I had Real Time with Bill Maher on TV while doing some work overnight, and one of Bill’s guests was the actress Ellen Page (the pregnant girl in Juno; Kitty Pride in the X-Men, etc.). She was promoting a documentary about bees, and the gist of their discussion about it was that the bees were [...]

Scott Carleton, who was kind enough to offer his thoughts here as a former nuclear engineer on the Japan disaster last week (“The worst case scenario in Japan”), had his start-up Artsicle profiled on Eyewitness News today, on ABC’s flagship NYC TV station, WABC. Here’s the clip:

Via KnowAbout.It (with a second assist to Quora), former nuclear engineer (and current co-founder/CTO of Artsicle1) Scott Carlton answers the question:
What’s the worst possible scenario involving the damaged Japanese nuclear reactors?
The worst possible scenario is happening. Fuel pools are on fire, hydrogen explosions are occurring and fuel rods are exposed. However, even with [...]

Incidentally, Amy Schumer is distantly related to Senator Chuck Schumer, about whom Jon Corzine famously quipped, “Sharing a media market with Chuck Schumer is like sharing a banana with a monkey, take a little bite out of it and he will throw his own feces at you.”

Reading Real Clear Politics a couple of weeks ago, I saw a link from its sister site, Real Clear Religion to the video below, of atheists Christopher Hitchens¹ and Sam Harris debating two rabbis about whether there is an afterlife. Shakespeare comes up in this literate and entertaining debate, along with Spinoza a couple of contemporary philosophers with whom I was unfamiliar.

One of the contemporary philosophers mentioned in this discussion (by Sam Harris, I think) had an interesting theory: that all of us actually exist within a computer, built by some future generation (the theory actually sounded semi-plausible as it was fleshed out in the clip). That reminded me of the digital afterlife proposed in Ron Moore’s recently canceled SyFy show, the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica. As with Moore’s previous series…

Finally watched the 1936 H.G. Wells  classic Things to Come last night, via Netflix. Here’s a quick plot summary, via IMDB, then a couple of thoughts :
A global war begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) [...]

Late to this, but Sunday’s New York Times featured an op/ed by the novelist Richard Powers about the IBM computer that’s going to compete in Jeopardy, “What Is Artificial Intelligence?”. In it, Powers adds, parenthetically,
(Recall Socrates’ warnings about the perils of that most destabilizing technology of all — writing.)
If I had read that a [...]