Demographics: South Korea’s fertility rate falls even more
South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world – and its falling. Like many countries, their fertility rate is well below 2.1 (replacement level). Efforts to bolster fertility…
Skepticism: Why We Need to Think for Ourselves
Vikram Mansharamani, a lecturer at Harvard University with several degrees in multiple disciplines and author of Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial, Intelligence…
Climate: 11 inches of global warming falls on Portland, OR, 2nd snowiest since 1943
Since record-keeping at the airport began in 1939, the greatest snowfall in a day was 14.4 inches in 1943. Source: Portland records snowiest day since 1943, landing at No. 2…
Public health: Estimated 95% of US population has now had Covid
By early 2022, about 95% of Americans had contracted COVID despite the harsh countermeasures. A John Hopkins University meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns failed to contain the spread of COVID. At…
Drones: Recreational drone pilots can now get authorization for night flight in controlled airspace
Starting on February 20 Recreational Flyers may request an airspace authorization to operate in controlled airspace at night through LAANC and before you fly, make sure you meet all of…
Demographics: It’s a mystery “More colleges to close”
Even as college applications surge, a number of institutions are in financial jeopardy. Source: More colleges to close even as top schools experience application boom A significant part of this…
Software: How does ChatGPT work, behind the user interface?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what’s going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax. Source: What…
Follow up: Authoritarianism is Necessary
When dueling celebrity epidemiologists met social media, a catastrophe occurred: a complete loss of trust in science itself.
Bogus Legal Claims in Unsolicited Email
Someone mistyped an email address – probably leaving out a middle initial – and it ended up in my in box. This happens often. This email, from a wireless service…
Stupidity: We “literally did nothing to stop the infection from spreading”
This is what counts as our brilliant technocratic overloads: If only we had been more like China … We did nothing. Like shutdown non-life-threatening health care, prohibiting me from seeing…