Thursday Things: December Is Here
5 December 2019. Vol 1 No 17. By Dan McGirt. #17
Welcome to Thursday Things! It’s the first Thursday of December, the best month of all months! And it is time to question everything you think you know. Read on!
Photo by Marina Khrapova on Unsplash
Do you ever have bad dreams? My dreams are often weird, but rarely scary. For example, I recently dreamed that Sir Patrick Stewart offered to sell me a new car for one tater tot. Strange, but hardly disturbing. But for those who do suffer from bad dreams, researchers have good news: it seems that nightmares help us prepare for real anxiety-provoking situations. An experiment “identified the areas of the brain that were activated while a group of participants experienced fear in their dreams … they discovered that after the participants woke up, those same emotion-regulating brain areas responded to scary situations much more efficiently.” In short, bad dreams may be the brain’s way of rehearsing and better responding to scary or anxiety-producing situations when we’re awake. Thanks, brain! However, any neurological benefits are lost if your nightmares cross the line into full-blown terror. Or, presumably, if Freddy Krueger shows up.
Remember Schrödinger's cat? In the famous physics thought experiment (no real cats harmed!) a cat is placed in a box with some poison that will either be activated or not based on the decay of a radioactive particle. The upshot is because of quantum something something the cat is neither dead or alive (or both dead and alive) until an observer opens the box to see what happened. Well scientists have updated the experiment. Now with with two cats! In two boxes! Let’s look in:
The conceptual experiment by the scientists from Zurich involves putting two physicist cats into boxes. One cat would toss a coin and using its knowledge of quantum physics send a message to the other cat. That second cat, in its turn, would also employ quantum theory but to detect the message from the other cat and guess the coin toss. If two outside observers were to open these boxes, they would some times be able to guess with certainty how the coin landed but on occasion their conclusions would not agree.
Apparently this updated thought experiment calls into question the very nature of reality itself. I’m sure it does, but for me the most startling part is “the cat will use its knowledge of quantum physics to send a message to the other cat.” I’ve always suspected that cats know more about quantum physics than they are telling us. Let’s just be glad the cats aren’t putting us in boxes to do experiments “for science”.
In the latest example of real world technology catching up with Hollywood, those cool masks Tom Cruise wears in the Mission Impossible films to fool the bad guys now exist in the real world, as researchers found that Hyper-Realistic Masks Can Be More Believable Than Real Human Faces:
In a study by the Universities of York and Kyoto, researchers asked participants to look at pairs of photographs and decide which showed a normal face and which showed a person wearing a mask.
Surprisingly, participants made the wrong call in one-in-five cases.
The 20% error rate observed in the study likely underestimates the extent to which people would struggle to tell an artificial face from the real thing outside of the lab, the researchers say.
Could have fooled me! Credit: University of York
Participants in the study knew that some of the photos were of masks, and still got it wrong one time out of five. Regular people out in the world may not even be aware that such hyper-realistic masks even exist. I certainly wasn’t until reading this article! Why does that matter? Well, because bad guys are using these masks the same way the fiction Ethan Hunt of the IMF does:
There are now dozens of criminal cases in which culprits have passed themselves off as people of a different age, race or gender, sending police investigations down the wrong path.
In one recent case, an international gang used a hyper-realistic mask to impersonate a French minister, defrauding business executives out of millions of pounds.
Between the masks, the deep fake videos, and the fake voice synthesis you can no longer assume that anyone is who they say they are! Or even who they look like they are. And, according to the quantum cats, we can’t even believe in reality itself. Brave new world indeed.
But we can believe in chocolate! This week I’ve offered up nightmares, fake faces, and knocked holes in the underpinnings of universe. So I’ll close with some science that is both timely — holiday treats! — and soothing: Science Says Eating Chocolate Every Day Is Good for Your Brain.
"Regular intake of cocoa and chocolate could indeed provide beneficial effects on cognitive functioning over time," said review authors Valentina Socci and Michele Ferrara. Their analysis published in Frontiers in Nutrition found that seniors at risk for memory decline received the biggest perks from eating chocolate. Regularly choosing the treat could help improve vital thinking processes over time.
And that’s not all: “Eating cocoa also helped young and healthy adults perform better on tough cognitive tests almost immediately.” The recommended dose for these benefits is one ounce of dark chocolate daily. See? It’s not a guilty pleasure, it’s medicine chocolate!
For medicinal purposes only. Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash
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