over the architecture, right, and where that evaluation actually happens and how that data is exposed or where that's exposed. Because those two halves need to meet and both halves have the potential to be extremely sensitive. If I'm targeting based off of a list of 10,000 of my premium users' email addresses, I should not be exposing that list of 10,000 email addresses to a web browser or a mobile phone.That's highly insecure. And inefficient; that's a large amount of text to send, over 10,000 email addresses. And so when we're thinking about things like page load times, and people being able to push F12 to inspect the page, absolutely not, we shouldn't be exposing that there. At the same time, it's a scary prospect to say, “Hey, I'm going to send personal information about Corey over to some third-party service, some edge worker that's going to decide whether Corey should see a feature or not.” So, there's definitely architectural considerations of different use cases, but that's something that we think through all the time and make sure is secure.There's a reason—I'm going to put on my sales engineer hat here—which is to say that there is a reason that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is our sponsor for FedRAMP moderate certification, in process right now, expected to be completed mid-2022. I don't know. But anybody who is unfamiliar with that, if you've ever had to go through high trust certification, you know, any of these compliances to make your regulators happy, you know that FedRAMP is so incredibly stringent. And that comes down to evaluating where are we exposing the data? Who gets to see that? Is security built in and innate into the architecture? Is that something that's been thought through?I have went so far afield from the original point that you made, but I agree, right? We've got to be opinionated about some things while still providing the freedom to use it in a way that is actually useful to you and [laugh] and we're not, you know, putting up guardrails, that mean that you've got such a narrow set of use cases.Corey: I'd like to hope—maybe I'm wrong on this—that it gets easier the more that we wind up doing these things because I don't think that it necessarily has been easy enough for an awful lot of us.Tom: When you say ‘it,' what do you mean?Corey: All of it. That's the best part, I suppose the easy parts of working on computers, which I guess might be typing if you learn it early enough.Tom: Sure. [laugh] yeah. Mario Teaches Typing, or Starcraft taught me how to type quickly. You can't type slowly or else your expansion is going to get destroyed. No, so for someone who got their formal education in music or for someone with an eighth-grade education, I agree there needs to be resources out there.And there are. Not every single StackOverflow post with a question that's been asked has the response, “That's a dumb question.” There are some out there. There's definitely a community or a group of folks who think that there is a correct way to do things and that if you're asking a question, that it's a dumb question. It really isn't. It's getting back to the diverse backgrounds and diverse schools of thought that are coming in.We don't know where someone is coming from that led them to that question without the context, and so we need to continue providing resources to folks to make it easy to self-enable and continue abstracting away the machine code parts of it in friendlier and friendlier ways. I love that there are services like Squarespace out there now, right, that allow anybody to make a website. You don't have to have a degree in computer science to spin something up and share it with the world on the web. We're going to continue to see that type of abstraction, that type of on-ramp for folks, and I'm excited to be part of it.Corey: I really look forward to it. I'm curious to see what happens next for you, especially as you continue—‘you' being the corporate ‘you' here; that's like the understood ‘you' are the royal ‘you.' This is the corporate ‘you'—continue to refine the story of what it is LaunchDarkly does, where you start, where you stop, and how that winds up playing out.Tom: Yeah, you bet. Well, in the meantime, I'm going to continue to play with things like GitHub Copilot, see how much I can autofill, and see which paths that takes me down?Corey: Oh, I've been using it for a while. It's great. Just tab-complete my entire life. It's amazing.Tom: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.Corey: [unintelligible 00:36:08] other people's secrets start working, great, that makes my AWS bill way lower when I use someone else's keys. But that's neither here nor there.Tom: Yeah, exactly. That's a next step of doing that npm install or, you know, bringing in somebody else's [laugh] tools that they've already made. Yeah, just a couple weeks ago, I was playing around with it, and I typed in two lines: I imported the LaunchDarkly SDK and the configuration for the LaunchDarkly SDK, and then I just let it autofill, whatever it wanted. It came out with about 100 lines of something or other. [laugh]. And not all of it made sense, but hey, I saw where the thought process was. It was pretty cool to see.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending as much time and energy as you have talking about how you see the world and where you folks are going. If people want to learn more. Where's the best place to find you?Tom: At launchdarkly.com. Of course, any other various different booths, DevOpsDays, we're at re:Invent, we're at QCon right now. We're at all sorts of places, so come stop by, say hi, get a demo. Maybe we'll talk.Corey: Excellent. We will be tossing links to that into the [show notes 00:37:09]. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.Tom: Corey, Thank you.Corey: Tom Totenberg, senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry and insulting comment, and then I'll sing it to you.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

“The business of business is a lot of little decisions every day mixed up with a few big decisions.” – Tom Murphy Finanskursen Årskull 5 börjar 1a maj. Gör en tidig ansökan innan 17e april för att bli garanterad en plats. Läs mer på finanskursen.se/ Använd CTRL + F vid långa texter. Skapa flikar i din browser för effektivare Internetanvändning. När du arbetar på en komplex uppgift, fråga alltid "Vad är nästa steg?" Tänk i extremer: Low-hanging fruit vs 5-årsbeslut. Skippa allt mellan. Tänk 80/20: Ett fåtal viktiga saker ger majoriteten av resultaten.

