Happy Brithday Saroo & Blue!

March 24th 2024; the day Saroo and Blue came to Max's home. This day became their birthday. 

Life hasn't been mundane ever since they came :-) 

Happy 9th birthday my little ones!

What Was The Very First Plant In The World?

The story of plants begins in the water. The earliest plantlike organisms were simple, tiny green life-forms such as algae. You can still see algae today as seaweed along beaches or as green slime on rocks in ponds.

Algae have lived in Earth’s oceans and lakes for over 1 billion years. They can make their own food, using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create sugars. This process is called photosynthesis; it releases oxygen – the gas we need to breathe – as a byproduct.

At first, Earth’s atmosphere had very little oxygen. Over millions of years, photosynthesizing organisms like algae and some bacteria slowly released oxygen into the air. This change, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event, made it possible for larger and more complex life to evolve. Without oxygen-producing organisms, animals, including humans, could never have existed.

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Moving onto land was not easy. Water plants are supported by water and can absorb nutrients easily, but land plants faced new challenges. How would they avoid drying out? How could they stand upright without floating? How would they get water and nutrients from dry ground?

To survive, early plants evolved important new features. One key adaptation was a waxy coating, called a cuticle, which helped keep water inside the plant. Plants also developed stronger cell walls that allowed them to stand upright against gravity. Simple rootlike structures, called rhizoids, helped anchor plants to the ground and absorb water and minerals from the soil.

The earliest land plants were very small and simple. They looked similar to modern mosses, liverworts and hornworts, which still grow today in damp places like forest floors and stream edges. These plants did not have true roots or stems, and they stayed close to the ground. Fossils of early land plants, such as Cooksonia, date back to about 430 million years ago and show small branching stems only an inch or two tall.

- More Here

Happy 20th Birthday Max !

My everything would have been 20 today! 

20 years! 

Two insignificant creatures became one this day to make earth a little better place than the one we inherited. 

Happy Birthday Max! 

You know I talk to you every hour if not every moment of the day - I am in you and you are in me. 

Together we bought beauty, magic, awe, wonder, and peace into our lives and it will persist for eternity my love. 

I love you, I miss you every moment.

                                                                2009, Max's 3rd Birthday!

Underrated Ways To Change The World

Wonderful list here!!

Good Bye Robert Trivers

He was the only person, I wanted to meet but never met (although he lived in NJ).

Humanity hasn't scratched the surface of his work's; thank you for everything sir.

Wisdom Of Taleb

To be a real Human, one needs intelligence, courage, tenacity, curiosity, and a strong sense of justice. 

Remove any one of the five and you end up with the equivalent of a lemon. 

Remove the sense of justice and you end up with a monster.

- Taleb

Animal Suffering...

Animals who are sick, in pain, cold, frustrated, or thirsty respond differently to experimental cancer treatments. Animal stress is not just bad for the animals but it’s also bad for the scientists’ data.

- How Animal Suffering Can Ruin Lab Experiments, Lab animal veterinarian

There Is No Such Thing As Grand Strategy - The Continued Influence Of A Bad Genre

So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.

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A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.

Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.

There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.

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"Surprisingly Popular" Algorithm - Better Wisdom From Crowds

The new method is simple. For a given question, people are asked two things: What they think the right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The variation between the two aggregate responses indicates the correct answer.

“In situations where there is enough information in the crowd to determine the correct answer to a question, that answer will be the one [that] most outperforms expectations,” says paper co-author Drazen Prelec, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the Department of Economics and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

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Across all these areas, the researchers found that the “surprisingly popular” algorithm reduced errors by 21.3 percent compared to simple majority votes, and by 24.2 percent compared to basic confidence-weighted votes (where people express how confident they are in their answers). And it reduced errors by 22.2 percent compared to another kind of confidence-weighted votes, those taking the answers with the highest average confidence levels.

The paper, “A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem,” is being published today in Nature. The authors are Prelec; John McCoy, a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of neuroscience and computer science at Princeton University and a former MIT faculty member. Prelec and McCoy are also researchers in the MIT Neuroeconomics Laboratory, where Prelec is the principal investigator.

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In this sense, the “surprisingly popular” principle is not simply derived from the wisdom of crowds. Instead, it uses the knowledge of a well-informed subgroup of people within the larger crowd as a diagnostically powerful tool that points to the right answer.

“A lot of crowd wisdom weights people equally,” McCoy explains. “But some people have more specialized knowledge.” And those people — if they have both correct information and a correct sense of public perception — make a big difference.

- More Here

No-Technological-Solution Problem

Bingo! What an insight!

We sapiens fucked things up, are still fucking things up, and promise, to continue fucking things up in future. 

Changing their mind and behavior is not in the equation but my species is planning to  innovate the fuck of technologies to clean up the mess they created while they continue to fuck things up. 

Hmm, god bless my species. 

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Dan Brooks about his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century:

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. 

This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. 

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That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

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One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation.