Tech
"I think a lot of people dismiss this kind of talk of superintelligence as science fiction because we’re stuck in this sort of carbon chauvinism idea that intelligence can only exist in biological organisms made of cells and carbon atoms." - Max Tegmark, Physicist
Motion
Cryptographers want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible. The post Which Computational Universe Do We Live In? first appeared in Quanta Magazine
Tech
Data dashboards have been an important part of pandemic response and planning. What have their developers learnt about communicating science in a crisis?
Motion
A tiny discrepancy in the weight of a fundamental particle called the W boson could blow open one of our major theories for understanding everything – if the measurement stands up to scrutiny
Thinking
"In analytics, the term fishing expedition refers to a project that was never framed correctly to begin with and involves trolling the data for unexpected correlations." There is an excellent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Framing Data Science Problems the Right Way From the Start. This
Matthew
It's been a long time since I checked in on #opensource publishing software. I learned perl and then PHP by using tools like WordPress, Drupal, and others I'm sure I've forgotten about. Like going back to a place you saw as a child, the
Culture
The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, is a choral symphony, the final complete symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, composed between 1822 and 1824. It was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824.
Matthew
I didn't sleep well last night, but I always seem to dream somehow. I only write down the weirdest, and last night's dream was pretty odd, and I remember the dream starting in the middle of a total adventure.
Film
Drew Barrymore was born in 1975, so we were about the same age when I saw E.T. at the theatre. She grew up in West Hollywood until she moved to Sherman Oaks at seven. In her 2015 memoir, Wildflower, Drew says she talks "like a valley girl" because she grew up in Sherman Oaks.
Thinking
It all began in 1922, when Einstein and Bergson met in an unplanned but fateful debate. Einstein had been invited to give a presentation in Paris on his theory of relativity. Time was central to Einstein’s work. It was, however, also the central issue in Bergson’s philosophy. Their
Culture
How does a woman turn from a mortal to an icon overnight? Think of Pamela Anderson, in a tight Labatt Blue shirt, at a football game with her friends, and finding herself featured on the stadium jumbotron long enough for the crowd — and later the world — to fall in love
Culture
Passages on the importance of treating all people equality are scattered from Old Testament to New. Genesis even begins by highlighting our equality by pointing out that “God created man in His own image.” That means we are equal in God’s eyes. James 2, Chapter 1-4 says, “My brothers