Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author: This story is part of our January/February 2015 issue See the rest of the issue Subscribe In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear…

Photo by guenterguni / Getty Images . Medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating. And concentration was their lifelong work! Their tech was obviously different from ours. But their anxiety about distraction was not. They complained about being overloaded with information, and about how, even…

More precisely, today's machine learning (ML) systems cannot infer a fractal structure from time series data. This may come as a surprise because computers seem like they can understand time series data. After all, aren't self-driving cars, AlphaStar and recurrent neural networks all evidence that…

When you are having a strong running season, it is hard to think about slowing down. In 2015, Ray Marquette ran 16 races, including three marathons. He set a personal record of 3:42:28 in Chicago and three weeks later ran the New York City Marathon. Shortly after, Achilles tendinitis flared up and…

Writer Milan Kundera has had Czech citizenship restored, 40 years after it was revoked and his books banned. Kundera is seen here in 2010 in Paris, where he has lived since leaving Czechoslovakia in 1975. Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images The novelist Milan Kundera left Czechoslovakia in 1975. He…

Cache Baba Dec 29, 2019 · 25 min read Many reddit users asked me to post my [ 20k comment] about climate change on a website. So here we are. 10 years ago I was the guy chained up to a tree, 5 years ago I was the guy protesting and trying to get your attention to stop eating meat. I was arrested,…

It’s time for the annual predictions column. I’m chastened by my 2019 Oscar picks—0 for 4—which leave me with 15½ correct forecasts, 9½ wrong and one yet to be settled. As predicted: The House impeached President Trump. Barring a zombie apocalypse, the Senate won’t convict, but that’s still playing…

Help Wake Up America - Share Pat's Columns! If there are IEDs on Trump’s road to reelection, they may be found in the Middle and Near East, land of the forever wars, and North Korea. Not infrequently, foreign policy has proven decisive in presidential years. “It’s tough to make predictions,…

FILE - In this April 11, 2018, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pauses while testifying before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. A year ago, Shoshana Zuboff dropped…

The Golden State remains stuck in the slow lane when it comes to population. The number of Californians increased to 39.96 million, with new data from the Department of Finance showing mostly downward trends. They are rooted in fewer births, coupled with increased deaths among an aging population.…

A few simple strategies Jessica Wildfire Dec 18, 2019 · 6 min read Kenchiro168 O nce as a kid, I watched a bird in the sky. “Look at the raven,” I told my mom. She ignored me. The next day I asked, “A raven’s a crow, right?” That’s when she studied my face. “It’s really too bad,” she said. “I was…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Friday, Facebook and Twitter shut down a network of fake accounts that pushed pro-Trump messages all while “masquerading” as Americans with AI-generated faces as profile photos. In a blog post, Facebook said that it connected the accounts to a US-based…

In the 1990s researchers announced a series of discoveries that would upend a bedrock tenet of neuroscience. For decades the mature brain was understood to be incapable of growing new neurons. Once an individual reached adulthood, the thinking went, the brain began losing neurons rather than gaining…

Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The…

Click here to see more International Journal of Astrobiology cambridge.org/ija Research Article Cite this article: Schmidt GA, Frank A (2019). The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? International Journal of Astrobiology 18 , 142 –…

Over the years of designing and printing business cards and calling cards, there is one famous card that is referenced time and time again. This card’s celebrity status comes from a three-minute movie scene and is visible for about four seconds, yet it has become one of our most requested cards. The…

Summary There are empirical measures for assessing the quality of financial data. A specific set of institutional arrangements disincentivizes China's market participants from producing, disclosing, and demanding high-quality financial information. Understanding this incentive structure will allow…

Essays The Sound and the Story Exploring the World of Paradise Lost John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been many things to many people — a Christian epic, a comment on the English Civil War, the epitome of poetic ambiguity — but it is first of all a pleasure to read. Drawing on sources as varied as…

At Wat Doi Kham, my local temple in Chiang Mai in Thailand, visitors come in their thousands every week. Bearing money and garlands of jasmine, the devotees prostrate themselves in front of a small Buddha statue, muttering solemn prayers and requesting their wishes be granted. Similar rituals are…

Story Highlights Trump defeats Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg and Bloomberg in head-to-heads. A third of Republicans support replacing Pence on the GOP ticket with Nikki Haley. Biden leads Democratic field, but the number of undecided Democrats rises. WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump, the…

Everyone complains about the weather. Nobody does anything about it. The same applies to the US economy. America shifts restlessly from its first non-white president to an orange-haired nativist. But its fixation on the economy rarely wavers. Even amid widely shared booms (millennials should ask a…

