-
9 votes
-
Animals are using Utah’s largest wildlife overpass earlier than expected
11 votes -
The race to make the world's fastest running shoe
5 votes -
Markets are not incompatible with discrimination (2014)
2 votes -
Why scientists are turning to Rust
9 votes -
Educational and fun podcast episode about vaginal health: Dr. Jen Gunter with Jameela Jamil
4 votes -
Why Raku is the ideal language for Advent of Code
5 votes -
Due to the pandemic, an estimated fifty million children in Afghanistan and Pakistan missed polio vaccines this year
6 votes -
Project Wingman | Launch trailer
4 votes -
A case for the possible sale of Wizards of the Coast
6 votes -
Capitalists are bad at business
10 votes -
A few of you seemed to like my brother's comic, so thought I'd let you know that issue #3 of SPACE PIRATES is now out
11 votes -
China's Chang'e-5 mission has successfully landed on the moon, will now collect and return the first lunar samples since 1976
13 votes -
On colonial nostalgia and food in fantasy writing
4 votes -
No game days. No bars. The pandemic is forcing some men to realize they need deeper friendships.
30 votes -
How supercomputers are identifying Covid-19 therapeutics
7 votes -
TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here. Please just try to provide fair warning of...
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
4 votes -
How machine-readable content benefits everyone who publishes content online
4 votes -
Rubber ducks have become a symbol of Thailand’s pro-democracy protests in Bangkok after demonstrators used them as shields against police water cannon and teargas
12 votes -
Mutt releases version 2.0
16 votes -
Danish murder on Bornholm island raises tension in race debate – rights groups have reacted by questioning whether potential hate crimes are being seriously investigated
8 votes -
Evictions have led to 10,000 additional COVID deaths
12 votes -
Microsoft's 'Project Latte' aims to bring Android apps to Windows 10
7 votes -
NHS to trial blood test to detect more than fifty forms of cancer
9 votes -
Blood Orange - High Street (feat. Skepta) (2013)
5 votes -
Control: The Foundation | Expansion trailer
9 votes -
Australian telescope maps new atlas of the universe in record speed
5 votes -
Study indicates climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children
20 votes -
Gamedev from scratch 0: Groundwork
5 votes -
Google Desktop (2004) - demo and retrospective
6 votes -
In pursuit of intentionality
7 votes -
Endnote 2: White Fascism
3 votes -
Legendary science fiction author Ben Bova has passed at the age of 88, due to Covid
10 votes -
How Qanon invaded moms' Facebook groups
11 votes -
Brad learns how to compost | It's Alive
6 votes -
‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures
22 votes -
What Facebook fed the baby boomers. Many Americans’ feeds are nightmares. I know because I spent weeks living inside two of them.
18 votes -
Asteroid impact: What are our chances?
4 votes -
'Sistine Chapel of the ancients' rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
11 votes -
Keleketla! - Keleketla! (2020)
4 votes -
Protein folding, 2020
7 votes -
Because cheerleading is not governed by the NCAA, its participants can sign lucrative endorsement deals that would lead to punishment for most college athletes
5 votes -
AlphaFold: A solution to a fifty-year-old grand challenge in biology
7 votes -
Radicle -- A peer-to-peer stack for building software together
16 votes -
The podcast The Butterfly Effect and Last Day of Autumn are free to listen to, do it
5 votes -
The impact of toxic influencers on communities
11 votes -
Popular pirate sites disappear from DuckDuckGo top results
25 votes -
When was the last or most important time you tried proving someone wrong?
At what lengths did you go to prove this person wrong? Did proving this person wrong cause a major transition in your life? Side bar: The question comes from watching Dancer Boy.
7 votes -
Why Nova Scotia sends Boston a tree every year
@Canadian Forces in 🇺🇸: This tree from Nova Scotia is now in Boston Common.The Nova Scotians send one every year.Why? pic.twitter.com/T0iCbPoEh5
14 votes -
BOTI Science: Best of interval compilations, suggestions? Supporting trends identification
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and...
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and running into the Ever Growing List dilemma, I hit on what I call BOTI, or Best of the Interval (day, week, month, year, decade, century, etc.). It's similar to the tickler file 43 folder perpetual filing system of GTD. For technical types, a round-robin database or circular buffer.
(As with my bullet journal experiments, the effort is uneven but recoverable, which is its core strength.)
By setting up a cascade of buffers --- day of month, (optionally week or weekdays), month of year, year of decade, decade of century, century of millennium, millennium of 10kyr, a progressively larger scale record (roughly order-of-magnitude based), with a resolution of day but a maximum retention of (here) 10,000 years but only 83 record bins. How much you choose to put in each bin is up to you, but the idea is that only to most significant information is carried forward. Yes, some information is lost but total data storage requirements are known once the bin size and count are established.
Another problem BOTI addresses is finite attention. If you limit yourself to a finite set of items per year, say ten to one hundred (about what a moderately motivated individual could be aware of), BOTI is a form of noise-filtering. Items which seemed urgent or captivating in the moment often fade in significance with time, and often overlooked element rise in significance with time and context. 'Let it settle with time" is a good cure to FOMO.
There's the question of revisiting context. I'd argue that significance might be substantially revised years, decades, possibly centuries after a discovery or inventiion. So an end-of-period purge of all but the top items isn't what we're looking for. Gut a gradual forgetting / pruning seems the general idea.
Back to science and technology: It's hard to assess significance in the moment, and day-to-day reports of science and technology advances are noisy. I've been looking for possible sources to use and am finding little that's satisfactory. I'd like suggestions.
- Many newspapers and magazines run annual "best of" features. These typically include books, but not science (or at least not regularly). Some of the books are science- or technonolgy-related, though.
- There are the Nobel prizes, notably in physics, chemistry, and medicine, with lists at Wikipedia (linked). The Fields Medal in maths. Other fields have their awards, of which lists might prove useful...
- I'm having trouble finding something like a yearbook of science or technology, though some titles match, e.g., McGraw-Hill yearbook of science and technology. On closer look, this might answer my question, at least for yearbooks.
- Wikipedia has some promising but either inconsistent or untidily organised pages or collections, including the List of years in science, Timeline of historic inventions, Timeline of scientific discoveries, Timeline of scientific thought, among numerous other timelines. Compilations are useful but aren't themselves rankings. See also "never ending list" above.
There is a goal here: trends over time. I've a few senses of directions of research and progress, possibly also of biases in awards. Looking at, for example, Nobels in physics, chemistry, and medicine from, say, 1901--1960 vs. 1961--2020, there seems to be a marked shift, though categorising that might be difficult. The breakpoint isn't necessarily 1960 either --- 1950 or 1940 might be argued for.
There is the question of how to measure significance of scientific discoveries or technological inventions. I'm not going to get into that though several standard measures (e.g., counting patents issued) strike me as highly problematic, despite being common in research. Discussion might be interesting.
Mostly, though, I'm looking for data sources.
5 votes