A sport of (wild) playing cards
Suggestions doesn’t have the time or inclination to select by each version of the American Journal of Physics, however luckily New Scientist‘s physics reporters Alex Wilkins and Karmela Padavic-Callaghan are contractually obligated to take action. Therefore our newfound familiarity with a paper entitled “Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe”.
Probably the most instantly placing level is the two-person writer record. One, Ian Tregillis, is a theoretical physicist on the Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory in New Mexico and a printed author. The opposite is George R. R. Martin, the famous writer of sci-fi and fantasy books like Nightflyers, Fevre Dream and, in fact, the A Track of Ice and Fireplace collection, which was tailored for tv as Recreation of Thrones. That is “his first peer-reviewed physics publication”.
Tregillis and Martin have developed a instructing train, aimed toward superior undergraduates in physics. It’s based mostly on Wild Playing cards: a set of tales set in a shared universe, edited by Martin and Melinda Snodgrass.
The tales’ premise is that an extraterrestrial virus has received unfastened on Earth and contaminated many people. As Tregillis and Martin clarify: “Of each 100 latent carriers who expertise viral expression inside their our bodies… 90 expertise a deadly end result; 9 are bodily mutated, usually profoundly so; and 1 obtains a superhuman skill”.
The instructing train is constructed round this “fastened empirical 90:9:1 rule”. College students are inspired to think about that they’re theorists dwelling within the Wild Playing cards universe and to attempt to work out why the virus impacts individuals in these proportions. The purpose is to supply college students an issue with no identified resolution, to encourage artistic analysis.
Suggestions will get the place they’re coming from, however we do marvel if that is going to fly. Loads of educators tie their classes to popular culture phenomena as a hook for reluctant college students, however this solely works if the phenomenon in query is genuinely well-known. With the most effective will on the planet, Suggestions isn’t positive if that may be stated for Wild Playing cards.
Nevertheless, we marvel if there could be some higher choices for superior physics noodling, drawing on fictional universes with a bit extra cachet. How does the Snap work in Avengers: Infinity Struggle? It appears to propagate immediately, essentially breaking the velocity of sunshine. Or what concerning the cosmology of Iain M. Banks’s Tradition novels?
We’re additionally stunned that they haven’t accomplished the plain one: what causes the irregular, elongated seasons in A Track of Ice and Fireplace? One viable rationalization is that the planet has a pronounced orbital wobble, however in that case why do the years-long winters solely afflict the continent of Westeros? There appears to be no cultural reminiscence of them on Essos in any respect. Is there one thing particular within the atmospheric dynamics that often offers Westeros with a decade of blizzards?
Sorry, we received sidetracked there. Talking of getting sidetracked: George, would you please simply end The Winds of Winter and get onto A Dream of Spring, so we are able to all discover out whether or not your deliberate ending for the collection is any higher than the damp squib the TV writers got here up with? It may possibly’t be worse than the bit the place they killed the primary baddie and all his subordinates conveniently disintegrated – can it?
Animal templates
Within the ongoing vein of “generative AIs say the stupidest issues”, reporter Matthew Sparkes attracts our consideration to a paper on the arXiv entitled “Owls are sensible and foxes are untrue: Uncovering animal stereotypes in vision-language fashions”. The research targeted on DALL-E 3, an AI that generates pictures based mostly on textual content prompts. Researchers gave it prompts like “generate a picture of a delicate animal” and recorded which creatures the AI drew.
With frankly distressing predictability, given what we find out about AIs recapitulating sexist and racist tropes, DALL-E 3 pumped out a torrent of stereotypes. All of the loyal animals have been canine, sensible animals have been largely owls and mischievous animals have been primarily raccoons and foxes. Suggestions is fairly positive canine will be mischievous – our final canine was extremely sneaky when it got here to stealing cat meals or discovering streaks of fox poo through which to roll – however DALL-E 3 evidently takes a extra one-dimensional view of canines.
We can’t even carry ourselves to repeat the libel in opposition to cats perpetrated by DALL-E 3, in case Suggestions’s felines learn this.
Luckily, different AIs are doing higher. As an example, in mid-January, Apple suspended its AI information notification system after it repeatedly provided ludicrously deceptive headlines, together with “Netanyahu arrested“. Oh wait, no, that’s not higher.
All of the sleep
A press launch alerts Suggestions to a research printed in Purposeful Ecology on 5 January on the evolution of dormancy behaviours like torpor and hibernation. By analyzing which animals can grow to be dormant and which might’t, the researchers conclude that torpor and hibernation have developed independently a number of occasions amongst warm-blooded animals.
Some may interpret this as evolution’s great creativity and suppleness on full show. Suggestions, nevertheless, interprets it as evolution having failed us. It’s chilly, darkish and moist the place we’re, and Suggestions fairly fancies hibernating. Three months should do it.
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