Monday Microsofty 100: How To Win at Poker All the Time
Choose any hand you want and I will still win. But why?The solution to the puzzle about cutting the fan belt is to remember that there is only ever one side.
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Winchester College drops laptops for pen and paper
The pen and paper are mightier than the keyboardHandwritten notes boost memory because it requires more thought than typing on a computer, also, one writes slower forcing one to process information more effectively.
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Longtermism: The Rise and Near Collapse of a Valley Philosophy
Valley philosophies may be more influential than we think, especially if we do not even know about themLongtermism — making decisions based on assumptions about a far distant future where everything might be different — makes no sense.
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Canada Backs Off Euthanasia for Mental Illness, Targets Dementia
The government is now promoting euthanasia for people with dementiaCanada’s leaders have shifted their focus from the mentally ill — which caused pushback — to dementia patients as euthanasia’s next big expansion.
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Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review Part 16
The entire Resistance remains on the base, it doesn’t even attempt an evacuationSnoke does the obvious thing: tells Hux to destroy the Resistance and tells Kylo to bring Rey to him.
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The Human Brain: My, What a Well-Organized “Kludge”!
Looking back at a neuroscience book that was popular two decades ago is quite revealing in the light of new findingsWhy is a concept like the kludge brain, out of date and at odds with the facts, somehow more representative of science than an inference to design would be?
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A universe grounded in Mind rather than matter
When was the last time you heard or read the words ‘conscience’ or ‘sin’?We aren’t just physical beings dealing with materialistic problems of the external world, and hackable brains are not the ultimate nature of who we really are: Our immaterial, immortal minds and our souls.
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AI and the Spectrum Crisis: What You Need to Know
The spectrum crisis is NOT a metaphor. The frequencies everyone wants are finite, the physics will not budge, and the tools to fix the problem are availableSMART Hub’s proposed way out is sharing. A radar operating near 3.1 gigahertz could sense a nearby wireless network, shift to 3.4 gigahertz, and keep its range.
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Don’t Get Trapped in a Data Mine
It’s a common pitfall. Even Google played with the idea that a coincidental relationship between baseball and a full moon might be meaningfulPeople are often superstitious—baseball players are among the worst for this—and that causes us to imagine statistical relationships.
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Article in Top Science Journal Endorses ‘Nature Rights’
As the journal Nature joins the list of endorsers, the idea is becoming an establishment policy juggernautThe authors try to sell their radical proposal by comparing it to past efforts to redress injustices against humans.
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Computer Engineer Robert Marks Says AI will Never Match Humans
But do the sophisticated new chatbots prove Marks wrong? Turns out, he is writing a new book to address thatAt COSM 2026, his message will be that overall, AI—properly handled—will be positive for humanity.
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Socialism’s Most Pressing Problem: The Human Mind
Markets, prices, and profits do what socialist central planners cannot: coordinate millions of independent human mindsThe market economy that socialists dispraise is not merely a system for moving goods. It is the best system for coordinating minds.
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AI ‘Claude’ Can Never Be a Person
A rabbi noted that if Claude is a person, Anthropic is engaging in slavery that must stopThat makes me wonder how serious they really are about claiming AI personhood or reflecting on its consequences.
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Microsofty 99: Fan Belt Cutting Technology
The world of geometry features some strange elements, even in everyday thingsThe answer to last week’s puzzle lies in determining how many sides a belt must have.
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Seeing Chatbots as People Is Not New. Some See Cars That Way
It's actually a natural tendency but it certainly comes with risksAnthropomorphism has nothing to do with electronics as such. But there are new perils.
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Our Minds Have Sparks of the Divine
Theatre of the Absurd was always seen as very FrenchIn recent years, it has become hip to like Beckett, and I believe, in some ways, genuine admirers of ‘Godot’ believe it has suffered as a consequence of this due to its popularisation into the mainstream.
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Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review Part 15
Looking back at this a decade later, it’s amazing how rushed all of this isThe film seems to have a general idea what it wants to do, but it’s so impatient it can’t even be bothered to show Rey learning, let alone struggling, to use her powers.
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Does a Decline in Reading Mean a Decline in Thinking?
Thinking is natural to humans. But the current decline in reading may signal a worrisome decline in a particular TYPE of thinkingIf we reach the point where most people cannot muster the level of sustained attention needed to read a book, political changes unwelcome to many of us are inevitable.
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Is writing really not important any more?
A New York Times op-ed claims writing isn't as essential as we might assumeFor those who want to grow and develop as thinkers and communicators, writing is still a time-tested option.
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Prize-Winning French Author Accused of Using AI; Furor Erupts
The questions the story raises are mostly not about the End of WritingWhy had no one tried using an AI detector on Orélien’s—and everyone else’s—work as a *condition of entry* into the writing contest?
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