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.
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
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:
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!”