Ask A Genius 904: Travel, “Valence,” and Abstractions

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I took a long ride from New Orleans to Chicago and Chicago to Los Angeles. Rick Rosner: We were saying making distinctions in quantum mechanics is a big deal. You would have virtual landscapes of possible things happening and, occasionally, things changing in the quantum mechanical characterization of a system reflecting that …

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Ask A Genius 903: Pessimism in Reporting

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: On Twitter, I left it up. Pessimism in news reporting is a thread about how bad news gets more eyeballs than good news. So, it goes into various areas. It is by John Burn-Murdoch, a columnist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times and a senior fellow at LSE Data Science. He shows …

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Ask A Genius 902: A Relational Information System

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We've had several ideas come up amid informational cosmology. One of them has to do with the degrees of freedom in a system and how we frame the universe as a relational system, and so I was thinking about the degrees of freedom in a relational system of information. The …

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Ask A Genius 900: Canadian and American Politics

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I wanted to make a point about comparing Canadian and American politics. A recent thing arose that I think is essential with a woman named Selena Robinson; she's the minister of postsecondary education and future skills of British Columbia. She made an insensitive, according to many, comment about Israel and …

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Ask A Genius 899: California Under Attack?

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: California is attacked by Conservatives for just being a liberal hell and that people are fleeing California for the free states of Texas and Florida. There's a lot of bullshit in that California has lost about 1% of its population. Some people made a ton of money in California and want to …

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Ask A Genius 898: Niches of Persistence

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I proposed a topic on how evolution finds all niches of persistence. Those are generic abstract terms. I wanted to start with reproduction styles, and I'm speaking more about biological reproduction. So, our species has its form of reproduction, and I'm speaking purely in terms of a continuation of a …

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Ask A Genius 896: Hypochondria

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: This topic could be more interesting.  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I might disagree. Rosner: Okay. If I stack up enough physical complaints and irritations simultaneously happening in me, then I get flu-like symptoms that subside if I take a pain pill. So, I assume it's like fibromyalgia light or something like that where my feet …

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Ask A Genius 895: “I am the chosen one.”

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Trump's quote is, "I am the chosen one." This is crazy talk coming from surveys of about a third of Americans who believe Trump was not ordained by God but guided or even selected by God to lead.  Rosner: Anything he does that seems terrible, like fucking porn or inciting an insurrection …

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