Includes stuff about anything where feedback causes the system to adapt, including the systems of nature, those that are man-made or cultural, and those of the human mind.
I’ve talked about depression a lot on this blog, both my own and in general, primarily because I’ve been dealing with it since early childhood. My personal depressive hell has gotten a lot less torturous over the last few years; my depressions now last a day or two at most (thanks primarily to the Lefkoe …
Continue reading ‘News Flash: Depression Has Been Solved… For the Last Forty Years!’ »
Remember what I said last year, about how governments will soon find themselves responsible for the mental health of their citizens? Academics have just taken another step toward it.
I’ve often wondered what the future would look like if someone did create a true artificial intelligence, and it was simple enough that anyone could do it once they knew how. I’ve often thought that most of today’s intellectual jobs would just vanish, the way that so many blue-collar jobs did when automation started replacing …
Continue reading ‘“I, for one, welcome our robotic communist jobless future”’ »
The Swiss plan to clean up low-Earth orbit is finally taking off (pun completely intended). 🙂
I wouldn’t have bothered posting about this, except for one throwaway line near the top: […] In the end, the nuclear apocalypse failed to appear – the scientific consensus is that absolutely no health effects due to the Fukushima radiation will ever be detectable […] So to sum it up: the worst nuclear disaster in …
Continue reading ‘“OMG! New ‘CRISIS DISASTER’ at Fukushima! Oh wait, it’s nothing. Again.”’ »
This is utter nonsense, as far as I can tell. There simply wouldn’t be enough volatile material to create something that would explode with any amount of force. At best it could turn someone into a walking fireball for a (very) short time, which is bad enough on an airplane, but would hardly bring it …
Continue reading ‘“Latest Movie-Plot Threat: Explosive-Dipped Clothing”’ »
The first burgers created from lab-grown beef have been sampled and declared “close to meat.” This isn’t going to take over overnight, but in ten years it will probably be available in supermarket freezers, and in thirty it will probably be more common than the real thing, simply because it will be nearly indistinguishable from …
Continue reading ‘“Sergey Brin’s ‘test-tube burger’ cooked, eaten, declared meat-like”’ »
In some long-ago post, I mentioned a climate-scientist’s throw-away line about Global Warming making the deserts greener, and a reader (C-Square?) took exception to it. I can’t find the conversation now, but for that reader, here’s the proof you asked for.
It is with great sadness that I have to agree with this article. When I was growing up, we were taught that the US was the greatest nation on Earth. There was even some evidence that objectively supported it — the Manhattan project (and the fact that we were so collectively horrified at the fates …
Continue reading ‘“NSA Prism: Why I’m boycotting US cloud tech – and you should too”’ »
Has anyone mentioned recently that you should use really strong passwords — or how hard it is to come up with them? I use truly random passwords, generated (and kept track of) by LastPass, for most sites; for the ones that need to be remembered, I’ve got a pretty good password-selection algorithm (which I can’t …
Continue reading ‘“A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords”’ »