In this Extra Bit; Henry tells us about some Trolls Dan's Pick: You Henry's Pick: Ukraine support Red Cross Unicef

This is part 2 of our chronological journey through Yes members' first solo albums since joining Yes. This time, it's Two Sides of Peter Banks, released August 21, 1973 by the original Yes guitarist. We talk about our impressions of the material (this was Dan's first listen), how Yes it may sound, a fun anecdote regarding Peter's involvement with Phil Collins and Steve Hackett, and more! Relevant Links: -Peter Banks interview on marqueeclub.net -Album listing and Rolling Stone review on PeterBanks.net -Bill Bruford's Making a Song and Dance box set on Burning Shed -Asia in Asia listing on Burning Shed. (Steven was wrong about it being audio only. He used Ctrl+F to see if there was a DVD, and there isn't, but there's a Blu-ray included. lol ) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/yesshift/support

It might not solve all life's problems, but a high LSAT score is the closest thing to a panacea for law school application troubles. It can overshadow a mediocre GPA and demonstrate your aptitude to succeed in law school. It can open doors at higher-ranked schools. And, most importantly, it can save you from taking on a lifetime of student debt. Tune in this week for a mixed-bag episode covering everything from LSAT strategies and score improvements to scholarships and URM status. As always, if you like the show and you want to get more from the Thinking LSAT community, check out the links below. You can connect with other folks studying for the LSAT and get more useful resources from Nathan and Ben. LSAT Demon LSAT Demon iOS App LSAT Demon Daily Thinking LSAT YouTube LSAT Demon YouTube Important Dates 3.16.2022 — April LSAT registration deadline 3.30.2022 — March LSAT scores released 4.27.2022 — June LSAT registration deadline 4.29.2022 — April LSAT begins 5.18.2022 — April LSAT scores released 7:30 - The Solution to All Problems? 13:26 - A 22-Point Improvement 32:03 - Advice from a Corporate Lawyer 37:15 - Running the Tables 40:25 - CTRL+F on the LSAT 47:00 - Cost-of-Living Loans 1:12:44 - Focus on What You Can Control 1:25:38 - The LSAT Is Easy 1:29:26 - URM Status Read more on our website!

Doğal dil işleme, Nazi tweet botu, Karadenizli iç ses, yani diyor ki

CBA negotiations heat up a notch as the League tries to bring in the Feds while the Players instead bring in the fans. Cowboy Joe hangs up his chest protector and yet still no women umpires in sight. Pottymouth adds a prize to her Hernandez collection, naming Teoscar as her Blue Jays boyfriend. Patti puts in a bid for beer with the Biggios with her pick of Cavan. For the Reds, Pottymouth Blind Sides us by selecting Kyle Farmer, and Patti is swayed by qHAR, Mookie, and a wacky career path to pick TJ Friedl. Colombia comes out of nowhere to take the Serie del Caribe and Pottymouth tells us what we missed. Cedric Mullins further cements his boyfriend cred by sharing his Crohn's Disease story. The Dodgers sign two players from Uganda, so can a Disney movie be far behind? We say CTRL-F is my friend, thrusty swivel, and breakfast hockey.Get boosted, fight the man, and find us on Twitter @ncibpodcast, on Facebook @nocryinginbball, Instagram @nocryinginbball and on the Interweb at nocryinginbball.com. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to NCiB. Become a supporter at Patreon to help us keep doing what we do. Say goodnight, Pottymouth.

