In the news:

Google just open-sourced TensorFlow, its AI engine.

The Tech Elite’s Quest to Reinvent School in Its Own Image

A Day in the Life

Like a true startup, Khan Lab School constantly changes its schedule to accommodate evolving workflow and logistical demands. Different age-groups follow different self-paced lesson plans, but here’s an example of a day at the Lab School.

9–9:15 am: Morning Meeting

A daily all-school meeting where students learn about things like current events, view the work of their fellow classmates, and focus on relationships.

9:15–9:45 Advisory

Students break out into cohorts sorted by age. They attend one-on-one meetings with advisers to set personal goals. (One ambitious 12-year-old hopes to launch a small-scale NGO.) Some days include “Goal Studio” time to work on these independent passion projects.

9:45–10:45 Literacy Lab, Part 1

Teachers cover all the essentials, from developing main ideas to composing blog posts.

10:45–11 Morning Break

11–11:30 Literacy Lab, Part 2

Instructors use digital tools like Lexia and LightSail to assess students’ reading levels and work with individuals on problem areas.

11:30–12 Inner Wellness

Students improve their mental well-being by practicing mindfulness.

12–12:45 pm Lunch

12:45–1 Afternoon Meeting

Another schoolwide gathering for announcements and updates.

1–2:30 Math/Computer Science Lab

Using videos from Khan Academy, students practice skills at their math level. Younger students receive more direct instruction, while older students might work on a collaborative engineering project.

2:30–3 Outer Wellness

Students participate in physical fitness activities, including gardening and playing sports like field hockey, soccer, and Ultimate Frisbee.

3–4 Cleanup, Read Aloud, Flexible Pick Up/Recess

4–6 Studio Time/Pick Up

During this optional period, students work on their own without direct supervision, though the staff is available for help.

If it is alien structure, what purpose it have most probably? In your opinion?

That's less likely than that it's something aliens constructed to make their lives better.

Imagining the orientations as a series of rotations along individual, orthonormal basis axes, you may run into the problem of gimbal lock. Try visualising the desired final result as an orientation represented by a quaternion.

If we are in a simulation, why isn’t the simulation more streamlined? I have a couple of examples for that:

• Classical physics and basic chemistry would likely be sufficient for life to exist.
• There are seven uninhabitable planets in our solar system.
• 99.9…% of everything performs extremely boring computations (dirt, large bodies of fluids and gas etc.).
• The universe is extremely hostile towards intelligent life (GRBs, supernovae, scarcity of resources, large distances between celestial body).

It seems that our simulation hosts would need to have access to vast or unlimited resources. (In that case it would be interesting to consider whether life is sustainable in a world with unlimited resources at all. Perhaps scarcity is somehow required for ethical behavior to develop; malice would perhaps spread too easily.)

I’m a big fan of these infographics by the way.

I've found I've become a smidge more conservative-- I was in favor of the Arab Spring, and to put it mildly, it hasn't worked well. I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.

Any thoughts about how much stability should be respected?

I have banned advancedatheist. While he's been tiresome, I find that I have more tolerance for nastiness than some, but this recent comment was the last straw. I've found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals, and that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.

Do you believe that those posts that receive massive downvotes are healthy for LW? Otherwise why do you continue posting them?

SOMA is a new horror videogame by the makers of Amnesia The Dark Descent.

The developers list Phillip K Dick, China Mieville, Permutation City, and the works of Peter Watts as primary influences.

Main character lives in Canada in 2015, goes in for a new experimental high-resolution brain-scan to aid treatment of his recent brain injury - and then all of a sudden he is sitting on a chair in some kind of post-apocalyptic undersea base full of malfunctioning robots (many of which seem to think they are human and many of which are insane) and biological humans heavily infected by technology that seems much more organic than the base itself but seem to not have much like their original minds left. I leave it to the reader to infer what happened to cause this sudden perspective shift.

Game plot comes down to a conflict between a powerful yet stupid AI trying to keep alive the last of humanity after a catastrophe beyond its control (but with a rather different definition of 'humanity' and 'alive') and robots running human brain emulations trying to carry out the last wishes of the last biological humans.