Abstract
We introduce ChillsDB the first validated database of audiovisual stimuli eliciting aesthetic chills (goosebumps, psychogenic shivers) in a US population. To discover chills stimuli “in the wild”, we devised a bottom-up, ecologically-valid method consisting in searching for mentions of the emotion’ somatic markers in user comments throughout social media platforms (YouTube and Reddit). We successfully captured 204 chills-eliciting videos of three categories: music, film, and speech. We then tested the top 50 videos in the database on 600+ participants and validated a gold standard of 10 stimuli with a 0.9 probability of generating chills. All ChillsDB tools and data are fully available on GitHub for researchers to be able to contribute and perform further analysis.Background & Summary
Aesthetic chills are a universal marker of human peak experiences across the arts, sciences and world religions. Best characterized as the feeling of cold down the spine or goosebumps while engaging with music or film, chills are the sensation associated to shivers: short thermogenic tremors of skeletal muscles. Though ordinarily involved in the regulation of temperature (or as an immune response during fever), chills can also be triggered by information-related processes (e.g., music, stories, speeches), independently of changes in temperature (i.e., psychogenic shivers, thereafter “chills”).
Category: Tech / Science
World’s Hottest Day on Record
The record for the world’s hottest day has tumbled twice in one week, according to the European climate change service.
On Monday the global average surface air temperature reached 17.15C, breaking the record of 17.09C set on Sunday.
It beats the record set in July 2023, and it could break again this week.
Parts of the world are experiencing powerful heatwaves including the Mediterranean, Russia and Canada.
World breaks hottest day record twice in a week
July 24, 2024
Renewable Energy in California
Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy.
California Is Showing How a Big State Can Power Itself Without Fossil Fuels
For part of almost every day this spring, the state produced more electricity than it needed from renewable sources.
By Bill McKibben
Google Search – Getting Lamer, Worse, Dumber, Shill…
In March, Gisele Navarro watched Google Search traffic to her Web site, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh evaluates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020, when the pandemic created a spike in demand for air purification, and at its peak the business had fifteen paid contributors. (Navarro and Ashton also work together at NeoMam, a content studio that Ashton founded.) Google traffic to HouseFresh had been slowly declining since last October, but the recent drop was far more dramatic—from around four thousand daily search referrals, or click-throughs from Google results, to around three hundred. The site makes money from affiliate fees, taking a small cut when a reader follows a link from HouseFresh to purchase an air purifier online; less traffic means less revenue, and the site can now only afford to pay one full-time employee. Navarro told me, “We are living our lives like Google is gone for us.”
The drop in traffic to HouseFresh has coincided with internal changes to Google’s search function. In late 2023, Google rolled out a series of algorithm modifications; with a “core update” in March, it made those changes permanent. HouseFresh reviews previously ranked highly on Google searches for air purifiers, but lately its articles have been buried below recommendations from brand-name publications—Better Homes and Gardens, People, Architectural Digest (which is owned by Condé Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker). Navarro even noticed Rolling Stone, the music magazine owned by Penske Media, recommending anti-mold humidifiers. To her, it seemed as if media companies were making a grab for affiliate revenue without the expertise that her own site had worked hard to cultivate—and it looked as if Google was rewarding them for doing so. HouseFresh followed Google’s guidelines for search-engine optimization, or S.E.O.s—the company suggests that Web sites “provide original information” and demonstrate “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”—but this no longer seemed to have any effect. “There are people who feel that Google is obfuscating the truth,” Navarro said. “It’s lying to our faces, or gaslighting.” She began publishing articles on HouseFresh about the decline in search traffic, with headlines such as “How Google Is Killing Independent Sites Like Ours.” The articles got more search traffic than the reviews did.
Is Google S.E.O. Gaslighting the Internet?
Leaked documents provide a glimpse into the inner workings of Google Search—and contradict the company’s public
Kyle Chayka
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-google-seo-gaslighting-the-internet
Computer Keeps Making Me Sign In – Checked Power Settings and Screen Saver and That Didn’t Work – How to Fix
FIX – Go to Smart Assist > Zero Touch Lock – Set to off:
Solution to screen lock problem
Numerous threads in regards to the issue of screen lock and not being able to disable it.I too had this issue and I change registry values and every conceivable setting and still Windows 11 would put me in screen lock and I had to re-enter my pin.