Dr. Moiya McTier (@GoAstroMo) returns to the pod, this time in her full-fledged role as TNO's Greek Mythological Correspondent! Come hear her answer questions about everything Mike wondered about while reading the first PJO book, cover the desired topics as chosen by patrons, and beyond! Ctrl+F, mythology sources, theoi.com, Perseus, Medusa's origin, Luciano Garbati, John Wick, the Portland god, animal icons, items of power, Mercury, caduceus, the Furies, Argus, SpongeBob, Chiron, Hercules, cool storks, hot animals, Procrustes, lotus eaters, and more!Thanks to our sponsor: Athletic Greens! Get a year's worth of Vitamin D plus 5 free travel packs at www.athleticgreens.com/newestolympian— Find The Newest Olympian Online —• Website: https://thenewestolympian.com• Patreon: https://thenewestolympian.com/patreon• Twitter: https://twitter.com/newestolympian• Instagram: https://instagram.com/newestolympian• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newestolympian• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/thenewestolympian— Production —• Creator, Host, Producer, Social Media, Web Design: Mike Schubert (https://schub.es)• Editor: Sherry Guo• Music: Bettina Campomanes and Brandon Grugle• Art: Jessica E. Boyd• Multitude: https://www.multitude.productions— About The Show —Is Percy Jackson the book series we should've been reading all along? Join Mike Schubert as he reads through the books for the first time with the help of longtime PJO fans to cover the plot, take stabs at what happens next, and nerd out over Greek mythology. Whether you're looking for an excuse to finally read these books, or want to re-read an old favorite with a digital book club, grab your blue chocolate chip cookies and listen along. New episodes release on Mondays wherever you get your podcasts!

AITA: Racist Grandpa Edition

welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: 2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison , published by Larks on the effective altruism forum. Cross-posted to LessWrong here. Introduction As in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments. My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2019 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2019 budgets to get a sense of urgency. I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone doing useful AI Safety work whose contributions I may have overlooked or misconstrued. As ever I am painfully aware of the various corners I have had to cut due to time constraints from my job, as well as being distracted by 1) another existential risk capital allocation project, 2) the miracle of life and 3) computer games. How to read this document This document is fairly extensive, and some parts (particularly the methodology section) are the same as last year, so I don't recommend reading from start to finish. Instead, I recommend navigating to the sections of most interest to you. If you are interested in a specific research organisation, you can use the table of contents to navigate to the appropriate section. You might then also want to Ctrl+F for the organisation acronym in case they are mentioned elsewhere as well. If you are interested in a specific topic, I have added a tag to each paper, so you can Ctrl+F for a tag to find associated work. The tags were chosen somewhat informally so you might want to search more than one, especially as a piece might seem to fit in multiple categories. Here are the un-scientifically-chosen hashtags: Agent Foundations AI_Theory Amplification Careers CIRL Decision_Theory Ethical_Theory Forecasting Introduction Misc ML_safety Other_Xrisk Overview Philosophy Politics RL Security Shortterm Strategy New to Artificial Intelligence as an existential risk? If you are new to the idea of General Artificial Intelligence as presenting a major risk to the survival of human value, I recommend this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper. If you are already convinced and are interested in contributing technically, I recommend this piece by Jacob Steinheart, as unlike this document Jacob covers pre-2019 research and organises by topic, not organisation. Research Organisations FHI: The Future of Humanity Institute FHI is an Oxford-based Existential Risk Research organisation founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom. They are affiliated with Oxford University. They cover a wide variety of existential risks, including artificial intelligence, and do political outreach. Their research can be found here. Their research is more varied than MIRI's, including strategic work, work directly addressing the value-learning problem, and corrigibility work. In the past I have been very impressed with their work. Research Drexler's Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence is a massive document arguing that superintelligent AI will be developed for individual discrete services for specific finite tasks, rather than as general-purpose agents. Basically the idea is that it makes more sense for people to develop specialised AIs, so these will happen first, and if/when we build AGI these services can help control it. To some extent this seems to match what is happening - we do have many specialised AIs - but on the other hand there are teams working directly on AGI, and often in ML 'build an ML system that does it...

welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: 2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, published by Larks on the effective altruism forum. Write a Review cross-posted to LW here. Introduction As in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments. My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2020 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2021 budgets to get a sense of urgency. I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone doing useful AI Safety work whose contributions I have overlooked or misconstrued. As ever I am painfully aware of the various corners I have had to cut due to time constraints from my job, as well as being distracted by 1) other projects, 2) the miracle of life and 3) computer games. This article focuses on AI risk work. If you think other causes are important too, your priorities might differ. This particularly affects GCRI, FHI and CSER, who both do a lot of work on other issues which I attempt to cover but only very cursorily. How to read this document This document is fairly extensive, and some parts (particularly the methodology section) are largely the same as last year, so I don't recommend reading from start to finish. Instead, I recommend navigating to the sections of most interest to you. If you are interested in a specific research organisation, you can use the table of contents to navigate to the appropriate section. You might then also want to Ctrl+F for the organisation acronym in case they are mentioned elsewhere as well. Papers listed as ‘X researchers contributed to the following research lead by other organisations' are included in the section corresponding to their first author and you can Cntrl+F to find them. If you are interested in a specific topic, I have added a tag to each paper, so you can Ctrl+F for a tag to find associated work. The tags were chosen somewhat informally so you might want to search more than one, especially as a piece might seem to fit in multiple categories. Here are the un-scientifically-chosen hashtags: AgentFoundations Amplification Capabilities Corrigibility DecisionTheory Ethics Forecasting GPT-3 IRL Misc NearAI OtherXrisk Overview Politics RL Strategy Textbook Transparency ValueLearning New to Artificial Intelligence as an existential risk? If you are new to the idea of General Artificial Intelligence as presenting a major risk to the survival of human value, I recommend this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper, or for a more technical version this by Richard Ngo. If you are already convinced and are interested in contributing technically, I recommend this piece by Jacob Steinheart, as unlike this document Jacob covers pre-2019 research and organises by topic, not organisation, or this from Critch & Krueger, or this from Everitt et al, though it is a few years old now Research Organisations FHI: The Future of Humanity Institute FHI is an Oxford-based Existential Risk Research organisation founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom. They are affiliated with Oxford University. They cover a wide variety of existential risks, including artificial intelligence, and do political outreach. Their research can be found here. Their research is more varied than MIRI's, including strategic work, work directly addressing the value-learning problem, and corrigibility work - as well as work on other Xrisks. They run a Research Scholars Program, where people can join them to do research at FHI. There is a f...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison , published by Larks on the LessWrong. Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. cross-posted to the EA forum here. Introduction As in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments. My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2020 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2020 budgets to get a sense of urgency. I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone doing useful AI Safety work whose contributions I have overlooked or misconstrued. As ever I am painfully aware of the various corners I have had to cut due to time constraints from my job, as well as being distracted by 1) other projects, 2) the miracle of life and 3) computer games. This article focuses on AI risk work. If you think other causes are important too, your priorities might differ. This particularly affects GCRI, FHI and CSER, who both do a lot of work on other issues which I attempt to cover but only very cursorily. How to read this document This document is fairly extensive, and some parts (particularly the methodology section) are largely the same as last year, so I don't recommend reading from start to finish. Instead, I recommend navigating to the sections of most interest to you. If you are interested in a specific research organisation, you can use the table of contents to navigate to the appropriate section. You might then also want to Ctrl+F for the organisation acronym in case they are mentioned elsewhere as well. Papers listed as ‘X researchers contributed to the following research lead by other organisations' are included in the section corresponding to their first author and you can Cntrl+F to find them. If you are interested in a specific topic, I have added a tag to each paper, so you can Ctrl+F for a tag to find associated work. The tags were chosen somewhat informally so you might want to search more than one, especially as a piece might seem to fit