Can Pandorans Speak Whale? It might be that the only way we can ever understand an alien language is by figuring out how to understand what terrestrial animals are actually saying. On a Planet, Far, Far Away You might have noticed that the movie “Avatar” is about to get a sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water”. Avatar is one of my old-time favorite movi...
Deepfake Fake News Next? Deepfakes are a thing now. They are simply really good fakes. Nowadays many of the videos of politicians are deepfakes. Did you see the videos of Tom Cruise earlier this year on TikTok? They were deepfakes. Those who watched the documentary recently about the traveling chef Anthony Bourdain might know that the editors ins...
Not Another Digital Currency! I’m sure you’re aware of all the buzz around what are referred to as Nonfungible Tokens (NFTs). These are basically a digital token that inherently attests to the fact of the existence of something, let’s call it an Object of Value (OOV) for the sake of convenience. The NFT provides an audit trail to support the attest...
AI is So Passé I suppose you’ve seen that Google is having problems with it’s AI folks. Maybe it needs some AI to fix them? The cobbler’s shoes perhaps? It seems that everyone is using AI in their apps these days. Voice assistants like Alexa are touted for them and who can claim they aren’t getting smarter? If you have an app these days, it might b...
Neuroscience Theater? So, Elon Musk is at it again with another mind-bending venture. This times it’s #Neuralink. This is basically a chip implant in a brain that allows direct brain-computer links. Just like Musk’s other ventures, it probably indeed is the future, even if not right now. But there’s skepticism from the pros, which is to be expected...
You know a field of knowledge is being popularized for the Great Unwashed once psychologists start to talk knowledgeably about it. So, it goes with quantum stuff; what was once the province only of the hard science literati has now entered the sphere of pop media. Quantum Cats Well kind of; cast a glance or two at this one - 'What is quantum cognit...
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 on a one-way street getting ever nicer to one an...
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 that they require their own manifestation ...
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 as Jules Vern...
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? Even Einstein didn’t believe in it. Yet, here it is surfac...
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 implicitly in them. Aren’...
What if the brain had a way of communicating within its own boundaries that we never suspected and knew nothing about? Well, it might just be here, see this (“Neuroscientists Say They've Found an Entirely New Form of Neural Communication”. On the face of it, it appears that the brain can communicate between different cells and neurons without any i...
I’m thinking that you think you have a brain. Nope. Actually, you have two. We all have two brains. As in two hemispheres, the left and the right. They both do very different things, although there is some overlap. The left hemisphere does logic, process, rules and analysis. The right does envisioning, emotion, empathy and social stuff. So what? In...
Do black holes affect personality? I guess black holes are cool and fashionable right now, at least to judge by the volume of black holes news being fed to me online these days. So, I feel the need to write about black holes, not that I know the slightest thing about them. But who cares, I say. And the news, such as it might go by that name, is get...
This sounds a little weird right? But the research I am talking about has been published in a respectable journal (Journal of Neuroscience 22 October 2018, 3360-17) by a group of bona fide researchers in Sweden. So, let’s take it on trust for the moment. The research tested two groups, one of which breathed through the mouth and the other through ...
You know the Turing test, right? You communicate with a computer by typing and it must guess if you’re a human or an AI. The test has been run for many years. Usually the humans have won but the AIs are catching up. So now some inventive academics (yep, they even exist) have devised a new Turing test; instead of doing a typed conversation you just ...
Have you heard about deepfaking? Yep it’s a real word, albeit very new. Deepfaking is about how you can modify a video in such a sophisticated way that it’s impossible to tell it’s a fake. That’s gonna put the cat amongst the pigeons right? Who will ever know what anyone ever said about anything once this stuff goes global, which is happening r...
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 ill-health. “2001” was a prescient work in so many ways. I think th...
AI has been the talk of the town at CES. There’s suitcases that follow you, more smart speakers and that’s the least of it. But I’m feeling uneasy with all this AI stuff. Part of my concern is it all sounds too easy. Just add more intelligence and everything’s ok. Doesn’t that all sound too easy, too pat? If you stuff even more intelligence into yo...
There’s nothing more feel-good than selfies right? Taken with friends, family, colleagues they are the paragon of amicability, friendship, togetherness. What’s not to like? Selfies are big. These days there’s whole articles about the best smartphones to take them. It's crucial right? After all these have become the core of their online identify for...
