The Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and the Limits of Logic

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The Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and the Limits of Logic     “Something very small, so tiny and insignificant as to be almost invisible in its origin, can nonetheless open up a new and radiant perspective, because through it a higher order of being is … Continued here

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What the Act of Crying Can Offer     “I think about tears as a doorway: an invitation to be fully human and to connect with others.”This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. Continued here

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Fevered Planet: How a shifting climate is catalysing infectious disease     When temperatures rise, everything changes and disease arrives. As the thick ice melts and the seas and the air warm, so new life arrives in Arctic waters. Minke, bottlenose, fin and sperm whales are heading north, even as grizzly bears, white-tailed deer, coyotes and other animals and birds expand their range into boreal forests to the south.But the geography of disease is also changing as novel pathogens affecting plants, animals and humans increase their range. New beetles are heading north and devastating Siberian forests, Alaskan mammals are struggling as new ticks arrive and human habitations in northern Norway are infested by new insects. Continued here

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No further investments in Virgin Galactic, says Richard Branson     Philip Georgiadis and Peggy Hollinger, Financial Times - Dec 2, 2023 6:58 pm UTC Continued here

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The 4 Types of Innovation and the Problems They Solve     Innovation is, at its core, about solving problems — and there are as many ways to innovate as there are different types of problems to solve. Just like we wouldn’t rely on a single marketing tactic for the life of an organization, or a single source of financing, we need to build up a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks. Leaders identify the right type of strategy to solve the right type of problem, just by asking two questions: How well we can define the problem and how well we can define the skill domain(s) needed to solve it. Well-defined problems that benefit from well-defined skills fall into the category of “sustaining innovation.” Most innovation happens here, because most of the time we’re trying to get better at something we’re already doing. “Breakthrough innovation” is needed when we run into a well-defined problem that’s just devilishly hard to solve. In cases like these, we need to explore unconventional skill domains. When the reverse is true — skills are well-defined, but the problem is not — we can tap into “disruptive innovation” strategies. And when nothing is well-defined, well, then we’re in the exploratory, pioneering realm of basic research. There are always new problems to solve; learn to apply the solution that best fits your current problem. Continued here

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Roar of cicadas was so loud, it was picked up by fiber-optic cables     One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It’s a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. Continued here

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Ancient black hole challenges our understanding of the early Universe     At the center of nearly every galaxy in the cosmos sits a monster: a black hole with a mass millions or even billions of times heavier than our Sun. When and how these enormous objects formed is an open question in the astrophysics community.Recently, in a paper published in Nature Astronomy, scientists reported the discovery of an ancient supermassive black hole, one that existed very early in life of the Universe. While some enthusiasts have claimed that the observation of these gigantic black holes has disproved the theory of the Big Bang, this is a hasty conclusion. However, it is certainly true that the existence of very early supermassive black holes will require astronomers to rethink some things. Continued here

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Climate Cookbooks Are Here to Change How You Eat     Kitchen Arts & Letters, a legendary cookbook store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is tiny—just 750 square feet—but not an inch of space is wasted. With roughly 12,000 different cookbooks and a staff of former chefs and food academics, it’s the land of plenty for those seeking guidance beyond the typical weekday recipe.One table is piled high with new cookbooks about ramen, eggs, and the many uses of whey, the overflow stacked in leaning towers above the shelves along the walls. One bookcase is packed with nothing but titles about fish. And next to a robust vegetarian section at the back of the store, tucked in a corner, is a minuscule collection of cookbooks about sustainability and climate change. Continued here

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What Happens When the U.S. Overestimates Its Power     American leaders keep overestimating their control over events in the Middle East, Ukraine, and around the world.Ever since a terror attack by Hamas triggered a war in Israel and Gaza in October, many commentators have presumed that the United States can in some way manage the course of the crisis—either by supporting Israel emphatically or by demanding greater restraint from that country’s leaders. Successive American administrations, including Joe Biden’s, have encouraged this belief in American control of events in the Middle East and around the world. Just days before the Hamas attack, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted in an article in a Foreign Affairs article that the Biden administration had “de-escalated crises in Gaza.” The Middle East, he wrote, is “quieter than it has been for decades,” echoing comments he made at tThe Atlantic Festival in late September. (The online version of the article was subsequently edited to omit those statements.) In essence, the United States had mistaken a temporary lull in the Middle East for a more enduring period of relative peace—and ascribed the apparent boon to American influence. Continued here

