Nice. Good to see actual hard science books popularized and available for free.
The textbook industry is a criminal cartel shafting both the students/knowledge seekers and authors/professors. Hence i really appreciate the way you have made the pdf available both for free and for a nominal price; so thank you.
We need more hard science (Physics/Chemistry/Biology/etc.) content (books/articles/videos/etc.) on HN. For example, the interdisciplinary field of "Materials Science" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_science) is one the most practical and important for our modern world and yet there is hardly any discussions/popularization about it.
I used to think that way about the publishing industry too, but I now think that this description is not deserved. Just observing it from an operational perspective: a laptop to type, software to edit, book printers that will talk to you, payment rails, and even access to world-class distribution: it’s all available to us now. On the other side of the market, students and teachers are not locked in either. Barriers to entry are nonexistent. For context, see the links I posted in my other comments on this page. It’s all in our hands!
Nice; thanks for the pointer to the paper (i had not known of it).
The key to understanding and usage of Formal Methods is to realize that it is a way of thinking at many different levels. You can choose whatever level seems intuitive and accessible to you.
Carroll Morgan's classic (In-)Formal Methods: The Lost Art --- A Users’ Manual and his recent book on the same are also relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490017
Mischkowski’s own research has uncovered a sinister side-effect of paracetamol. For a long time, scientists have known that the drug blunts physical pain by reducing activity in certain brain areas, such as the insular cortex, which plays an important role in our emotions. These areas are involved in our experience of social pain, too – and intriguingly, paracetamol can make us feel better after a rejection.
Mischkowski wondered whether painkillers might be making it harder to experience empathy
And recent research has revealed that this patch of cerebral real-estate is more crowded than anyone previously thought, because it turns out the brain’s pain centres also share their home with empathy.
For example, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans have shown that the same areas of our brain become active when we’re experiencing “positive empathy” –pleasure on other people’s behalf – as when we’re experiencing pain.
Given these facts, Mischkowski wondered whether painkillers might be making it harder to experience empathy. Earlier this year, together with colleagues from Ohio University and Ohio State University, he recruited some students and spilt them into two groups. One received a standard 1,000mg dose of paracetamol, while the other was given a placebo. Then he asked them to read scenarios about uplifting experiences that had happened to other people, such as the good fortune of “Alex”, who finally plucked up the courage to ask a girl on a date (she said yes).
The results revealed that paracetamol significantly reduces our ability to feel positive empathy – a result with implications for how the drug is shaping the social relationships of millions of people every day. Though the experiment didn’t look at negative empathy – where we experience and relate to other people’s pain – Mischkowski suspects that this would also be more difficult to summon after taking the drug.
What? Read the article fully; it has to do with "negative empathy" different from "positive empathy".
Dominik Mischkowski is a Pain Researcher at Ohio University who has been studying this for a while. The word "suspects" here is statistical research-speak meaning there is a correlation (w.r.t. positive empathy) but more studies are warranted (w.r.t. negative empathy). That is all.
Folks might find the following useful for studying PLs;
1) Advanced Programming Language Design by Raphael Finkel - A classic (late 90s) book comparing a whole smorgasbord of languages.
2) Design Concepts in Programming Languages by Franklyn Turbak et al. - A comprehensive (and big) book on PL design.
3) Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van Roy et al. - Shows how to organically add different programming paradigms to a simple core language.
Carver Mead's "Analog VLSI and Neural Systems" for where neuromorphic computing started. Intel's Loihi papers (Mike Davies et al.) for where it is now. Our paper takes a different path — constraints instead of neurons.
Thank You. I see those (and more) at the wikipedia entry for NC.
Any books you can recommend? I see a bunch on Amazon but not sure which are the good technical ones. Something with more information about the various hardware approaches (eg. non-ISA/hybrid/etc.) would be welcome.
Event-Based Neuromorphic Systems" (Liu, Delbrück, Indiveri, Whatley, Douglas — Wiley 2014). For current silicon, read the Loihi 2, TrueNorth, and SpiNNaker 2 primary papers directly — books can't keep up with where the hardware is actually moving.
Headache? More like a morass from which we will never get out of, unless we learn to use Formal Methods techniques to have AI generate code using a correct-by-construction approach. Classic ideas from Floyd/Hoare/Dijkstra/Meyer are the key techniques to use before moving on to heavyweight techniques like model-checking/theorem-proving etc.
Particularly see the presentations on Ramanujan by Prof. Ken Ono and the various documentaries on him linked to in my comment chain here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41910851
K. Srinivasa Rao has said, "As for his place in the world of Mathematics, we quote Bruce C. Berndt: 'Paul Erdős has passed on to us Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100. Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J. E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.'"
The broader overlapping concept is Evolutionary Mismatch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_mismatch
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