PicoBlog

Inspired by a misguided dread of overpopulation back here on Earth, “The Mark of Gideon” aired in Star Trek: The Original Series’ third season. The episode was written by George F. Slavin and Stanley Adams, who is best known to Star Trek fans as Cyrano Jones from the "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode. This concern for overpopulation reached a pinnacle in 1968 with the publication of “The Population Bomb,” a best-selling book by Paul Ehrlich.

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As we continue through the Windows Vista Challenge I thought it might be worthwhile to explore the desktop for those who never had a chance to experience it. Maybe you are younger and grew up in a home that ran that sturdy Windows XP box until it died and then upgraded to Windows 7 or even 8. Maybe you were a Mac OS X user at the time and skipped over it.

As a kid, I loved to watch Beyond 2000. It’s a TV show from Australia that started airing in 1985 and lasted until 1999. It was full of wonderful future tech some panned out, others did not but it has such a positive view of the future that it was infectious. Watching the show you could not help but feel positive about the future and what it could bring. I wanted to recapture that feeling after doing an article about AI and discussion around it.

When Tumblr announced that nudity was coming back to the platform, I started work on a piece talking about the relationship between sex workers and social media platforms. It’s a subject I’m passionate about, and I’m very happy with the final result, which you can read in The Spectator. The summary is this quote: Conservatives worry about deplatforming and shadow bans, but sex workers are Americas most censored, financially harassed and socially ostracized group.

Hi, all, and happy Sunday! Here’s a picture of me and three of my personal heroes—Simon Rosenberg, Rachel Bitecofer, and Tom Bonier—in the Network NOVA green room yesterday. Man, what a blast to meet them! I share the picture because I know lots of you love them, and I’m hoping, too, that the snapshot carries just a tiny bit of the energy, enthusiasm, determination, and fight I absorbed from hanging out with them backstage.

New here? Hi! If you want to get right down to business, scroll down for the video link and allllllll the way to the bottom for the recipe.Hey! If you’re here for the Mama Teav’s giveaway, all you need to do is become a Food Processing subscriber at any level and follow @lallimusic and @mamateavs on Instagram. Winners are selected randomly from the Food Processing subscriber list, so make sure your email is entered correctly.

I hate to say I told you so, and I am by no means the only one who said so, but driverless cars (still) have a problem. That problem, which I have emphasized dozens of times over the last several years, is edge cases, out-of-the-ordinary circumstances that often confound machine learning algorithms. The more complicated a domain is, the more unanticipated outliers there tend to be. And the real world is really complicated and messy; there’s no way to list all the crazy and out of ordinary things that can happen.

In this excerpt from my latest conversation with John, we discuss Charles Murray’s latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. (You can watch my recent discussion with Charles here.) John is more critical of the book than I am, though I share some of his concerns. For John, Murray’s citation of evidence of racial disparities in IQ tests is so convincing as to be incontrovertible. But when Murray offers suggestions about what to do with this information, John finds him less enlightening.