Could China be North Korea’s True Nuclear Target?
It looks like North Korea really has it in for the US. But what if the Dear Leader’s real target is China? Now that sounds crazy right? China is North Korea’s closest ally. Moreover it is North Korea’s main trade partner. As the media constantly remind us, China will never move against North Korea because […]
Are human writers becoming obsolete?
Before we knew better it was predicted that the Internet would make newspapers and magazines obsolete. But now we can see that most people who read these things do so on their smartphones. It’s starting to look like the Internet has resulted in more reading rather than less. But does that mean that we now […]
A Third Way for AI: Cognitively-Augmented Animals?
Not everyone believes that AI is God’s gift to humans. Two noted gurus Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk beg to disagree. Musk is trying to stop what he believes is a lemming-like rush to fall over the cliff (Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse) and Hawking thinks that AI will kill the human […]
Does streaming music reduce productivity?
Well, whadya know? US worker productivity growth rose sluggishly in the last quarter (at 0.9%). So what? This is kind of boring stuff after my usual posts on quantum brains, love force-fields and the like. What could possibly be of existential interest here? Productivity growth is usually said to be caused by eye-glazingly boring phenomena such as […]
Is love a physical force-field?
Did you hear about the recent wedding of two people in their nineties (She’s 98. He’s 94. They Met at the Gym). Tells us that you can have love even when it might be thought you were past it. Put it in the sweet news column. It used to be thought that love was a […]
Bitcoin meets behavioral finance – what happens next?
So now Bitcoin has split between two camps, the miners and the rest. That gives us a bit of insight into the psychodynamics of the Bitcoin community. Can we figure out more of them? How about a behavioral finance analysis? To wit, what are the cognitive biases of the Bitcoin crowd? That is, both the rational […]
Can gravitational wave detectors read human thoughts?
Just been reading a couple of books about human consciousness (Douglas Hofstadter “I am a Strange Loop and Dan Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach). What’s the bottom line? In a word we still don’t have a clue how the brain really works and what consciousness actually is. Hmmm. Notwithstanding, we smart-alec little pieces of terrestrial carbon, as […]
Wagbits Revolutionizes How Pets Feel About Their BMI!
Obesity is old news these days. But what about our pets? It’s now become the topic du jour. naturally they’re getting fatter, just like we humans. The scientists are getting in the act, coz pet obesity (hereafter PO) is now big business, and of course we need to work out its genetics. Now the race is on […]
The End of Restaurants?
I just returned from one of my regular trips to China. Air quality worse, even more traffic. BUT a Cambrian-like explosion of bikes and bike-sharing (see Ofo) and now, lots more yummy takeout. Americans invented takeout right? How dare the upstart Chinese try to beat us at our own game? But they have: massively. China and […]
Amazon Eats Whole Foods – Are Authentic Leaders Too Predictable?
So we didn’t expect Amazon to do the Whole Foods thing right? Bezos is an unpredictable guy. Reminds me of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, even (especially) Donald Trump. Unpredictable to a fault. Never know what they’re gonna do next. The traditional leadership canon teaches that leaders should be predictable; authentic they call it. But what […]