in multiple categories. Here are the un-scientifically-chosen hashtags: AgentFoundations Amplification Capabilities Corrigibility DecisionTheory Ethics Forecasting GPT-3 IRL Misc NearAI OtherXrisk Overview Politics RL Strategy Textbook Transparency ValueLearning New to Artificial Intelligence as an existential risk? If you are new to the idea of General Artificial Intelligence as presenting a major risk to the survival of human value, I recommend this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper, or for a more technical version this by Richard Ngo. If you are already convinced and are interested in contributing technically, I recommend this piece by Jacob Steinheart, as unlike this document Jacob covers pre-2019 research and organises by topic, not organisation, or this from Critch & Krueger, or this from Everitt et al, though it is a few years old now Research Organisations FHI: The Future of Humanity Institute FHI is an Oxford-based Existential Risk Research organisation founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom. They are affiliated with Oxford University. They cover a wide variety of existential risks, including artificial intelligence, and do political outreach. Their research can be found here. Their research is more varied than MIRI's, including strategic work, work directly addressing the value-learning problem, and corrigibility work - as well as work on other Xrisks. They run a Research Scholars Pro...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, published by Larks on the AI Alignment Forum. Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Cross-posted to the EA forum here. Introduction As in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments. My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2019 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2019 budgets to get a sense of urgency. I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone doing useful AI Safety work whose contributions I may have overlooked or misconstrued. As ever I am painfully aware of the various corners I have had to cut due to time constraints from my job, as well as being distracted by 1) another existential risk capital allocation project, 2) the miracle of life and 3) computer games. How to read this document This document is fairly extensive, and some parts (particularly the methodology section) are the same as last year, so I don't recommend reading from start to finish. Instead, I recommend navigating to the sections of most interest to you. If you are interested in a specific research organisation, you can use the table of contents to navigate to the appropriate section. You might then also want to Ctrl+F for the organisation acronym in case they are mentioned elsewhere as well. If you are interested in a specific topic, I have added a tag to each paper, so you can Ctrl+F for a tag to find associated work. The tags were chosen somewhat informally so you might want to search more than one, especially as a piece might seem to fit in multiple categories. Here are the un-scientifically-chosen hashtags: Agent Foundations AI_Theory Amplification Careers CIRL Decision_Theory Ethical_Theory Forecasting Introduction Misc ML_safety Other_Xrisk Overview Philosophy Politics RL Security Shortterm Strategy New to Artificial Intelligence as an existential risk? If you are new to the idea of General Artificial Intelligence as presenting a major risk to the survival of human value, I recommend this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper. If you are already convinced and are interested in contributing technically, I recommend this piece by Jacob Steinheart, as unlike this document Jacob covers pre-2019 research and organises by topic, not organisation. Research Organisations FHI: The Future of Humanity Institute FHI is an Oxford-based Existential Risk Research organisation founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom. They are affiliated with Oxford University. They cover a wide variety of existential risks, including artificial intelligence, and do political outreach. Their research can be found here. Their research is more varied than MIRI's, including strategic work, work directly addressing the value-learning problem, and corrigibility work. In the past I have been very impressed with their work. Research Drexler's Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence is a massive document arguing that superintelligent AI will be developed for individual discrete services for specific finite tasks, rather than as general-purpose agents. Basically the idea is that it makes more sense for people to develop specialised AIs, so these will happen first, and if/when we build AGI these services can help control it. To some extent this seems to match what is happening - we do have many specialised AIs - but on the other hand there ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, published by Larks on the AI Alignment Forum. Write a Review cross-posted to the EA forum here. Introduction As in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments. My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2020 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2020 budgets to get a sense of urgency. I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone doing useful AI Safety work whose contributions I have overlooked or misconstrued. As ever I am painfully aware of the various corners I have had to cut due to time constraints from my