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Giving Birth in Gaza     Every morning since October 7, Nour Shath has woken up, scanned her body, and felt relief that her twin babies were still inside her. Each additional day, her doctor has told her, makes their birth less likely to require an obstetric or neonatal intervention that might not be available in Gaza.But even after those morning checks reassure her that she’s one day closer to a normal, safe delivery, Shath told me, she feels a deep, wrenching fear—one she worries she’ll transmit to her babies: “Are they feeling scared inside me?” she asks herself. She wonders whether they can sense when she cries, and whether the stress will induce premature labor. Continued here

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Netflix Just Quietly Released the Most Deranged Military Thriller of the Decade     Obliterated packs a lot of raunchy humor and epic action into its eight hour-long episodes, while also managing to be one of the best counterterrorism thrillers since 24. But while Jack Bauer was all tension and no laughs, Obliterated (from the guys behind Harold and Kumar, Hot Tub Time Machine and, more recently, Cobra Kai) finds comedy gold in its heroes’ last-ditch effort to save the world.The premise of Obliterated is deliciously simple. The show follows a best-of-the-best-style special forces team assembled to thwart an evil plot that involves a nuclear weapon being sold (or possibly detonated) in Las Vegas. That alone could have provided enough plot for an entire season, but within the first 20 minutes, the team has captured the main villain and disarmed the nuke — or so they think. Continued here

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How the keffiyeh - a practical garment used for protection against the desert sun - became a symbol of Palestinian identity     After Israel declared war on Hamas following the militant group’s surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and hostilities resumed in the region, some Palestinians have been urging non-Palestinians to wear the keffiyeh, a distinctive checkered scarf, during protests. Indeed, several Palestinian diaspora communities and their allies across the globe have taken to wearing the keffiyeh as a mark of solidarity. Last week, three Palestinian students who were shot in Vermont were wearing black-and-white keffiyeh scarves. Continued here

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Bill Gates Says This Eye-Opening Course Will Help You Understand How Everyone Makes Decisions--Including You     Macalaster College Professor Timothy Taylor explores everything from traffic jams to falling birth rates. Continued here

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These programs make college possible for students with developmental disabilities     For students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, opportunities to attend college may appear few and far between. But this is changing, thanks to inclusive postsecondary education – known as IPSE – programs at colleges across the United States. Here are some important things to know about these programs.Inclusive postsecondary education refers to programs at colleges and technical schools that provide career and transitional training to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Transitional training helps these individuals move into adulthood, teaching them skills like how to set up a bank account, do laundry or cook for themselves. Continued here

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New algorithm finds lots of gene-editing enzymes in environmental DNA     CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—is the microbial world’s answer to adaptive immunity. Bacteria don’t generate antibodies when they are invaded by a pathogen and then hold those antibodies in abeyance in case they encounter that same pathogen again, the way we do. Instead, they incorporate some of the pathogen’s DNA into their own genome and link it to an enzyme that can use it to recognize that pathogenic DNA sequence and cut it to pieces if the pathogen ever turns up again. Continued here

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The Withings ScanWatch 2 Checks Your Temperature and Ups the Price     If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDI loved the original Withings ScanWatch (8/10, WIRED recommends). It was a refined, elegant, health- and fitness-focused hybrid smartwatch with impressive stamina. The ScanWatch 2 retains everything that made the original so compelling and adds some subtle improvements, most notably temperature tracking, but this comes with an unpalatable price hike. Continued here

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Let's Never Do This to Edith Wharton Again     The writer’s deeply emotional architecture is made dully explicit in a new adaptation of The Buccaneers.Edith Wharton’s unfinished 1938 novel, The Buccaneers, occupies much of its second half with the unhappy marriage of Annabel, an innocent American aesthete, and the Duke of Tintagel, a small, easily slighted man whose life’s passion is repairing clocks. As analogies, they read to me as pure Charles and Diana—the too-young woman who finds herself, on her wedding day, suddenly encased in a world with unknowable rules, and the man who chooses a wife based on the extent to which he thinks he can control her. Continued here

