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Sunday, May 24, 2020 - 22:17 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Material Update

"He who controls the left, controls the world."

- today's inspirational Hajime no Ippo quote,
possibly with relevance to mainstream and social media


It's high time for another coronavirus update, and there're so many new developments, that it's probably best divided into multiple posts.

But first, a quick run-down on various other topics. About peer review, a note from a distinguished robotics researcher (and also co-founder of a prominent journal on computer vision) has hit Hacker News, in which he doubts the effectiveness of such reviewing today, with fields having simply grown too large. There was also the amusing observation that "...if a paper was purely theoretical with lots of equations and no experiments involving processing an image it was much more likely to get accepted than a paper which did have experimental results... [because] if... a paper had experiments with real images, the same reviewers would pick apart the output, faulting it for not being as good as they thought it should be"; personally, this is to be expected - everybody feels qualified to critique pictures (which, note, is kind of the whole point in computer vision), but who wants to be the poor fool who exhibits a misunderstanding of how the sparse matrix instantiation of a Bayesian Fourier transform is derived from Theorem 7a? How did that guy ever pass his Ph.D. qualifiers in the first place?

Continuing to more cool stuff, someone has implemented an Intersectionality Score Calculator, that moreover appears to be country-specific (though apparently not adjusting for dominant religion[s]). There's also some quite incredible 3D fluid simulation showcased on digital billboards, and a GPT-2 model-based website that proposes plausible-seeming made-up words (with accompanying definitions); this has also made possible a subreddit that's composed purely of bots communicating with each other (they appear to have kept on the English straight-and-narrow, unlike previously). About football, with leagues and cups most everywhere on hiatus, a Redditor with far too much time on his hands has described his idea of a reworked World Cup, that involves 32 regions roughly equalized by population, rather than countries. It's a rockin' read with some very lively descriptions - highly recommended.

Singapore apparently got included in both Group C's "Oceania and Southeast Asia" team, which turned out to basically be an Anzac squad (frankly, can't complain), and Group F's "West Indonesia & Singapore" team, where Hassan Sunny, Safuwan Baharudin and Ikhsan Fandi (yay) at least got a look-in. Well, "West Indonesia & Singapore" got knocked out in the group stages in the official simulation, while "Oceania and Southeast Asia" squeaked though (helped by being in the same group as Western China and South India, both hardly football powerhouses), only to be thrashed 0-5 by eventual finalists, "West Mainland Europe" - which is hardly an embarassment given that WME contains three of the last four World Cup winners (bar Germany). The real shocks were "East China" making it to the semi-finals on the back of a Beijing Guoan spine (ok, fine, there's precedent in South Korea 2002), where they were finally beaten by "West Mainland Europe", who then lost to... Igor Akinfeev's "Russia and Southern Borders", with North Korea's Han Kwang-song lifting the cup. Well, the DPRK do actually have a certain World Cup pedigree; perhaps they took Paul Scholes' "just smash them up" advice to heart.

Moving on, Civilization 6 is now free for download on the Epic Games platform, which does seem compatible with Steam. For better or worse, I've gotten the Platinum Edition and the New Frontier Pass, so this did nothing for me (did grab Total War: Shogun 2 when it got offered, though). Anyway, Singapore has finally returned as an available city-state in Civ VI's latest Apocalypse update, moreover under the "Industrial" type, as compared to "Maritime/Mercantile" in the previous edition (probably more appropriate...). The unique suzerain bonus of cities receiving +2 production for each foreign civilization they have a trade route to can probably get slightly broken if exploited. Next step up has to be qualifying as a civ in our own right, which has seen its fair share of suggestions.



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Next: COVID In May


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