How many post-history exoplanets are there anyway?
Mars is cool right now. Soon we will launch its inevitable colonization. And then what? Prior human settlements (here on Earth) have usually been economically successful but socially a shambles. Will Mars be any different? The reigning Mars thesis du jour is that it used to be inhabited by intelligent beings – maybe an earlier […]
Is EQ declining?
Emotional intelligence is hot. Thousands of companies doing training in it. Maybe millions learning all about it. So EQs should be rising right? Well I don’t know of anyone who publishes an index of global EQ. My guess is that if they did, it would be declining. How can that be? Surely, we humans are […]
Do we live in a black hole inside a black hole?
I keep seeing these articles about whether we live in a simulation (by aliens, of course), or in a hologram. So, I figure it’s my turn to do a poor copy of same, like do we live in a Dr. Seuss sock? Well, maybe not, but why not “do we live in a black hole”? […]
Should AIs be LGBTQ?
So you know that robots are here to stay once you see an article about teaching kids the need to refer to them as “it”. How about “Sir” in that case? Your Honor perhaps? But why not “she” or “her”? Shouldn’t we be designing and making AIs and robots as males and females? Aren’t the genders different enough […]
Are Quark Nukes as Scary as Godzilla?
We live in a scary world. There’s nothing like a scary movie, right? Hear about the latest Godzilla: King of the Monsters? So here’s the latest kind of Godzilla, courtesy of the Russians, namely hypersonic missiles . They go at Mach 5 speed, seriously fast, and you can’t knock them down. That’s scary. Oh, and did we mention […]
Is AI – artificial irrationality – the key to robot innovation?
Did you see that an interplanetary society has just launch a prototype starship powered by a solar sail, aka LightSail? For the ignorami, that’s a gossamer-thin piece of material that catches the light of the Sun which provide propulsive power to the starship. And no, it’s not a new idea. Kepler referred to it, and sci-fi writers such […]
Quantum neuromarketing – can memes be entangled with a brain?
Did you see that amazing photo of two entangled photons? If you did maybe like me you had no idea what you were looking at, just that it’s amazing to even think that it would be possible to do such a thing! Maybe it’s a hoax like NASA landing on the moon (not!). What is entanglement anyway? […]
Are some headaches caused by gravitational waves?
Yep, I know, this topic is way too out there to even consider. Whatever. There’s so much news now about black holes, gravitational waves and the like that you just can’t help thinking of weird stuff, right? After all, newspapers (the few left, that is) still publish horoscopes and millions of apparently sane people believe […]
Is knitting the gateway to AI 2.0?
I’m sure everyone has heard of mindfulness. It’s the new religion for curing stress, of which there seems to be quite a lot. Salespeople are hardly known for being meditative, so when they pick up knitting as a (secular) religion, you know there’s something going on. The buzzword is mindful knitting, by the way. And that’s […]
Is a War with Those Aliens the Ultimate Black Swan?
I guess everyone has seen the most recent reports by US Navy pilots about those UFO sightings. Sounds a bit more credible than usual. To my mind there’s so many galaxies and planets out there that if there weren’t any aliens, that would be the big surprise. Let’s assume for the moment that they were UFOs and […]