I doubt Trump will do anything that could be perceived as encouraging more whistleblowers, at least while he’s in office.

Best case—a Democrat wins the next election, Trump gives up on trying to stop it, and pardons Snowden on his way out.

If it’s in a Greek or ancient Latin context I pronounce it with a hard C, but if it’s a general English context I pronounce it with a soft C.

I’m not sure what the third way would be.

The same reason we capitalize peoples’ names, since a title is the proper name of a written work.

According to the paper, they tested ten different split-and-merge scenarios and this one was the most likely. But they give some important caveats, including:

• They assume that the smaller group had a more-or-less constant population size—if it fluctuated significantly, some of their other predictions on the dating of the split and merge might be off.

• They can’t rule out more complicated scenarios, like three or more splits and merges (but they can rule out the simpler scenario of no splits).

They do say that they tested their model on a number of other species (including chimps, bats, and dolphins), and got results consistent with those species’ known evolutionary histories.

Some animals are more equal than others!

They compared the entire genomes of 26 different modern human populations, and modeled their history to account for the patterns in the modern genomes.

For example, suppose a particular gene has two distinct groups within the modern genomes, with each group showing similar mutations within the group that are different from the mutations in the other group. You can infer that the two groups represent a split into two populations that later recombined, and you can infer the time of the split and the relative population sizes of the two groups from the number of mutations in each group.

Do that for the entire genome and you can make finer-grained inferences, like determining which genes experienced positive or negative selection pressure.

So the way I’m interpreting this is that the finch’s song neurons are pass-by-value and the budgerigar’s are pass-by-reference.

Further images reveal how massive galaxies surrounded by dark matter, the invisible substance said to pervade the universe, warp space and magnify more distant galaxies behind them.

Name telescope after Euclid, find warping of space that violates Euclid’s parallel postulate.

I suspect their ultimate goal is to confirm or refute the common theory that there’s a general mental faculty for recursion that that’s used both for natural language and for other recursive tasks (implying that language and recursive thought evolved together).

Sure.

I suspect the motivation behind this study was to try to narrow down the deciding factor in the earlier study showing a difference between natural and programming languages—the next logical step would be looking at a more “artificial” conlang like Lojban (and/or a more “natural” programming language like ACE).

The end result will probably be some broader category of “language-network-interpretable” languages including natural and (some but maybe not all) conlangs.

In previous work, Fedorenko and her students have found that computer programming languages, such as Python — another type of invented language — do not activate the brain network that is used to process natural language. Instead, people who read computer code rely on the so-called multiple demand network, a brain system that is often recruited for difficult cognitive tasks.

I’m curious if there’s some overlap between conlangs and programming languages, on the region level if not the network level. IIRC, the multiple demand network is a bit ill-defined and every component doesn’t necessarily activate for every task; and Fedorenko et al have their own idiosyncratic definition of the language network that omits anything that might also have other functions (including canonical regions like Broca’s and Wernike’s areas).

In theory, authoritarianism is the fastest way to transform a society from one form to another—so it’s rational that regimes that take power based on the promise of rapid social transformation will be drawn to authoritarianism.

But it’s also rational for institutions to try to preserve themselves—which for these authoritarian regimes means preserving the conditions that led to the belief in their necessity, instead of delivering on the promise of transformation that would lead to their dissolution.

For instance, formal burial customs began to appear around 110,000 years ago in Israel for the first time worldwide, likely as a result of intensified social interactions.

Wait—are they saying formal burial customs appeared worldwide at that time (including Israel), or that the Israeli site was the first appearance in the world?

If they tell law enforcement they can’t produce an unencrypted copy and it’s later proven that they could, the potential penalty would likely be more severe than anything they could have gained by using the data themselves. And any employee (or third party they tried to sell the data to) could rat them out—so they’d have to keep the information within a circle too small to make use of it at scale. And even if it never leaked, hackers would eventually find and exploit the backdoor, exposing its existence. And in either case they’d also have to face lawsuits from shareholders (rightly) complaining that they were never warned of the legal risk.

I guess in that sense you could say the only “creator” is the Big Bang.

Quantum circuits aren’t general-purpose computers—they’re added to conventional computers to allow them to perform a small handful of algorithms more efficiently. I don’t believe any of those algorithms would benefit the basic features of an operating system enough that it would make sense to modify an OS to require the use of one.

(Although I could totally see Microsoft doing something like only licensing their circuit’s drivers to run on Windows.)

I assume the “epigenetic signature” they describe is some kind of methylation?

I thought they were talking about the elementary particle—I was afraid we’d have to find some other way of manifesting our physical existence.