Reading Time: 4 minutes Freeman Dyson was one of the most brilliant and productive scientists in the world during his long life. A Nobel laureate for his work in physics, he made significant contributions in many other scientific fields. But one of his most famous “contributions” was his openly skeptical view on global warming. This is a common theme these […]
Tech
Posted inTech
Why degrowth is wrong
Reading Time: 4 minutes Americans are obsessed with bigness. We build bigger and bigger houses. We drive bigger and bigger cars. We even eat bigger portions and consume more calories than anyone else, including more meat, the most resource-intensive of foods. In short, we idolize excess. We’re the richest society that’s ever existed, and we consume in a way […]
Posted inScience
Scientific horoscope Sun March 13 – March 19
Reading Time: 3 minutes The scientific horoscope this week will educate you on neutrinos, Mongolian voles, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and more! Pisces You may be dreaming of summer days and nights, Pisces. And someday soon you won’t have to worry about mosquitos carrying dangerous diseases thanks to science. image by @worachatsodsri Aries You may feel like you’re hitting your head […]
Posted inTech
Cyberwar: When should it go military?
Reading Time: 4 minutes As we see burning buildings containing the charred and broken bodies of Ukrainian citizens, as we take in images of muddy fields and boggy tracks doing more to halt Russian hardware than NATO troops, and when we are glued to social media pictures of Ukrainian underdogs overcoming and requisitioning Russian military material (and vice versa), […]
Posted inTech
Climbing the Kardashev ladder: How civilization survives
Reading Time: 3 minutes The power to control ever-greater amounts of energy is a hallmark of civilization’s progress, and humanity is poised to take the next big step.
Posted inCritical thinking
The future: sci-fi utopia or heat-death disaster?
Reading Time: 4 minutes The future is inherently unknowable, and we should be skeptical of anyone, doomer or utopian, who’s excessively confident about what it holds.
Posted inTech
Can cryptocurrency bridge the racial wealth gap for Black America?
Reading Time: 4 minutes According to University of Chicago researchers, cryptocurrency traders are getting more racially diverse. Nearly 40% of 2021’s traders identified as non-white, suggesting a notable shift from the traditional image of the middle-aged IPA tech bro. Cryptocurrency provides a new opportunity to participate in an estimated two trillion dollar market for many African Americans. Still, is this strategy enough to […]
Posted inTech
‘Cementing bias in a flower-scented maze’: A.I. and the eternal digital footprint
Reading Time: 7 minutes Artificial intelligence is big business, and it’s not going away. International Data Corporation predicts that worldwide revenue for the A.I. market will top 157 billion in 2020, growing to over 300 billion by 2024. A.I. is prolific, with estimates of over 403,000 conference papers on A.I. in 2019 alone. The number of A.I. deployments is […]
Posted inTech
Microsoft’s purchase of Activision is about the Metaverse
Reading Time: 3 minutes There’s been a lot of talk about the Metaverse recently, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last year that he’d be changing Facebook’s name to Meta and shifting the company’s focus to “the Metaverse.“ What is the Metaverse? Although we have glimpses of the Metaverse today in gaming (Roblox, Fortnite, and other games), the Metaverse is […]
Posted inMemes
Lounge11: One of the first internet viruses
Reading Time: 2 minutes This is the story of “Lounge11.au,” an audio file that is a long-forgotten example of one of the first internet viruses. Remember when this was what we meant by “viral”? The music in this video is a loop of a track called “lounge11.au” Lounge11.au used to play in a continuous loop on the Hormell Food’s […]