Science and technology micro-summaries for June 26, 2019
The origins of human morality; An app that lets you pay by the minute for gym access in NYC; Why psychiatry hasn't progressed as fast as physiological medicine; A summary of blockchain sharding; Hacks for Google Docs
Straight from my RSS feed:
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- STEEM Where do Human’s Moral Convictions Come From? - A Psychological Overview - @abigail-dantes discusses the origins of human moral reasoning. The article points out that the "nature vs. nurture" debate has been going on since the time of the ancient Greeks, and that there is supportive evidence that we are born with a moral intuition, and also that we learn moral reasoning. The position is summarized thusly: "The reality is that we are born with both selfish and competitive, as well as cooperative and fair predispositions, which have all proved to be adaptive during the challenges of our species’ evolutionary past. These tendencies are, then, further shaped, enhanced and/or supressed by the specific contexts under which we grow up, from our home environment to the large sociocultural world we belong to." (5% of the rewards from this post will go to @abigail-dantes.)
- I worked out at premium gyms around New York City without committing to expensive memberships — a new fitness app helped me do it on a tight budget - The article recommends the PopIn fitness app to pay by the minute for use of gyms in New York City. The app lets you discover gyms, shows you photos, and it tells you what amenities and classes are offered. Prices range from $0.14 to $0.35 per minute.
- Why Psychiatry Is Still in the Nineteenth Century - We don't know much about the way that the brain works. The article suggests that we still think of the brain as a collection of cells, not as an organ. As a result, psychiatric treatment still involves far more trial and error, and far less individualized data, than many other fields of medicine. h/t RealClear Science
- Sharding, Explained - In the database world, sharding means breaking up the database in a way that speeds query access, splitting it up by customer location, for example. It's similar in the blockchain, where the shards are assigned independently to different nodes, in order to speed transactions. In this model, different nodes are only accountable for tracking their own shards, instead of managing the entire ledger. This speeds transactions by making the job easier for each of the nodes, and by enabling parallel processing - instead of sequential. Present challenges to sharding include communications and security. Other proposals for blockchain scaling include increases in block size, and the use of multiple blockchains, or altcoins. The first blockchain to implement sharding was zillaqilla, and others are in various stages of implementation, and Facebook's libra brought sharding to the forefront.
- This Amazingly Simple Google Docs Hack Is a Game-Changer - Typing doc.net in the browser's location bar opens a new document in Google Docs. Typing sheet.new opens a spread sheet. And if you have a chrome browser, you can use the Tools->"voice typing" menu in Google docs to dictate through your microphone.
In order to help make Steem the go to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.
For example, feel free to comment on any or all of these discussion topics:
- Aside from moral reasoning, what other aspects of human behavior do you think arise from a combination of nature and nurture?
- Here on the Steem blockchain, we're all aware of @actifit. Aside from actifit and popin, do you know any other apps that can improve the workout experience?
- Do you know any other hacks to improve the Google Docs experience?
- Have you used any blockchains that have implemented sharding?
About this series
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