SpaceX intends to make their second attempt tomorrow to recover a Falcon 9 satellite booster by landing it vertically (1950's Science-fiction-style) on rocket thrust on a barge out in the Atlantic 200 miles east of Cape Canaveral.

The first attempt several weeks ago succeeded in locating the barge, calculating a trajectory to it and decelerating from hypersonic velocity, but failed in controlling its attitude on approach, coming in at about a 45 degree angle to the vertical and exploded on impact.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150127...ke-monkeys

EXCERPT: When we gamble, something odd and seemingly irrational happens. It's called the 'hot hand' fallacy – a belief that your luck comes in streaks – and it can lose you a lot of money. Win on roulette and your chances of winning again aren't more or less – they stay exactly the same. But something in human psychology resists this fact, and people often place money on the premise that streaks of luck will continue – the so called 'hot hand'.

The opposite superstition is to bet that a streak has to end, in the false belief that independent events of chance must somehow even out. This is known as the gambler's fallacy, and achieved notoriety at the Casino de Monte-Carlo on 18 August 1913. The ball fell on black 26 times in a row, and as the streak lengthened gamblers lost millions betting on red, believing that the chances changed with the length of the run of blacks.

Why do people act this way time and time again? We can discover intriguing insights, it seems, by recruiting monkeys and getting them to gamble too. If these animals make dumb choices like us, perhaps it could tell us more about ourselves....

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...break.html

EXCERPT: Human moral systems are designed, or evolve and grow, with human beings in mind. So maybe it shouldn't be too surprising if they would break apart into confusion and contradiction if radically different intelligences enter the scene.

[...] My own emphasis would be this: Our moral systems, whether deontological, consequentialist, virtue ethical, or relatively untheorized and intuitive, take as a background assumption that the moral community is composed of stably distinct individuals with roughly equal cognitive and emotional capacities (with special provisions for non-human animals, human infants, and people with severe mental disabilities). If this assumption is suspended, moral thinking goes haywire....

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/20...ities.html

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/02/03/ami...ist-ideas/

EXCERPT: The Counterterrorism and Security Bill 2014-15 has all but completed its swift passage into law. Sponsored by Theresa May and Lord Bates of the Home Office, it promises to expand the state’s paranoid reach in predictable ways: new powers to seize passports and bar UK citizens from returning home; a requirement that internet service providers collect data on users; a provision that airlines and rail and shipping companies may have to seek permission from the Home Office to carry certain groups of people.

More novel is the bill’s requirement that schools and universities conduct surveillance on their students. Section 25.1 states that education institutions are among the ‘specified authorities’ – along with councils, prisons, hospitals and police chiefs – that must ‘have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. The Home Office has published guidance notes on how this duty is to be fulfilled. Administrators must conduct ‘risk assessments’ to uncover ‘where and how’ their students might be drawn to extremist ideology, including ‘non-violent extremism’. All staff members should be trained in ways to ‘challenge extremist ideas’, and if they find anyone who appears ‘vulnerable to being drawn into extremism’, refer them to local anti-terrorism panels for ‘support’. It isn’t only students who will get the benefit of these panels; the bill will mean that any member of the public can be referred to them by a specified authority...

http://plus.maths.org/content/how-long-can-we-survive

EXCERPT: Knowing how long we have before we interact with a zombie could mean the difference between life, death and zombification. Here, we use diffusion to model the zombie population shuffling randomly over a one-dimensional domain. This mathematical formulation allows us to derive exact and approximate interaction times, leading to conclusions on how best to delay the inevitable meeting.

Humans would not survive a zombie holocaust, or so current work suggests. The fact that reanimated corpses do not stop unless their brain is destroyed, coupled with an insatiable appetite for human flesh has proven to be a deadly combination.

However, the work produced by Munz et al. assumes that zombies and humans are well-mixed, meaning that zombies can be found everywhere there are humans. Realistically, the initial horde of zombies will be localised to areas containing dead humans, e.g. cemeteries and hospitals. In addition, by not initially separating humans and zombies, humans are not able to run and hide in order to try and preserve themselves. It is a well documented fact that zombies are deadly but slow moving. Due to their slow movements it is quite possible that, given sufficient warning, we would be able to outrun the zombies and produce a defensible blockade where humans could live safely. In order to do so, it would be useful to know just how long an infestation of zombies would take to reach our defences as this would give us an estimate of how long we would have to scavenge for supplies and weaponry in order that we may protect ourselves from these oncoming, undead predators....

http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/th...with-logic

EXCERPT: [...] Standing face to face, they were an unlikely pair. [Warren] McCulloch, 42 years old when he met Pitts, was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m. Pitts, 18, was small and shy, with a long forehead that prematurely aged him, and a squat, duck-like, bespectacled face. McCulloch was a respected scientist. Pitts was a homeless runaway. He’d been hanging around the University of Chicago, working a menial job and sneaking into Russell’s lectures, where he met a young medical student named Jerome Lettvin.

It was Lettvin who introduced the two men. The moment they spoke, they realized they shared a hero in common: Gottfried Leibniz. The 17th-century philosopher had attempted to create an alphabet of human thought, each letter of which represented a concept and could be combined and manipulated according to a set of logical rules to compute all knowledge—a vision that promised to transform the imperfect outside world into the rational sanctuary of a library.

McCulloch explained to Pitts that he was trying to model the brain with a Leibnizian logical calculus. He had been inspired by the Principia, in which Russell and Whitehead tried to show that all of mathematics could be built from the ground up using basic, indisputable logic. Their building block was the proposition—the simplest possible statement, either true or false. From there, they employed the fundamental operations of logic, like the conjunction (“and”), disjunction (“or”), and negation (“not”), to link propositions into increasingly complicated networks. From these simple propositions, they derived the full complexity of modern mathematics.

Which got McCulloch thinking about neurons. He knew that each of the brain’s nerve cells only fires after a minimum threshold has been reached: Enough of its neighboring nerve cells must send signals across the neuron’s synapses before it will fire off its own electrical spike. It occurred to McCulloch that this set-up was binary—either the neuron fires or it doesn’t. A neuron’s signal, he realized, is a proposition, and neurons seemed to work like logic gates, taking in multiple inputs and producing a single output. By varying a neuron’s firing threshold, it could be made to perform “and,” “or,” and “not” functions....

[...] This universality made it impossible for Pitts to provide a model of the brain that was practical, and so his work was dismissed and more or less forgotten by the community of scientists working on the brain. [...] A purely logical, purely brain-centered vision of thought had its limits. Nature had chosen the messiness of life over the austerity of logic, a choice Pitts likely could not comprehend. He had no way of knowing that while his ideas about the biological brain were not panning out, they were setting in motion the age of digital computing, the neural network approach to machine learning, and the so-called connectionist philosophy of mind...

Technicolor turns 100 this year. It was supposed to make films more lifelike. Instead, its over-the-top palette made movies more dreamlike...

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...00/385039/

When everyone is an artist and no one buys art, artists starve. So it goes in America, where the professional dancer’s annual salary can be $15,000...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/12093...estruction