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Porsche summons old-school cool with the 2024 911 Sport Classic     Sports cars have always been emotionally driven purchases, and perhaps no automaker understands this better than Porsche. There are more than two dozen iterations of the 911 on sale today, and while it can sometimes feel like sussing out the differences in character between one variant and another is an exercise in splitting hairs, the new Sport Classic tugs at enthusiasts' heartstrings in a way that no other modern 911 can. Continued here

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Katarzynki: Poland's famous gingerbread from Torun     The Polish city of Toruń is famous for being the birthplace of Nikolaus Copernicus – also known as Kopernik – the astronomer who, as we say in Poland, "stopped the Sun, and moved the Earth". But Kopernik is also the name of a company producing the town's famous Toruńskie pierniczki (Toruń gingerbread), which is celebrating its 260th anniversary this year.Many Polish sweets are named after people (a chocolate bar called Grzesiek, or Greg, is a great example), and a type of Toruń gingerbread called katarzynki is no exception. These spiced biscuits, which are covered in chocolate and shaped like a cloud, were most likely named after Katherine of Alexandria, a 4th-Century saint and martyr who is honoured in the Orthodox and Catholic church on 25 November. In Poland, "Katarzynki Day" is often celebrated by young men who wish to get married and is devoted to fortune telling and divination rituals to reveal the name of their future wives. (Women have "Andrzejki Day", or St Andrew's Day, on 30 November.) Continued here

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Experimental drug cuts heart disease risk factor by 96%     The first-in-human trial of an experimental drug, lepodisiran, found that a single shot could dramatically and durably reduce blood levels of lipoprotein(a), a currently untreatable risk factor for heart disease.The challenge: Your levels of LDL cholesterol — the bad kind that clogs arteries and leads to heart disease — are based on a combination of factors, including genetics, diet, and lifestyle. Continued here

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Colonized countries rarely ask for redress over past wrongs - the reasons can be complex     The king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, apologized in July 2023 for his ancestors’ role in the colonial slave trade. He is not alone in expressing remorse for past wrongs. In 2021, France returned 26 works of art seized by French colonial soldiers in Africa – the largest restitution France has ever made to a former colony. In the same year, Germany officially apologized for its 1904-08 genocide of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia and paid reparations. Continued here

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We've Never Seen Beyonc     The Renaissance concert movie is joyful but jumbled—and less about the star than about her audience.Confession: The Beyoncé concert I attended this past summer was pretty good but not, as Oprah described it, “the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.” Naturally, the expectations are high for any show by the most spectacular artist of my lifetime. Beyoncé’s previous solo arena tour, in 2016, made for a peak concertgoing experience: Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important. I felt like I was watching the Statue of Liberty come alive, declare herself empress of Earth, and twerk. Continued here

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Bringing classical physics into the modern world with Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment     If you drop a light object and a heavy object from a tower, which one reaches the ground first? As you may recall from high school physics, this is a trick question. Neglecting air resistance, they both fall the same way and reach the ground at the same time – gravity means that their speeds increase at 9.8 meters per second squared, no matter what their mass. That’s the premise behind Galileo Galilei’s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, a classic thought experiment in the field of dynamics. Continued here

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The Fall of Sports Illustrated     The week I started working at Sports Illustrated, in April 1984, the issue on newsstands featured a glowering Georgetown power forward named Michael Graham dunking on two flat-footed Houston Cougars in the NCAA championship, won by the Hoyas. Filing the gamer that night was Curry Kirkpatrick, a gonzo genius whose pyrotechnical run-on sentences left one winded and smiling. But the story that stuck with me from that issue was shorter and angrier. Frank Deford needed only 587 words to eviscerate Robert Irsay, the then-owner of the Baltimore Colts, who’d hired 15 Mayflower trucks the previous week and moved the team to Indianapolis.“It’s really quite amazing,” Deford wrote. “A man who could screw up professional football in Baltimore would foul the water at Lourdes or flatten the beer in Munich.” Continued here