The problem is not in Windows 11 but rather something called “proximity sensor” which all hardware vendors now enable by default (HP, Lenovo, etc). In Lenovo you need to go into Lenovo Vantage and then into Smart Assist and disable “Zero Touch Lock”. Your screen will not get locked every 1-3 minutes when you step away.
AI Hallucination – Definition, Example of
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called confabulation or delusion) is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there’s a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with unjustified responses or beliefs rather than perceptual experiences.
For example, a chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, may embed plausible-sounding random falsehoods within its generated content. Researchers have recognized this issue, and by 2023, analysts estimated that chatbots hallucinate as much as 27% of the time, with factual errors present in 46% of their responses. Detecting and mitigating these hallucinations pose significant challenges for practical deployment and reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Some researchers believe the specific term “AI hallucination” unreasonably anthropomorphizes computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)
As an example, Googling to find a movie with three actors, Rainn Wilson, Kevin Hart, and Jason Statham, and Google says they were all in Crank, when only Statham was:
movie with rainn wilson kevin hart jason statham
Rainn Wilson, Kevin Hart, and Jason Statham star in Crank, a 2006 action movie that ends with Chelios breaking Verona’s neck in a helicopter. Some critics say the movie is better than expected and powered by a great performance from Statham.
VO2 Max – Health Indicator
Derek Thompson: Steve, I want to start with you: VO2 max. If you’re a listener who is anywhere proximate to the health and lifespan world, there is a 90 percent chance you have heard the term “VO2 max” in the last year, maybe the last month, possibly the last 15 minutes. This is a health and fitness metric that seems to have exploded into popular consciousness in large part thanks to the bestselling book Outlive by Peter Attia. The New York Times just recently, last week, called VO2 max “the best way to track fitness and longevity.” The best way to track fitness and longevity. Steve, ground-floor level please, what is VO2 max?
Steve Magness: I’ve got to say, as an exercise scientist, it humbles me that this has now come out as the thing when we’ve been able to measure VO2 max since about the 1930s. But anyways, what is VO2 max? Quite simply, it’s the maximum amount of oxygen that we can utilize. So it’s essentially how much oxygen you can breathe in, and then go through your circulatory system, and then utilized by the muscles, and that’s what it is. So the way we measure it is pretty simple. You get put on a treadmill or a bike in an exercise science or a doctor’s lab. They hook you up to a mask. That mask has a tube that runs into a machine or a bag that essentially measures how much oxygen you’re breathing in and out, and then they ramp up the exercise. You start really easy, and then the speed gets faster on the treadmill every one or two minutes, depending on the protocol.
And you keep that going until essentially you cry uncle, which is you are so exhausted that you either fall off the back of the treadmill, which happens with elite athletes, or, more so with regular people, you just scream, hit stop, and just are done. And generally, at the end of the fastest that you’re going on that treadmill, your oxygen consumption is at its highest level, and whatever that number is is your VO2 max. And it’s a surrogate indicator of cardiovascular or aerobic fitness. And the way I like to describe it is it’s the measure of the engine size of the car. So it’s that big number that we use holistically to look at aerobic fitness.
…
Magness: They use the speed that you reached at the end of the treadmill when you called uncle, when you quit. So I think this is really important because we confuse the thing. We say, “Oh. It’s VO2 max. It’s VO2 max. It’s VO2 max.” Vast majority of times in these mortality longevity studies, it’s not. We use that speed, or incline, or watts on the bike, and say, essentially, “How fast can you get until you’re exhausted on this test?” And that is what correlates to mortality, longevity, etc.