job, as well as being distracted by 1) other projects, 2) the miracle of life and 3) computer games. This article focuses on AI risk work. If you think other causes are important too, your priorities might differ. This particularly affects GCRI, FHI and CSER, who both do a lot of work on other issues which I attempt to cover but only very cursorily. How to read this document This document is fairly extensive, and some parts (particularly the methodology section) are largely the same as last year, so I don't recommend reading from start to finish. Instead, I recommend navigating to the sections of most interest to you. If you are interested in a specific research organisation, you can use the table of contents to navigate to the appropriate section. You might then also want to Ctrl+F for the organisation acronym in case they are mentioned elsewhere as well. Papers listed as ‘X researchers contributed to the following research lead by other organisations' are included in the section corresponding to their first author and you can Cntrl+F to find them. If you are interested in a specific topic, I have added a tag to each paper, so you can Ctrl+F for a tag to find associated work. The tags were chosen somewhat informally so you might want to search more than one, especially as a piece might seem to fit in multiple categories. Here are the un-scientifically-chosen hashtags: AgentFoundations Amplification Capabilities Corrigibility DecisionTheory Ethics Forecasting GPT-3 IRL Misc NearAI OtherXrisk Overview Politics RL Strategy Textbook Transparency ValueLearning New to Artificial Intelligence as an existential risk? If you are new to the idea of General Artificial Intelligence as presenting a major risk to the survival of human value, I recommend this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper, or for a more technical version this by Richard Ngo. If you are already convinced and are interested in contributing technically, I recommend this piece by Jacob Steinheart, as unlike this document Jacob covers pre-2019 research and organises by topic, not organisation, or this from Critch & Krueger, or this from Everitt et al, though it is a few years old now Research Organisations FHI: The Future of Humanity Institute FHI is an Oxford-based Existential Risk Research organisation founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom. They are affiliated with Oxford University. They cover a wide variety of existential risks, including artificial intelligence, and do political outreach. Their research can be found here. Their research is more varied than MIRI's, including strategic work, work directly addressing the value-learning problem, and corrigibility work - as well as work on other Xrisks. They run a Research Scholars Program, where people can join them to do research at FHI. There is...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, published by Larks on the AI Alignment Forum. Cross-posted to the EA forum here. Introduction As in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments. My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2019 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2019 budgets to get a sense of urgency. I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone doing useful AI Safety work whose contributions I may have overlooked or misconstrued. As ever I am painfully aware of the various corners I have had to cut due to time constraints from my job, as well as being distracted by 1) another existential risk capital allocation project, 2) the miracle of life and 3) computer games. How to read this document This document is fairly extensive, and some parts (particularly the methodology section) are the same as last year, so I don't recommend reading from start to finish. Instead, I recommend navigating to the sections of most interest to you. If you are interested in a specific research organisation, you can use the table of contents to navigate to the appropriate section. You might then also want to Ctrl+F for the organisation acronym in case they are mentioned elsewhere as well. If you are interested in a specific topic, I have added a tag to each paper, so you can Ctrl+F for a tag to find associated work. The tags were chosen somewhat informally so you might want to search more than one, especially as a piece might seem to fit in multiple categories. Here are the un-scientifically-chosen hashtags: Agent Foundations AI_Theory Amplification Careers CIRL Decision_Theory Ethical_Theory Forecasting Introduction Misc ML_safety Other_Xrisk Overview Philosophy Politics RL Security Shortterm Strategy New to Artificial Intelligence as an existential risk? If you are new to the idea of General Artificial Intelligence as presenting a major risk to the survival of human value, I recommend this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper. If you are already convinced and are interested in contributing technically, I recommend this piece by Jacob Steinheart, as unlike this document Jacob covers pre-2019 research and organises by topic, not organisation. Research Organisations FHI: The Future of Humanity Institute FHI is an Oxford-based Existential Risk Research organisation founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom. They are affiliated with Oxford University. They cover a wide variety of existential risks, including artificial intelligence, and do political outreach. Their research can be found here. Their research is more varied than MIRI's, including strategic work, work directly addressing the value-learning problem, and corrigibility work. In the past I have been very impressed with their work. Research Drexler's Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence is a massive document arguing that superintelligent AI will be developed for individual discrete services for specific finite tasks, rather than as general-purpose agents. Basically the idea is that it makes more sense for people to develop specialised AIs, so these will happen first, and if/when we build AGI these services can help control it. To some extent this seems to match what is happening - we do have many specialised AIs - but on the other hand there are teams working directly on AGI, and often in ML 'build an ML system that does it all...