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Fairytale of New York: Shane MacGowan, The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl's rousing and controversial Christmas classic     When the death of Shane MacGowan was announced on Thursday, fans everywhere discussed which of his songs were their favourites. As the lead singer of Anglo-Irish band The Pogues, and then as a solo artist, MacGowan was renowned as one of pop's most distinctive writers, and as someone who brought rambunctious, punky new life to Irish folk music. But one song of his will be remembered above all others. Fairytale of New York is a bona fide Christmas classic that is currently being played in a bar, shop or home near you – although some people would prefer if it were never played again.More like this:-       The most violent band in the world-       Why Sinead O'Connor refused to be silenced-       The number one song that promoted safe sex Continued here

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Yes, Even Your Indoor Cat Should Wear a Collar. A Vet Tells Us Why.     Modern collars are much more than a loop of fabric with an engraved tag. They boast wi-fi connection and AI capability and might be nicer than your fanciest pair of shoes. But strip back the superfluous parts, collars serve a basic, important function of identifying your fur baby if they ever get out of your sight.While collars are arguably important for humans, our smooth-brained friends don’t know what they’re wearing or why. Are there potential drawbacks to making our pets wear collars? And do indoor cats need them as much as the most trail-blazing dog? The health effects of collars, unsurprisingly, are far more beneficial than they are detrimental. Continued here

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Emissions inequality is getting worse - here's how to end the reign of the ultra-polluters     Climate change is overwhelmingly a problem of wealthy people. The wealthiest 1% of humanity produce over 1,000 times the emissions of the poorest 1%. In fact, these 77 million people are responsible for more climate-changing emissions than the poorest 66% (5 billion people) of humanity. Since 1990, the personal emissions of the world’s wealthiest have exploded. They are now 77 times larger than the level that would be compatible with a 1.5°C warming limit – a threshold beyond which whole island nations will possibly disappear. Continued here

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How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut     Intuition is frequently dismissed as mystical or unreliable — but there’s a deep neurological basis for it. When you approach a decision intuitively, your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all your memories, past learnings, personal needs, and preferences and then makes the wisest decision given the context. The author offers strategies to learn how to leverage your intuition as a helpful decision-making tool in your career: 1) discern gut feeling from fear, 2) start by making minor decisions, 3) test drive your choices, 4) try the snap judgment test, and 5) fall back on your values. Continued here

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ChatGPT Spit Out Sensitive Data When Told to Repeat 'Poem' Forever     Brinkmanship escalated in the US Congress this week over strategies to reauthorize the government surveillance powers known as "Section 702," as civil rights groups sounded the alarm about the consequences of the program and its potential renewal. A WIRED investigation of more than 100 restricted Telegram channels indicated that the communication app's bans on extremist discourse aren't effective or adequate bans. And the identity management platform Okta admitted this week that a security breach previously thought to impact 1 percent of its customers actually affected 100 percent.Analysis indicates that OpenAI's custom chatbots, known as GPTs, can be manipulated to leak their training data and other private information. Funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gun violence research is at risk as Republicans quietly work to strip support. Palmer Luckey's autonomous drone company Anduril is exploring innovations in jet power and artificial intelligence to enhance these combat-shifting devices—for better or worse. And the Indian government's longtime control of radio news is giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi a critical advantage with elections looming in the country. Continued here

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TLC's 1995 hit Waterfalls: The number one song that promoted safe sex     In the mid-1990s, one of the world's brightest bands was boldly changing the conversation around safe sex, HIV and Aids. Award-winning Atlanta-based trio TLC (comprising Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas) released their signature track in 1995: Waterfalls, taken from their second album, CrazySexyCool.More like this: - The real meaning of Swift's song Slut - Should we bring singers back from the dead? - The extraordinary influence of Madonna Continued here

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COP28: 7 food and agriculture innovations needed to protect the climate and feed a rapidly growing world     For the first time ever, food and agriculture took center stage at the annual United Nations climate conference in 2023.More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Dec. 1, committing to make their food systems – everything from production to consumption – a focal point in national strategies to address climate change. Continued here

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A Refresher on Regression Analysis     You probably know by now that whenever possible you should be making data-driven decisions at work. But do you know how to parse through all the data available to you? The good news is that you probably don’t need to do the number crunching yourself (hallelujah!) but you do need to correctly understand and interpret the analysis created by your colleagues. One of the most important types of data analysis is called regression analysis. Continued here

