This week, Republican Iowans must choose between two large, orange objects equally qualified to be President.
- Vladimir Putin’s evil isn’t even surprising anymore.
- Donald Rumsfeld, not a gifted strategist, has created a video game.
- Tyler Cowen reviews Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
- American employment may be less prone to automation than other nations.
- Ed Miliband offers potential prescriptions for the world’s wealth-inequality woes.
- AI pioneer Marvin Minsky dies. See a trove of posts about him.
- Steven Levy recalls Minsky as an AI genius/Borscht Belt comedian.
- Steve Jobs was mourned in office parks and Zuccotti Park. Why.
- An Aeon essay analyzes the meaning of Silicon Valley’s sprawling campuses.
- Computer scientist Leslie Valiant believes all biology computational.
- Now that Google AI has mastered Go, where does such research head next?
- Rachel Nuwer wonders about the fate of paper books in the Digital Age.
- In a Five Books Q&A, Matthew Cobb discusses the Space Race, etc.
- Astronaut Scott Kelly did a Reddit AMA from aboard the ISS.
- French daredevil Tancrède Melet lived an audacious, but very short, life.
- China’s real-estate billionaire Zhang Xin discusses democracy and more.
- Some stolen cigars trigger a twisty tale about a songwriter’s heartbreak.
- Stack Fallacy may explain why elephantine businesses are slain by mice.
- Consumer choices are less about individual wants than we may think.
- New learning machines are said to utilize “social intelligence.”
- CTE screening for the living will make the NFL’s existential threat loom larger.
- Old Print Article: Football caused 26 deaths in America. (1909)
- Old Print Article: Auto polo thrills New York City. (1913)
- A brief note from 1913 about a dog-to-man brain transplant.
- A brief note from 1885 about a Swedish witch.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.