Fall, Or Dodge in Hell (Neil Stephenson) and The Waves (Ken Liu) are two other good stories about brain scanning and transhumanism. The first one is a ridiculously long novel about a future where the cloud is increasingly used for uploading souls of scanned brains, and the second one is a short story where people on a spaceship eventually evolve into noncorporal beings.
Won't fungi and bacteria eat (cellulose-based) the clothes, releasing the same amount of CO₂, only a bit slower?
Synthetic fabrics can likely be buried as a form of carbon sequestration though.
I just had a nice trip to Venice and I was curious about it's history. Supposedly, the Venice republic lasted almost 1000 years, basically from after the fall of Rome to Napoleon based on a weird lottery system for choosing the Doge.
I've never read up on the republic of Venice, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia article on its election procedure... that is a strangely large number of voting rounds and lotteries.
At ECAI conference last week there was a panel discussion and someone had a great quote, "in Europe we are in the golden age of AI regulation, while the US and China are in the actual golden age of AI".
Actually if you want to find the origin of bell bottoms, according to a museum exhibit on men's clothing I saw, it was the sans coulottes in the 1700s. They protested the aristocrats, who wore high-legged pants, and eventually led to the French revolution and the association of bell bottoms with revolutionary/countercultural things.
I did an image search for sans coulottes and I did not see any bell bottoms. They did appear to wear long pants to the ankles rather than breeches to the knees.
Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.
Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.
Its just a number game. You see say 15 patients per day, so maybe 3000 a year. Even if you have a tiny 1% chance of overlooking something, thats 30 cases a year, easily. In a career, that jumps to 1000 cases minimally.
Now a lot of folks come to doctors with very vague problems - ie 'chest pain' is probably the worst since it can be from nothing to killer (and it really often is). Also you need to keep constantly full mental model of all the other problems of patient (allergies, injuries, degenerative diseases of literally everything in the body), plus all their medication and how it interacts with those problems and whatever new treatment you are applying. Old folks are generally worst in sense that they are just breaking down altogether including their mind, so everything is potentially a problem, but then you sometimes have very little time to decide.
Its just not possible to not make mistakes, and its only matter of time before they become fatal. But doctors will never admit this to strangers, even close ones they often keep avoiding this topic. I grok them - idealists who want to save lives, but reality ain't some MSF hospital in middle of warzone where you save 50 lives a day and people celebrate you like a national hero, its small churning of all above, tons of bureaucracy and regulations and various financial pressures, so they do their best just like rest of us, and like rest of us mistakes (even if just misunderstandings with bad consequences) do happen.
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