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Our world is awash in challenges, from global health problems to climate change to economic hardship. Fortunately, there are very smart people working on these problems at some of our finest institutions. For example, two scientists at MIT, noting that people felt 2016 was an especially bad year for celebrity deaths, decided to calculate whether […]
Perhaps it’s due to our having a cold for over a month (a viral metaphor for the late, lamented 2016?) but we’ve been obsessed with the video of Patti Smith performing Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall at December’s Nobel Prize Ceremony. It’s a powerful performance made even more so when Smith falters with […]
Years ago an employee came into our office upset about something we did. They were mid-way through a rant about our screw-up when we politely interrupted them and said they were right, we had made a mistake, and we apologized. No weasel words, no attempting to explain anything away–we flat out said we were wrong […]
This week, two technological advances caught our bleary, head-cold ridden eyes. First, is a huge advance by Google in translation capability. The company used its A.I. technology to radically improve its translation services. Try it out and you’ll see the translation is remarkably better. In fact, the New York Times reports, “The A.I. system had […]
As the end of this year of trials and tribulations draws near, we were called to jury duty this week. It was our first time as a potential juror and our experience suggests that jury duty is a prime target for a cocky start-up to make more efficient. We sat in a room with pretty good Wi-Fi for […]
Somehow in our many years on this planet, we have never read John Steinbeck. We recently rectified this situation by reading The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck is very different than what we expected: far more gritty, earthy and melancholy. We enjoyed the book and are edified by it. And yet, we are struck both by its short-sightedness […]
We have pondered in this space of how large a role fear plays in what is happening in our world, in our revolt against post-world war institutions, in how we vote and in many other ways. The documentary, Amanda Knox, now playing on Netflix, can be seen as a metaphor for our times. One theme of […]
In light of recent events perhaps we should not have been surprised to learn that chimpanzees score higher than humans in “working memory, information processing and strategic play.” No, really, you can see the videos here. The Australian PhD in economics and evolutionary biology blogger (now there’s a description) Jason Collins informs us, “If you […]
I tell those who are afraid of flying that it is not the flight you should be scared of, it’s the taxi ride at the end of it. I have been nearly killed in at least half a dozen cab rides in different locations around the world. Last week in a small town in Eastern Washington, my cab driver […]
(Caution: Parts of the following was written early in the morning after the 2016 World Series [congratulations Cubs! Once every 108 years without fail]. We cannot vouch for veracity, grammar or decency but like the Cubs and Indians, we left it all out on the field. International Need to Know is attending a Homeland Security […]