Kids probably get it, even if we don’t. Honey, I Shrunk the (Kids, Whoops) Universe! This is a previous post that I introduce just to show how a (my) warped sense of cosmological history works, the better to understand the very complicated tale I weave below. Telescopes such as the James Webb, the European Euclid scope and even more forthcoming Rub...
As you will see below, my formative years were spent dissipating while reading tomes like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Europa Will Be Bulldozed to Make Way for the Next Cosmic Superhighway! We’re just sending the Europa Clipper to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Clipper is an apt name coz there’s apparently a huge underwater ocean on t...
Alzheimer’s is the most terrible, mind-shattering disease of our time. We citizens given the task to the prestigious National Institutes of Health to slay the dragon. Staffed by the crème de la crème, leading scientists from all over the world, there could be no questioning of its scientific expertise and its capacity to take on this role. Agency l...
To my peevish mind, OpenAI looks just too good to be true. What if I am right? Easy Queasy Whenever I see a certain type of headline in a prominent publication I get collywobbles in my stomach. That’s because I have seen so many similar associated with hubris, fraud and wrongdoing. Here’s one headline I saw recently: OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burn...
You’ve probably been reading and hearing about all those condos in Florida that their owners can’t get rid of. It’s going to get much bigger than we think, with numerous scary flavors thrown in. The Crash Heard Around the World? Yep, that would be Surfside, the tragic collapse of a Mimami a condo skyscraper in 2021. Naturally that led to the gove...
So, Boeing has screwed up yet again. The secret? Don’t aim to fix the particular problem – find a totally new solution. Quality Job No. 11 Boeaing is one of the worlds bellwethers in reliability, quality and admirability. Or it was. Now it’s not. Is there any way of unbreaking something that is irretrievably broken when there’s never been a precede...
No Tipping Points Left? No doubt you have been deluged by all those doom headlines about climate change. The tipping points I have included below are just another iteration. My take: the big takeaway is not what happens to the planet – it’s what happens to us (i.e. we humans). Remember Coral? Did you see this? Depressing right? (How Close Are the P...
Space is big right? What if all those books, movies and stories are just so much bunkum anyway? At best epics that could never be. Surely not??? No Thrust? No Trust! I guess you could have missed seeing the latest failure of the NASA/Boeing launch to the ISS. This time it was the thrusters, but it could have been anything else, given the sad and ev...
Is there something better, and more reliable than AI, namely what I am calling BNI (boosted natural intelligence)? Old Before Their Time One of the deep undying tragedies of our times is the growing ranks of seniors with dementia, of which there are many varieties. The various approaches to finding a palliative – not a cure, we’re nowhere near yet ...
Words are so boring. We’re going to move to LXMs (non-LLM-based models) which can ditch obsolescent codas to move up into the new good stuff. Not So Single(sic) We’ve all been captured by the tempting notion of the Singularity. Singularity is the final signal of the end of everything, the ultimate resting place for bureaucrats, politicians and wann...
Would Saudi Arabia’s new city of Neom be more admired on Earth if it could be seen from Proxima Centauri? The Line in the Sand No doubt you have read about the new city of Neom being built by Saudi Arabia as its new-world city. It will be 170 kilometers long and incorporate skyscrapers and architectural monuments. Neom’s vision is the flowering of ...
We humans made a huge mistake in our design for exploring the universe – we are looking through the wrong end of the telescopes! Eye in the Sky I’m sure you have heard heaps about the James Webb Telescope – definitely a technological breakthrough and a gigantic step towards understanding the known universe a bit better. Now we’ve got another additi...
I’m expecting AIs to come up with an answer, because that should tell us if we humans have free will or not. That translates into whether humans will ever be able to answer the really interesting questions, or just keep on endlessly playing old (vinyl) records, even if we persuade ourselves that there is, or isn’t, a God. Do We Even Matter? This ...
Behavioral economics and finance were an innovative new approach to economics and human behavior. But the economists still don’t get it. Human Behaviors Not Meant to be Studied? You might have noticed that Daniel Kahneman, one of the two founders (with Amos Tversky who predeceased him thereby being passed over for the Nobel) just died. The two ec...
Where’s the Universe headed? Downhill, according to “The 3 Body Problem”. Not a Warm Body So maybe you are aware of the hot sci-fi movie on Netflix “The 3 Body Problem” (T3BP)? The first Chinese sci-fi film to win a famous global prize for sci-fi stories. Yep, it’s pretty good, probably one of the best sci-fi books and movies I have ever encountere...
The killjoys are on the march again. Ultra-processed is next to Godliness. Big Food Seems like you can’t read an article anywhere without being told that the reason that so many of us are obese or big is because we eat too much ultra-processed food. That’s got me to thinking and even, ultraly ruminating. Is a nicely turned steak with a carefully an...
Mental health globally is already in crisis. AI is already making it dramatically worse. Could it be the final death of us? We’re All Hal Now! Now we’re all getting into the bad stuff that comes with AI. That includes ,inter alia, racial bias in AI tools, c.f. Google’s Gemini admission by its CEO, numerous instances of the AIs giving us wrong or ev...
There’s a global industry out there devoted to predicting stock prices; the evidence shows that human traders rarely beat index funds or the S&P. Is AI going to finally figure out how to do that? Don’t bet on it, but we have a way. Is AI Expert? Whither AI? The pundits all see it taking over the world. I’m not so sure. The oldies reading this m...
Both diseases lead to dire human suffering and dispiriting global social and economic impacts. Did we just find the secret to curing them? A Little Bit of Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing OK just for the record, I have no medical qualifications whatsoever. Just an average but curious citizen wanting to do my little bit if I can find something I might...
We need to make a clear distinction between the types of immunities. Boring Immunities We’ve heard a lot, actually too much, about immunity lately. Seems like if it were granted to any politician who became a President, that’s the end of the American dream, freedom if you remember. We’ve also heard a lot about another disrupter extraordinaire excep...
