So many (snooty) people treat audiobooks like a cheap substitute for reading, when in reality, reading is the cheap substitute for oral storytelling. Sure, you've got Infinite Jest where page structure and end notes are part of the aesthetic design, but I think more people would consume more literature if audiobooks were more normalized.
US colleges foresee a future where they are under attack for being absurdly selective, what some are now calling being "highly rejective". I think they want to avoid being targeted by the fairness wonks anymore than they already are.
Also, US News and World Report rankings have major problems, for instance, the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality, but doesn't account for price, giving schools incentive to raise prices to fund campus improvements that boost rank, in turn boosting applications, in turn reducing % acceptance (the principal indicator of "quality" in US schools). This was how TCU went from a meh christian school to a "selective private college" in just a couple of years. World Report now publishes a "best dollar value" report to account for this, but few read it.
That's my thinking as well: just re-brand string theory as math. It's not as though string theory will be testable anytime soon, so the criteria of verification is just hurting the field.
Why doesn't pure math get similarly attacked? Clearly math has generated lots of economic and scientific value, but it seems to me that there isn't much difference between string theory and, say, math work on the Monster Moonshine group or whatever.
I recommend Torkel Franzén's Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse. It is readable without sacrificing rigor.
It is especially good at ensuring the reader doesn't come away infected with the pseudo-profound BS that plagues many discussions of the Gödel's Theorems.
Newton wasn't above abusing his position as head of the Royal Society to discredit Leibniz. Wolfram reminds me of Newton—a self-conscious genius, exceedingly jealous of his intellectual primacy. I think Wolfram even compares NKS to Newton's Principia on the book's dust jacket if I recall.
“There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?” -- Frank Herbert
I hope this research evolves beyond the 'Cybernetics' buzzword. It seems like a meaningful term (control, regulation etc.) but when other disciplines take it up, it often seems to fade into vagueness. Psycho-cybernetics, socio-cybernetics, and cybernetics of child development were all hot stuff in the decades after Weiner. But little came of them in the end (mean while, Claud Shannon was doing very real work in Information Theory, which started from the same theoretical underpinnings).
There is no reason x-cybernetics can't deliver, esp. for quantum systems...I just hope that it does this time.
Would have been more interested to know how the avg EEV household electricity consumption compares to offset gasoline usage (as energy). My understand is that the efficiency of power plants is so much higher than automobile combustion engines that even if all power plants were gas-powered, EEVs would be an efficiency improvement thermodynamically.
I mean, of course EEV household consume more electricity, and of course they are parked at night...and that happens to be cheap electricity hours.
I've heard numerous people reference the mythical pragmatism of programmers and hackers as a problem when idealism vs. self-interest is on the line, Kevin Mitnick being one of them (~"a caught hacker always rats etc.")
Solution? It would be great to revive the old cyber-optimism of the 1990's when everyone thought the Internet was going to save the world. The "twitter revolutions" come to mind, but that narrative is pretty shallow.
For people to take a stand and hold under temptation for money and power, they have to have something they can believe in.