Health Fads and Fictions: VO2 Max, Supplement Mania, Sunlight, and Immortality
Max Planck on the Evolution of Ideas
Scientists and philosophers are exquisitely sensitive to the advantage of ideas that already enjoy broad familiarity. The history of science is a long story about good ideas facing rejection after punishing rejection until enough scientists become acquainted with the concepts, at which point they become law. Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who helped lay the groundwork for quantum theory, said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
Derek Thompson
Apple Vision on the Subway
Working in the NYC subway on the go with Apple Vision Pro?! 🤯🤯 pic.twitter.com/iVWiYlxjxP
— Alexxxx (@haig98) February 3, 2024
Web Surfing – Early Days of the Internet
PALOmino1701
I used to keep a magazine beside the computer so I could read something while waiting for a web page to load.
chevymonza
Just the other day, I ran into a guy who said “I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a magazine.” I had to take a minute to digest this idea.
HiddenCity
“When I was your age, television was called books.” -grampa in the princess bride
“When I was your age, internet was called magazines” -chevymonza
throwawayayaycaramba
I was thinking about it just the other day… it’s crazy how centralized the internet has become, how everything now revolves around a handful of sites. Back in the day going online was basically like going on an adventure, there was no “hub”; how long it’s been since I was recommended a cool website! I remember I had a magazine from like 2000 something, where they had a list of “the 50 best websites on the web”; that whole idea feels so archaic nowadays.
kemushi_warui
That’s why it was called “surfing”. Because you’d go to a site, then catch a link to another, and then to another. It’s like you were riding from one to the next, and could end up at a totally unexpected place.
TheTardisPizza
It was like falling into a Wikipedia hole except it was everything.
Scarbane
StumbleUpon
SnooBananas915
And you had to type the website in exactly to get what you wanted. Which meant having 30 random, crumpled, torn pieces of paper with long URLs on them. In your pockets, your bags, your desk.
slashdave
Yahoo used to have what was intended as a top-down directory of the entire internet, created by hand. It was incredibly useful at the time.
Lambda Calculus – Brief Overview of
Theranos – Believe or Else
The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. Copies of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s famous novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy who finds his destiny by going on a journey to Egypt, had been placed on every chair. Still visibly angry, Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Sunny put it more bluntly: anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.”
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou
Old Code – Load Bearing Bugs
The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore
byu/debordian inprogramming
Ancillas
Had to learn COBOL and JCL at my first job. It wasn’t tremendously hard, but there was a huge volume of programs to understand.
At one point I was maintaining code written in 1969 where there was a bug that no one was supposed to fix because there was 45 years worth of programs that assumed that bug was present.
midri
Load bearing bug
ejfrodo
I spent a while building a code analysis tool for an ancient proprietary language that was basically a superset of Pascal. A multi billion dollar company was built on this. Nobody at the company fully knew how it worked because they’d all retired years ago so I just had to be a code archeologist and hunt through the ruins. That was an interesting project
giantsparklerobot
Part of the problem with COBOL is it was meant for non-programmers to be able to encode/automate literal business logic. Maintaining or replacing a COBOL system isn’t only about just the code. The under-specified business process needs to be reimplemented with 50-60 years worth of special exemptions and in many cases load bearing bugs.
You can learn COBOL as easily as any other language. It’s much harder to bring in someone that understands the business process that COBOL automated.
RearExitOnly
Finally someone who gets it. I was well paid not because I was the worlds best COBOL programmer, but because I was an expert on grain contracts. In the Midwest I was never out of work and usually made more than double what PC guys were making back in the 80’s.
Maleficent_Mouse_930
I am currently leading a squad developing a replacement for a core banking program originally In COBOL, and the complexity is 100% in the actual operations. The code ain’t too tough, but it’s been 18 months so far of reverse engineering back and forth with the finance and compliance guys trying to nail down what’s needed. Every time we find a new intricacy and tell them, they’re like “Oh yeah, didn’t we tell you that?”
Morons. They’ve been relying on this software so long they don’t even know their own jobs any more.
Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience – The New York Times
“Now we find something that potentially can explain it in the brain,” she said. “The brain doesn’t look like it’s in a state of memory; it looks like it is a state of present experience.”
Indeed, the authors conclude in the paper, “traumatic memories are not experienced as memories as such,” but as “fragments of prior events, subjugating the present moment.”
The traumatic memories appeared to engage a different area of the brain — the posterior cingulate cortex, or P.C.C., which is usually involved in internally directed thought, like introspection or daydreaming. The more severe the person’s PTSD symptoms were, the more activity appeared in the P.C.C.
Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience