Can AIs suffer from mental health issues?
So the movie “2001 – A Space Odyssey” has just been re-released. I saw it when it was first released and I didn’t understand it even then. No doubt I will be none the wiser this time around. But one thing still sticks in my mind; HAL, the mission computer had a bad case of mental […]
China has just leapfrogged the US in a big way
I just arrived back from one of my regular business trips to China. Here’s my tally: air pollution is even worse, water in rivers is filthy. Yet the built environment is even more impressive and the Chinese people have made giant steps forward over their American and European counterparts in the convenience of their lives. […]
What if exercise and brain training don’t help Alzheimer’s?
I recently read an obituary of someone the town in which I live. He had died from complications of Alzheimer’s at the age of 73. What had caught my attention and stimulated my curiosity was that he had been a runner. I’m a runner too so I read the lengthy obituary just out of curiosity […]
Are viruses the biological equivalent of dark matter?
Did you get the flu? I was so lucky, I got it twice! So lots of stuff about influenza in the news. Other than that, how could you ever get excited about it? Influenza is a virus. Everyone knows that too. Nothing exciting there either, right? But what if there were many more of the […]
Space is actually for making ourselves more beautiful
Did you notice the news about Scott Kelly, the US astronaut? His DNA changed while he was in space, 7% of it to be exact. Actually it turns out that the report wasn’t quite correct; in fact the way his DNA was expressed changed for 7% of it. Whatever, his body changed. How so? Well for a start […]
Self-driving cars – just blame the victim
So now several people have been killed in accidents in self-driving cars. What gives? I’ve been driving for many years but I don’t regard myself as a good driver. For one thing I’ve got poor eyesight. I get easily confused at night and sometime in heavy traffic conditions. Here are three of the driving situations […]
Is free trade obsolete?
So we’ve had a little excitement about the US imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum and now we’re into a global frisson about the possibility of a global trade war. As we know, they lead to depressions, or so it is said. But here’s the question I want to ask: if a world has declining […]
What’s really inside black holes?
The main act? Stephen Hawking is dead and we will all miss him. One of the reasons for missing him is that he really was responsible for popularizing black holes. Now any Tom, Dick and Harry can toss the term around, talking knowledgeably about singularities, black hole horizons and information loss. All way above my […]
Is authoritarian leadership inevitable?
We’ve just seen China approve a lifting of term limits on their leader, an epochal decision. Clearly there’s a move to authoritarian leadership globally. As well as China there’s the usual suspects like Russia, Belarus and North Korea, but now there’s some new/newish members of the club including Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Malaysia and Myanmar […]
How about “Nuclear Winter Olympics” World War 3 playoffs?
We’ve just had the latest Winter Olympics in South Korea. Of course it was overshadowed by the nuclear threats hurled at each other by the US and North Korea. Olympics are supposed to be about peace but this clearly wasn’t a very peaceable atmosphere. Now the Dear Respected Comrade is on an ostensible peace offensive, […]