Log In - New York Times. Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? NEW YORK—If you, me and every person and thing in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game, we would not necessarily know it.
The idea that the universe is a simulation sounds more like the plot of “The Matrix,” but it is also a legitimate scientific hypothesis. Researchers pondered the controversial notion Tuesday at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate here at the American Museum of Natural History. Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive.
ARMIES OF THE RIGHT; The Young Hipublicans. Like the rest of their generation, they've been trained, from preschool onward, in the tenets of cooperation, politeness and racial and gender sensitivity.
As much as they would hate to admit it -- as hard as they try to fight it -- these quintessential values have suffused their consciousness and tempered their messages. You can see it in Charles Mitchell's editorship of The Counterweight. Back in the 1980's, the editors of campus conservative newspapers subscribed to the theory spelled out by D'Souza in his book ''Letters to a Young Conservative.'' ''At The Dartmouth Review,'' he wrote: ''To confront liberalism fully we . . . had to subvert liberal culture, and this meant disrupting the etiquette of liberalism.
Scout. Log In - New York Times. Drake on Money, Rap, and his Musical Legacy. When he was just 23, the rapper Drake set a goal for himself: He'd make $25 million by the time he was 25 years old by rapping about money, cars, girls, and—here's the bizarre part—his rawest feelings and emotions.
The best books we read in 2016. Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free. The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news.
So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December. But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour.
It wasn’t that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI’s freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter? Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building.
Nor would it dwell on the fact that this potentially job-killing technology was incubated in part at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Those ironies are obvious to a human. But not to a computer. At least not yet. More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism From 2015. Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I curate weekly for its subscribers.
This is my annual attempt to bring some of those stories to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article that was published last calendar year and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement. I hope it provides fodder for summer reading and inspiration for future writing. Winds Across America: Powering the Nation - Siemens - The Atlantic Sponsor Content. Who’s Influencing Election 2016? — MIT MEDIA LAB. Joe Biden Writes An Open Letter To Stanford Survivor - BuzzFeed News. Here's The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read To Her Attacker - BuzzFeed News. Many Middle-Class Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck. Since 2013, the Federal Reserve Board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.”
Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The Really Big One. When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology.
As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. The Backlash Against Serial's 'White Privilege'—and Why It's Wrong. Since its October debut, This American Life producer Sarah Koenig's Serial has quickly become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed podcasts ever produced.
