LINKS - May 31st, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Can AI Read Your Mind?
By Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine
“The scanner measured blood flow to the different parts of their brains, showing which parts were active at specific points in the podcast episodes. A large language model (an older version of the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT) then matched the words the subjects heard with their corresponding brain activities.
“The decoder that emerged from this process couldn’t eavesdrop on your inner monologue per se, but after all that training it has become intimately familiar with the brain states evoked by certain language. In subsequent fMRI sessions, it was able to reverse-engineer a thought based solely on the neural signals that thought produced.”
Amber Beads From Iraq’s Ziggurat of Assur Identified
“The new study suggests that the beads, which were found among several thousand shell, stone, glass, and pottery beads in a tunnel under the ziggurat and have been dated to about 1800 B.C., were made of amber from the Baltic or North Sea region.”
Why ancient Mesopotamians buried their dead beneath the floor
By Nicola Laneri, Psyche
“Such a sensorial and material vision of how the community of the living relates to dead ancestors was even stronger in ancient times. Before modern devices allowed memorialisation through the use of photographs or videos, the physical presence of their bodily remains was the only proxy for practising rituals of remembrance. In particular, the history of the ancient communities that inhabited the Middle East from prehistoric times until the arrival of Alexander the Great gives us a clear view of the techniques that were used by the living to stimulate a sensorial memory of the departed ancestors. This perspective is mostly based on the archaeological relics of these rituals, but – starting from the first forms of writing about 5,500 years ago – also on cuneiform written sources that describe such practices.”
Plant-covered roofs could help chill Brazil’s heat-stricken favelas
“Despite the study’s limitations, the results were encouraging. During the period that researchers recorded temperatures, Cassiano’s roof was roughly 86 degrees. His neighbor’s, on the other hand, fluctuated between 86 and 122 degrees. At one point, the roofs of the two homes differed by nearly 40 degrees.
“For Cassiano, the numbers confirmed what he suspected: If he wanted to make a difference, he needed to put green roofs on as many homes as possible.”
Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87
By Alex Williams, The New York Times
“Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that ‘science is a human enterprise,’ Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize.
“To Professor Hacking, they said, science ‘is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is “true,” or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.’”