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Alignment Newsletter One Year Retrospective, published by Rohin Shah on the AI Alignment Forum. On April 9, 2018, the first Alignment Newsletter was sent out to me and one test recipient. A year later, it has 889 subscribers and two additional content writers, and is the thing for which I'm best known. In this post I look at the impact of the newsletter and try to figure out what, if anything, should be changed in the future. (If you don't know about the newsletter, you can learn about it and/or sign up here.) Summary In which I badger you to take the 3-minute survey, and summarize some key points. Actions I'd like you to take If you have read at least one issue of the newsletter in the last two months, take the 3-minute survey! If you're going to read this post anyway, I'd prefer you first read the post and then take the survey; but it's much better to take the survey without reading this post than to not take it at all. Bookmark or otherwise make sure to know about the spreadsheet of papers, which includes everything sent in the newsletter, and a few other papers as well. Now that the newsletter is available in Mandarin (thanks Xiaohu!), I'd be excited to see the newsletter spread to AI researchers in China. Give me feedback in the comments so that I can make the newsletter better! I've listed particular topics that I want input on at the end of the post (before the appendix). Everything else The number of subscribers dwarfs the number of people working in AI safety. I'm not sure who the other subscribers are, or what value they get from the newsletter. The main benefits of the newsletter are: helping technical researchers keep up with the field, helping junior researchers skill up without mentorship, and reputational effects. The first of these is both the most important one, and the most uncertain one. I spent a counterfactual 300-400 hours on the newsletter over the last year. Still, in expectation the newsletter seems well worth the time cost, but due to the high uncertainty on the benefits to researchers, it's plausible that the newsletter is not worthwhile. There are a bunch of questions I'd like feedback on. Most notably, I want to get a better model of how the newsletter adds value to technical safety researchers. Newsletter updates In which I tell you about features of the newsletter that you probably didn't know about. Spreadsheet Many of you probably know me as the guy who summarizes a bunch of papers every week. I claim you should instead think of me as the guy who maintains a giant spreadsheet of alignment-related papers, and incidentally also sends out a changelog of the spreadsheet every week. You could use the spreadsheet by reading the changelog every week, but you could also use it in other ways: Whenever you want to do a literature review, you find the relevant categories in the spreadsheet and use the summaries to decide which of the papers to read in full. When you come across a new, interesting paper, you first Ctrl+F for it in the spreadsheet and read the summary and opinion if they are present, before deciding whether to read the paper in full. I expect most summaries to be more useful for this purpose than reading the abstract; the longer summaries can be more useful than reading the abstract, introduction and conclusion. Perhaps you should do it right now, with (say) “Prosaic AI alignment”, just to intuitively get how trivial it is to do. When you find an interesting idea or concept, search for related words in the spreadsheet to find other writing on the topic. (This is most useful for non-academic ideas -- for academic ones, Google Scholar is the way to go.) I find myself using the spreadsheet a couple of times a week, often to remind me of what I thought about a paper or post that I had read a long time ago, but also for literature revi...

Grammar alert! A complicated sentence and a clever description make Emily do a double-take in our first episode. Plus, even Jane Austen put her first manuscript in a drawer and came back to it later. CTRL+F for this sentence here (Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain) Listen to two friends book club this chapter on the Pod and Prejudice podcast  Good Writing is a podcast where two friends read like writers and lay out craft for fellow writers to steal. Co-hosted by Emily Donovan and Benjamin Kerns. Email: goodwritingpodcast@gmail.com Website: https://www.goodwritingpodcast.com/ 

What's in a name? We dive back in time to meet Thomas/ine Hall in 1629 and into Ariana Grande's rooftop pool, to quench our thirst for a neatly labelled sexuality. Featuring Adjoa Andoh, Blu del Barrio, and Tabby Lamb.