Miscellaneous #5

In the recent movie Top Gun Maverick, Tom Cruise’s character ejects at over Mach 10. Walking away from that in real life sounds unlikely if it was a normal ejection seat—but since they didn’t show the landing in the film, perhaps the cockpit turned into a supersonic escape crew capsule. Here’s the true story of an F-15 pilot who ejected at over Mach 1 and barely survived. Sadly, the navigator died.

Frame captured from linked video

Which brings us to…Why the U.S. Air Force Ejected Bears Out of Supersonic Jets


A living cellular automaton made of lizard skin scales

Image via Lana Sinapayen

Is symbolic AI returning in a big way to be combined with deep learning? And were its previous failures sometimes overstated because the projects themselves were incomplete?

Gary Marcus: How New are Yann LeCun’s “New” Ideas? spoiler alert: not very

From Nintil: “SHRDLU was either very finicky or it just didn’t work.” But was it always supposed to be known to be just a fragile demo? Later Winograd made it sound like it didn’t really work so much as was highly jury-rigged to just the specific dialogue(s) for the demos which raises questions on how far he actually got coding SHRDLU’s internal models and other logic:

Image via David Stafford

The EU and the US want to hold AI companies accountable

Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming

Why is Programming So Frustrating? and Accidental Complexity Vs. Essential Complexity

5 Most Pointless Smart Life Devices to Stay Away From


Max Brückner’s Collection of Polyhedral Models (1900)


One thing I’m sure we’ve all been wondering is: How do dormant spores decide to wake up? Researcher Kaito Kikuchi at UC San Diego says “Turns out that they can count in their sleep using electricity!”

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