[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 …
Category: Ask A Genius
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 901: Mr. and Mrs. Smith
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Carole and I started watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the TV series inspired by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a Doug Liman movie from probably 15 years ago. It's where Brad and Angelina met and fell in love, perhaps 17 or 18 years ago. In both the film and the series, the …
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 …
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 …
Ask A Genius 897: New Places and Faces
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You said you hate flying because you're about to go to Europe with your wife. I responded that I hate flying too, and that's a good topic because I wouldn't say I like flying. I don't like any travel; I'm a homebody. I want to be at home. I like it …
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 …
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 …
Ask A Genius 894: Hype on Self-Driving Cars
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: All right, this is an article from today's LA Times, January 5th, 2024: Calling out the hype around AI, self-driving cars by Michael Hiltzik, and it's an article about this guy named Rodney Brooks, who started Roomba and claims to have built more robots than anybody else and it's Rodney Brooks's sixth …
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Rick Rosner 