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'Discovery' Season 5 Confirms 2024 Release Date -- With A Twist On An Old Star Trek Trope     Nearly two years after the Season 4 finale — and almost seven years since its 2017 debut — Star Trek: Discovery will return for its fifth and final season in March of 2024. At CCXP in São Paulo, Brazil, Paramount+ revealed the release date window for Discovery Season 5 and dropped an action-packed clip that brings back a classic Trek concept in an entirely new way.Because the new season of Discovery has been described as a “galaxy-wide treasure hunt,” and Johnathan Frakes has indicated that there are “Indiana Jones” vibes to the overall story, the brand new clip sees Book (David Ajala) and Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) racing against the clock while trying to decipher some kind of ancient writing on a rock face. We don’t know the context of this galaxy-wide mystery yet, but in a clip released back in July, we did learn that certain mercenaries were willing to have their entire ship ripped apart by a tractor beam at high warp, just to keep a secret. Continued here

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The Balanced Scorecard--Measures that Drive Performance     In the same way that you can’t fly an airplane with just one instrument gauge, you can’t manage a company with just one kind of performance measure. Think of a balanced scorecard as the instrument panel in the cockpit of an airplane. It’s a set of interrelated gauges that links seemingly disparate information about a company’s finances and operations. Together, they give you a more complete view of how your company has been performing, as well as where it’s headed. Continued here

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The Most Dangerous Conflict No One Is Talking About     Of all the world’s hot spots, the South China Sea is one of the least remarked on and most potentially explosive.First came the concrete markers engraved in multiple languages. Naval aviators from the Philippines would spot them during surveillance flights in the mid-1990s and dispatch forces to remove them. Then came the huts—small, wooden structures teetering on stilts on uninhabited islands, fit maybe for fishermen to take shelter during storms. They looked innocuous enough, one of the pilots, Alberto Carlos, recalls thinking. Continued here

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A Leader's Framework for Decision Making     Simple contexts are characterized by stability and cause-and-effect relationships that are clear to everyone. Often, the right answer is self-evident. In this realm of “known knowns,” leaders must first assess the facts of a situation—that is, “sense” it—then categorize and respond to it. Continued here

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What VUCA Really Means for You     It’s become a trendy managerial acronym: VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and a catchall for “Hey, it’s crazy out there!” It’s also misleading: VUCA conflates four distinct types of challenges that demand four distinct types of responses. That makes it difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to use VUCA as a crutch, a way to throw off the hard work of strategy and planning—after all, you can’t prepare for a VUCA world, right? Continued here

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The GOP's Internal Dysfunction     On Wednesday, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger passed away at the age of 100. As the country remembers the former statesman’s complicated legacy, his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill are working to overcome their internal dysfunction: In the House, Republican Representative George Santos of New York was expelled from Congress in a rare bipartisan vote for ethics violations. And in the Senate, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama attempted to reassure colleagues that his monthslong blockade of Pentagon nominations will end soon.All of this comes as former President Donald Trump continues to lead in polls of Republican and evangelical voters six weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Continued here

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Why men in 19th century Wales dressed as women to protest taxation     South-west Wales was reeling in the wake of social unrest in November 1843. There had been a series of protests over several years by farmers furious at taxation levels, mainly attacking tollgates. Often, the men involved dressed as women and were therefore known in Welsh as Merched Beca (Rebecca’s daughters). The events that unfolded came to be known as the Rebecca riots in English. There has been speculation that the name “Rebecca” stemmed from a literal interpretation of Genesis 24:60 in the Bible, which refers to Rebekah’s offspring possessing the gates of their enemies. But the truth is, nobody really knows why the name was chosen. Continued here

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'Wonka' movie holds remnants of novel's racist past     Several years ago, I made a visit to a local book sale and came across a rare 1964 edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Popular in its own right, the novel has also served as the inspiration for a number of movies, including “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory” – the classic 1971 movie starring the late Gene Wilder – a 2005 reboot starring Johnny Depp, and “Wonka”, the 2023 version.As a child of the 1980s, I had voraciously consumed Dahl’s novels, so I knew the book well. But the illustrations in this particular edition looked unfamiliar. Continued here