By now, many people think they know what machine learning is: You “feed” computers a bunch of “training data” so that they “learn” to do things without our having to specify exactly how. But computers aren’t dogs, data isn’t kibble, and that previous sentence has way too many air quotes. What does that stuff really… Continue reading What Is Machine Learning? | Quanta Magazine
Can President Biden Resist His Dark Money Allies?
Does President Biden have any ability to resist his dark money allies? That question was teed up when the U.S. Supreme Court recently asked for the Biden Department of Justice, through the Solicitor General, to state its views on whether the Supreme Court should take up a dark-money-funded public nuisance lawsuit out of Hawaii. The… Continue reading Can President Biden Resist His Dark Money Allies?
How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold
Except in my case, it really is a digital twin. It looks like an EKG, going tch, tch, tch, and it’s developed based on the data I’ve captured about an athlete’s movements. I can model how they will race under different conditions. Over the last seven or eight years, I’ve collected thousands of swims from… Continue reading How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold
Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom: The Huge American Sex-Abuse Scandal That Educators Scandalously Suppress
By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsJuly 10, 2024 Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history. Given the roughly 50 million… Continue reading Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom: The Huge American Sex-Abuse Scandal That Educators Scandalously Suppress
A Double Emergence of Periodical Cicadas Isn’t Cicada-geddon—It’s a Marvel
Late spring and early summer in the forests of the eastern half of the U.S. have been eerily quiet for the past two years. In most years, long-lived periodical cicadas thrum through the region, but a quirk of timing means these insects have been sparse since 2021. This year, though, they’re roaring back. That’s because… Continue reading A Double Emergence of Periodical Cicadas Isn’t Cicada-geddon—It’s a Marvel
Sunlight-Dimming Climate Schemes Need Worldwide Oversight
Sunlight-Dimming Climate Schemes Need Worldwide Oversight As the climate crisis intensifies, experiments to “cool the planet” by reflecting solar radiation proliferate. Without proper global and national regulation, they will worsen the crisis By Chandra Bhushan & Tarun Gopalakrishnan NASA/SDO/AIA/Goddard Space Flight Center Deliberately reflecting sunlight into space to cool the planet—solar radiation modification (SRM)—is now… Continue reading Sunlight-Dimming Climate Schemes Need Worldwide Oversight
Universities Should Promote Rigorous Discourse, Not Stifle It
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an advocacy article that attacks academic freedom and urges stifling contentious campus debates. Specifically, Evan Mullen, Eric J. Topol, and Abraham Verghese urge universities to “speak out publicly” and issue official institutional opinions about public controversies involving its professors “when it concludes that a faculty member’s opinion could cause… Continue reading Universities Should Promote Rigorous Discourse, Not Stifle It
Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy
When were you first drawn to learning about it? I don’t think that was from some deep-seated, lifelong need to study magnetism, but it grabbed me in grad school as an area of astrophysics that is not well understood and is avoided for its complexity. For astrophysics in general, I did a National Science Foundation… Continue reading Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy
Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine
One memorable encounter occurred while Ligocki was visiting Germany the summer after his sophomore year, when he took a side trip to Berlin to meet up with Marxen. “We got through the language barrier through the medium of busy beavers,” he said. The medium of beer also helped. Ligocki ended up having too many and… Continue reading Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine
Lost Scripture? Jubilees (Missing Book of the Bible?)
Podcast: Download MYS319: Throughout history, there have been books some people considered scripture and others didn’t. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss one of those books, Jubilees. What was does it say? Could any of it be true? What should Christians today think of it? Get all new episodes automatically and for free: Follow by… Continue reading Lost Scripture? Jubilees (Missing Book of the Bible?)