Interesting Links for 16-01-2018

[andrewducker]

Barcelona moving to open source

(tags: Spain software opensource )

How does an MP resign and what happens next?

(tags: politics uk )

"Milkshake ​​duck" announced as Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year

(tags: internet society language )

Drinking more than one unit of alcohol per day is bad for your mental ability (and worse for older people)

(tags: alcohol Intelligence )

Jeremy Corbyn tightens grip on Labour as left-wingers sweep NEC election

(tags: labour politics uk )

Brexit could cost Scottish economy £16bn a year

(tags: UK Europe Scotland economy )

1,000 Danish youths face charges for sharing 15-year-olds’ sex videos

(tags: videos sex children crime denmark )

Albert Hofmann describes the very first usage of LSD

(tags: lsd drugs history )

Google is losing its memory

(tags: Google history fail )

'A monumental change': how Ireland transformed transgender rights

(tags: transgender lgbt Ireland uk )

Man faces online abuse after taking wife's surname on getting married

(tags: abuse names patriarchy men )

Plan to create ‘European boulevard’ in centre of Edinburgh

(tags: edinburgh )

Pointing out how Ted Chian's article on AI risk is nonsense

(tags: ai )

The worst volume control UI in the world

(tags: design satire funny )

Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes

(tags: language punctuation kazakhstan )

Dietary fat, changes in fat metabolism may promote prostate cancer metastasis

(tags: fat cancer prostate mice )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

We experimented with sort of pedestrianising George Street with lots of street cafes a few years ago and decided not to, apparantly because it allowed private organisations to profit from public space.

I think I'd like to see Edinburgh city centre operate for a few years without major roadworks - just so we can get a feel for whether it actually works or not.

[cheekbones3]

Why weren't business rates adjusted accordingly then? Probably a matter of national legislation I'd guess, but it would be nice if this were possible. After all, it's not like it's not done elsewhere in town (it being pavement use).

[danieldwilliam]

Yes, I think it is the difficulty in saying to the businesses in George Street - you and only you get a business rate increase.

[danieldwilliam]

I think other parts of town where the pavement is being used commercially aren't closing a major street in the city centre.

That seemed to be the issue with George Street. The general public suffered the traffic delays and the owners of businesses and buildings on George Street got the profits.

Man taking wife's surname

[alithea]

Dear me, there are some incredibly insecure people who like to project their issues on other people (I mean, I knew that but still, examples still surprise me sometimes).

My sister and I are the last of our family line too. She hasn't changed her name either but I'm not sure if she's talked her husband into their children having our surname yet, I expect it to be a hard sell.

Re: Man taking wife's surname

[danieldwilliam]

I wonder what they think the harm is that is being done to them.

I don't see that it makes much difference to them but they clearly disagree about that because they are spending time and energy being nasty to a stranger on the internet.

Re: Man taking wife's surname

[alithea]

Women are expecting men not to behave as if they own the place and therefore are obviously taking over and emasculating all men until being male becomes something so awful we start only keeping female babies and reproducing by science alone?

I think it's yet another example of equality being perceived as discriminating against the party used to being in the position of privilege.

Re: Man taking wife's surname

[heron61]

That remains the crucial question wrt this, marriage equality, and a host of similar issues, and sadly a great many troglodytes seem to feel that any departure from an imagined "traditional" order is a serious threat.

Trangender rights

[alithea]

That's an encouraging article, I hope the similar legislation planned here goes forward smoothly.

Also nice to see Ireland becoming more progressive, especially as moving there is my back up plan if Brexit completely trashes the country!

[calimac]

Resigning MPs: Accurate info as far as I know, but the focus on the details of signing up for the sinecure posts - which is also something Wikipedia is absolutely obsessed with - obscures the takeaway, which is that it's just a legal figleaf; in all practical terms the prohibition against resigning is a complete dead letter.

Man taking wife's surname: This actually has a long history. It was regular practice in the British gentry for centuries for an heiress's husband, or an adopted heir (e.g. a sister's son), to take the wife's or patron's surname, either in total or attaching it to his old one. That's where all those double-barrelled English surnames come from! (ALL of them, as far as I know.) Winston Churchill's paternal family name was originally Spencer (same family as Princess Diana's); married into the Churchills around 1700, double-barrelled the name, then gradually dropped the "Spencer-" part from daily use.

AI risk: Somewhere (probably from you) I saw a good article on AI, pointing out that corporations act like slow-moving AIs. But I don't think Chiang's article is it. But I found Alexander's rebuttal to be even poorer. His mockery of metaphor relies on the silliness of the idea of scientists making up physical facts about the universe to fit their emotional needs; but when discussing AI, we're all making things up because it doesn't yet exist, and how it will work may depend on how we design it, so the thinkers' emotional ideas remain a live issue. Also, it's incredibly disingenuous of Alexander to pretend that Chiang's use of the term "Silicon Valley" means "a region of California." Those of us who live here know that Silicon Valley is not a geographic area, though it does have a geographic location. Alexander needs to go to a dictionary and look up the word "metonym."

Worst volume controls: Extremely funny. I've seen real things almost that cluelessly evil.

[heron61]

vPointing out how Ted Chiang's article on AI risk is nonsense

While I can see some problems with Chiang's article, I see far more with pretty much anything about AI risk written by anyone associated with Less Wrong. Slatestarcodex often has interesting posts about healthcare and related issues, but on this topic he seems like just another blindly doctrinaire LW follower who utterly loses his critical thinking abilities when anything questions the heart of his faith.

[andrewducker]

That didn't feel like a critique of anything he actually said.

[drplokta]

On the alcohol study, note that according to their graph the worst amount of alcohol to drink for your cognitive performance is none. There is no level of drinking which leads to a performance worse than if you don't drink at all, because the performance if you drink one unit a day is very much better than for non-drinkers. To be fair, the researchers are skeptical about that finding and think it's probably due to sampling bias of some kind.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I am curious about what's going on there.

[doug]

It's a fairly common finding for other effects of alcohol consumption - though how much drinking corresponds to the same deleterious effects varies greatly.

The usual explanation is that "people who don't drink at all" includes a lot of people who don't drink because they're not well in some way. Interestingly, though, the effect tends to persist, albeit reduced in size, even when researchers try to control for it.

Some people use this - often with the addition of a just-so human evolution story - to say that the human body is adapted to alcohol and so does better with some than none.

I'm skeptical, despite being very fond of alcohol. My own guess is that alcohol is simply bad for you (but not very bad in moderation), and that there are several other explanations to account for these findings - including forms of disability, illness, and oddness (all often very mild) that don't easily surface in research causing the not drinking, and also a deleterious social ostracism effect on nondrinkers, which is really bad and we should feel bad.

The human body produces alcohol naturally, of course (not much IIRC), which makes it all more interesting biochemically.

[doug]

Oh, and can I just say that reaction time is a really rubbish measure of cognitive performance.

Also, lots of people are getting confused by this and are saying that drinking improves your reaction times. The drinkers in the study hadn't drunk immediately before the experiment! Alcohol - even in small amounts- has a very strong short-term negative effect on reaction time. This is easy to verify personally, which I have done, and it convinced me thoroughly not to drink at all when driving.