Sundry: praise, tuna, glass, chickens and the pandemic, grammar, chess
S U N D R Y
Insights on the psychology of praise — psyarxiv.com
A Japanese app leverages AI to help people choose good raw tuna. Japan’s tuna markets have always included inspectors who were able, after 10 years of practice, to judge the quality of a tuna from the tail cut. But less and less people know how to practice this arcane yet useful skill. Today, a phone with a camera can do the job. The app creators fed thousands of images to a deep learning algorithm which can successfully identify great tuna 90% of the time — reuters.com
Why is glass rigid? I am told it looks liquid at a microscopic scale, which is surprising. Rigid materials usually have rigid microscopic structures — quantamagazine.com
An animated primer on why Noam Chomsky’s 1950s ideas on language were both essential and not entirely accurate. The first idea is that there is a universal grammar common to every language. The second idea is that humans have a genetic, innate ability to acquire language. Although he was never able to prove that languages shared even a similar principle, the innateness theory fatally challenged “behaviorism”, which was the then dominant paradigm. Behaviorists argued that all we learn is through experience (kind of like a blank slate theory). Researchers never found that there is a specific faculty for language acquisition as Chomsky posited. But we discovered that there are biological factors affecting learning, and cognition more generally. This was when we veered towards cognitive science, and apply the scientific method to the study of the mind — openculture.com
A 28 year old guy without any degree became an influential writer about the economy. The subscribers to his newsletter include members of the Fed — bloomberg.com
Chess and religion have a conflictual relationship. There are many instances of religious authorities banning chess throughout geographies and time. Perhaps it has something to do with the inherent tension between the deceitfulness of playing games and the ethical aspects of religion? — chess.com
A warning from the chickens, or how the globalization of big farms fosters pandemics — thewalrus.ca
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