Rick Rosner: Carole and I were watching the "Greatest Portrait Artist Competition" in England. In this show, artists from around the UK compete in portraiture. Tonight's subject was the performer who portrays Dame Edna Everage—a renowned drag performer. Carol thought he had died because the show is from 2021; apparently, he suffered a fall in …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1256: “Greatest Portrait Artist Competition” and Falls
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I found an article in Mother Jones about AI becoming as powerful as human cognition by 2025 worth reading. The article is from 2013. The article was scaled up in search results somehow. Some parts of it could have been written ten years later. It uses Moore's law from 2013 to predict …
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you feel about Trump's first stint in office? Rick Rosner: Trump is, as usual, making much noise. He's taking harmful actions—although, on rare occasions, one might argue that not everything he does is disastrous. What I find most disconcerting about his first week in office (roughly six days) is that the …
Rick Rosner: Let's shift to its politics. The estimated damage could reach around $100 billion by the time the fires are fully contained, and there will be a lot of blame. Republicans and Trump are trying to pin it on the mayor and Governor Newsom, and Fox News is echoing the same narrative. While there is …
Rick Rosner: We live in an age where oligarchs wield more control over politics, the products we consume, and our culture than ever before. The nature of that oligarchy is about to change in unprecedented ways in the coming years, as it will merge with the extra strategic and persuasive power of sophisticated AI. What …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1252: Powerlessness or Empowerment
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Changing the subject, I recently listened to a roundtable discussion on Spotify featuring Edward Witten, Abdus Salam, Dennis Sciama, and Paolo Budinich. Abdus Salam, as you may recall, was not only a Nobel laureate in Physics (1979) renowned for his work on electroweak unification but also the founder of the International Centre …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1251: Edward Witten, Abdus Salam, Dennis Sciama, and Paolo Budinich
Rick Rosner: I know some decision-makers have been forced to choose a more patient approach—the "Biden option"—and one individual even allowed more time than Biden did. That was significant, though it seems that in democracies, we often see the same people in power repeatedly, and such decisions rarely lead to meaningful policy changes. Regarding Indigenous …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1250: Nonsense Amplification and Prof. Gibbs
Rick Rosner: Yesterday, I went in for my six‐month MRI after having had a one‐centimeter tumor cryoablated from my kidney. I’m waiting for the results, and it’s a little scary. It’s also a pain in the butt, but I’m grateful to have good insurance so that I can get a scan whenever I need one. …
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What's the scariest thing you've ever watched? In person? On television? Let's start with something from fiction and then something from real life. Rick Rosner: We'll do fiction first. JD and I were driving back from a Lance show one night just as a wildfire started along the 405. We drove through …
Rick Rosner: So, Skippy the Horse. When I was a teenager, there was a story about a horse named Skippy that was allegedly dissected by extraterrestrials. According to the tale, you can tell when aliens perform a dissection because they remove the animal's rear end perfectly circularly. It also turns out that in nature, certain …
Rick Rosner 