Hiring high-quality sales producers seems straightforward, but many sales managers get it wrong. The current job market is heavily candidate driven – with more available sales jobs than good sales candidates to fill them. At SalesForce Search, we’ve seen more counteroffers and competitive offers…

When I created the NUKEMAP in 2012 , the Google Maps API was amazing .1 It was the best thing in town for creating Javascript mapping mash-ups, cost literally nothing , had an active developer community that added new features on a regular basis, and actually seemed like it was interested in people…

X Story Stream recent articles For decades, Republicans have searched in vain for the right combination of platform and messaging to win over the burgeoning Hispanic population of America. Recent polling and policy successes suggest that President Trump may have hit upon it. Perhaps paradoxically,…

Peter Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook, and ultimately made more than $1 billion on his stake. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images By Emily Glazer , Deepa Seetharaman and Jeff Horwitz Dec. 17, 2019 5:30 am ET print Text 73 Facebook Inc. ’s senior leadership is increasingly divided…

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz created waves in Washington last week with the release of a lengthy report about the origins of the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump- Russia investigation . Pundits focused on his finding of no “political bias” in the decision to investigate Donald…

Even if you are living your ideal lifestyle, you are still going to have to do things you do not want to do on occasion. Even if your job is what your most passionate about, you’re still going to have administrative work to take care of, you’re not always going to feel like performing perfectly…

In debates about child abuse and neglect, truth normally becomes the first casualty. ‘A quarter of Australian children had witnessed violence against their mother’ stated South Australia’s Victims of Crime commissioner Michael O’Connell in August 2010. This statistic actually comes from Young People…

I Headed the F.B.I. and C.I.A. There’s a Dire Threat to the Country I Love. The rule of law is the principle that protects every American from the abuse of monarchs, despots and tyrants. Mr. Webster is a former federal judge and the former director of both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. Christopher Wray,…

How bad will it get? The "Atlas for A Green New Deal” paints a picture that is both alarming and hopeful. Courtesy McHarg Center Sarah Holder December 12, 2019 With “The 2100 Project: An Atlas for A Green New Deal,” the McHarg Center tries to visualize how the warming world will reshape the United…

Table of Contents Introduction Strategy Marketing Sales Mission Introduction The default state is failure Spoiler alert: the road ahead is littered with skulls. 90% of client-facing businesses will never generate enough cash for the founder(s) to pay themselves a decent salary. Why? Finding clients…

A watercolor I painted 12 years ago. No perfectionism here! Below are a smattering of thoughts on productivity, efficiency, and just getting things done. I’ve been obsessed with order, process, and planning for almost all my life. I used a planner in middle school. I made a spreadsheet of my budget…

Former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Joe Raedle/Getty Images In June 2016, a class action lawsuit was filed against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for violating the DNC Charter by rigging the Democratic…

This is the moment the CIA's then chief of disguise donned a mask as she spoke to an unsuspecting President George H.W. Bush - before dramatically peeling it off to reveal her true identity to him. Jonna Mendez, who spent 27 years working for the CIA, was in charge of creating advanced disguises -…

Megan Leonhardt of CNBC reports that according to one economist, the system is ‘flawed’ when most Americans have little or no retirement savings: It’s no secret that Americans are falling short when it comes to saving enough for retirement. But as a new report shows, many are disastrously unprepared…

Tamara Gane Jun 13, 2018 · 4 min read photo Timothy Muza Unsplash The information these sites have about you is mind-blowing. Have you ever searched for your name online only to be horrified to discover how much of your private information is available on sites like Mylife? Your net worth, cell…

Product 43/98 Product List > HEADER_TITLE_ROTATE HEADER_TITLE_DOUBLE Men's Powder Guide Jacket 3 Colors $511.37 $50.55 Save: 90% off Hours Minutes Seconds Please Choose: Color Size Quantity Visitors Right Now 2 Description GORE-TEX jacket for the most adventurous. Standard fit Hood and shoulders…

By Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown Dec. 14, 2019 12:00 am ET In early October, WeWork’s board of directors trickled into a brick building in lower Manhattan where the startup had an office. After they took their seats around the conference room table, Mark Schwartz started to vent. “I’ve stayed…

Having Kids Home Essays H&P Books YC School Arc Bel Lisp Spam Responses FAQs RAQs Quotes RSS Bio Twitter Essays Having Kids The Lesson to Unlearn Novelty and Heresy The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius General and Surprising Charisma / Power The Risk of Discovery This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in…

Guest post by Paul Dorian Daily observations of the number of sunspots since 1 January 1900 according to Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC). The thin blue line indicates the daily sunspot number, while the dark blue line indicates the running annual average. The recent low sunspot activity…