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The Giant Squid Nebula

Somewhere out there is a guy with a bear trap on his head because it’s been on there for years and if he took it off now people would be like “Hey, you got rid of the bear trap! What prompted this?” and he won’t have a perfectly rational answer.

This post is a stand-in for a very real complaint that I'll eventually speak of at a later time.

A storm brewing (Puritan and Cavalier), oil on canvas ― Edgar Bundy (British, 1862-1922)

interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume?

me: mhm so that’s called a lacuna. it refers to when manuscripts have missing parts, lost to time. for example, the epic of gilgamesh has

Macrophage Defector

Natural killer cells are a type of immune cell that protects the body against not only invading pathogens but also cancer, providing an innate defence against these rogue cells. Some tumours, however, keep natural kill cells at bay and thereby avoid destruction. And recent research in lung tumours reveals this natural killer cell exclusion is achieved with the help of another immune cell – the macrophage. The particular culprit is a type of macrophage covered in a protein called TREM2 – an anti-inflammatory factor. Shown above is a lung tumour (green) packed with TREM2-expressing macrophages (red) that are protecting the cancer from attack. Why these macrophages switch allegiance and side with enemy is unclear, but blocking TREM2 while boosting natural killer cell activity was shown to reduce lung tumour growth in mice suggesting a similar approach might be effective in promoting tumour regression in humans too.

Written by Ruth Williams

Image from work by Matthew D. Park and Ivan Reyes-Torres, and colleagues

Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Nature Immunology, April 2023

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The White House bragging about how many different countries have reached out to negotiate in response to the tariffs reminds me of that part of Disco Elysium where you have the option to put a loaded gun in your mouth and threaten to pull the trigger as a negotiating tactic. It is certainly one way to start a conversation!

"If we keep on optimizing the proxy objective, even after our goal stops improving, something more worrying happens. The goal often starts getting worse, even as our proxy objective continues to improve. Not just a little bit worse either — often the goal will diverge towards infinity. This is an extremely general phenomenon in machine learning. It mostly doesn't matter what our goal and proxy are, or what model architecture we use. If we are very efficient at optimizing a proxy, then we make the thing it is a proxy for grow worse."

Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart's law

When you switch on a lightbulb, your eyes perceive photons, and some neurons in your brain activate. If you switch off the light, then so-called ‘off’ neurons activate. You don’t actually “stop seeing” when you’re in the dark. No; the mind physically represents nothingness in a pattern of neurons.

The phrase “nothing exists” is not a self-contradicting statement but a statement of fact. Nothing exists.

I’ll never understand why people argue about free will. Your choices were always determined by the shape of the universe at the moment you decided to argue. Isn’t that beautiful, though?