US news summary for the last 160 years... Blues have consolidated their advances in the Virginia Tidewater and other coastal areas. Meanwhile Reds hold their gains in Appalachia and the Great Plains.
For decades, I've seen idealistic (usually computer) types try to fix human debate by making structured forums. They've failed badly. Someone who should study some & writeup summary of what went wrong. To deter or at least inform future attempts; this hope springs eternal.
So it seems that this is the most important machine in the world: a ventilator. The UK has less than Italy, for example. It looks complex, but could a simpler version be hacked together and produced quickly? What would the design specs be if we reduced it to a minimum?
The Library of Congress digitized a treasure trove of materials from Carl Sagan’s life—including early Cosmos drafts, NASA proposals, correspondences with Neil deGrasse Tyson, audio recordings, and over 30 minutes of home movie footage https://buff.ly/2I07Je5
the funniest thing about when the singularity hits will be that we hit it using machine/deep-learning...
so we'll still have no idea how consciousness and intelligence actually works despite creating it
good luck explaining how ML upgraded this footage
https://dpreview.com/news/6466204538/youtuber-upscales-classic-film-to-4k-60p-resolution-using-neural-networks…
I wonder how many male pols are spending the day quietly brooding on that time (just once, I swear!) they took that private jet with Jeffrey Epstein....
It's 1985. James Burke is walking around in some hills. And then he delivers a scintillating piece to camera about how politics is going to change in the digital age.
Totally. Crazy.
Genuine inclusivity means accepting the religious, the traditional, the non-conformists and the reactionary and allowing them to live as they choose as well - not just gay, the trans and the culturally non-wasp.
In 2018, for the first time, the average family paid more to hospitals than to the federal government in taxes: https://freopp.org/improving-hospital-competition-a-key-to-affordable-medicine-343e9b5c70f…@FREOPP
RIP to John Bogle who died today. This guy took many billions of dollars out of Wall Street’s pocket and gave it to regular people without even making himself a billionaire in the process. An unlikely but effective class warrior.
America doesn’t have two parties - it really has seven. That’s why our government is gridlocked. My latest @unherd - https://unherd.com/2019/01/americas-gridlock-isnt-about-trump/…
When words turn into reality:
"More than 500 Hungarian media titles are now controlled by Mr. Orban and his friends; in 2015, only 23 of them were. Loyalty trumps experience: Hungary’s biggest media mogul is a former pipe fitter from Mr. Orban’s hometown."
Closed forums on social media are pretty much the only place where intelligent debates held in good faith can be held. I'm also pretty keen the police and security services aren't involved in my private conversations too
"Transhumanism has become one of the de facto ideologies of the Silicon Valley establishment in that it justifies the Valley’s culture of ‘move fast, break things and make as much money as possible’" writes
Reaction is the enemy of creation.
Creation requires deep sustained focus.
This focus is under constant attack by "notifications" that encourage you to respond to unending false emergencies.
Protect your attention and direct it to where it is most valuable.
I'm increasingly thinking that every functioning system has two forms: The abstraction that outsiders are led to believe, and the reality that insiders actually and carefully operate.
You don't incrementally learn a system. You eventually unlearn its necessary lies.
Fascinating, if unsurprising: New study finds positive correlation between happiness and daily conversation quality http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797618774252… Cue Ursula K. Le Guin: "Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer..."
"Black riders were 73 percent more likely than white riders to have a taxi trip cancelled and waited 6-15 minutes longer than white riders, all else equal. By contrast, ridehail services nearly eliminate the racial-ethnic differences in service quality" https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4r22m57k…https://twitter.com/ucla_its/status/1012034307425091584…
The culture wars that were raging in a certain subsection of the internet 4 years ago are now consuming the culture at large.
An enormous intellectual realignment happened in silence.
The results of that change are beginning to play out.
A reminder from Politico that American politics is pay-to-play — and the only thing remarkable about Michael Cohen’s lobbying business was its amateurishness. The smart clients route funds through law firms.