The Week in Review (January 11-17)

[These images were created by Dr. ESP using ChatGPT or Adobe Firefly. They are copyrighted under Creative Commons and may be reproduced without prior permission as long as the owner is cited. They may not be modified without the owner’s permission. Thank you.] For what it’s worth.Dr. ESP

Newest Math

Hooray for new mathNew-hoo-hoo math!It won’t do you a bit of good to review mathIt’s so simpleSo very simpleThat only a child can do it! Tom Lehrer/”New Math” (1965) If, like me, you were a fifth or sixth grader in the early 1960s, perhaps your math book was a typed, xeroxed manuscript of a proposed … Read more

Brave New Whirl

What if we cannot sing? What if we cannot draw a straight line or a perfect circle? It does not stop us from imagining a new musical composition or a totally new building design.  We can always hire a talented singer to perform our songs or a skilled draftsman to render our architectural concept. We may … Read more

Who Ya Gonna Call?

A hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes completely alien to humans, uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. Technological Singularity/Wikipedia The question is no longer, “Will we reach technological singularity?” Instead, the only missing variable is “WHEN will we reach it?” The answer, based on the attention to and rapid deployment of … Read more

Ghost of April Fools Day Past

During last night’s edition of “A Closer Look,” Seth Meyers compared Donald Trump’s tariff announcement to Caligula’s appointing his horse to the Roman senate.  Although Meyers described the story as “apocryphal,” he wondered if such a presence in the United States Senate would result in the equine always voting “neigh” on legislation.  Or whether a … Read more