I love this koan and what makes it even better is that is based on a true event: Minsky’s real answer was “It has them, you just k ow what they are yet”
>The second stage of the grant termination process began on March 12, 2025, when Justin
Fox and Nate Cavanaugh – identified in the record as members of DOGE’s “Small Agencies
Team” – met with NEH leadership, including McDonald and Wolfson… Prior to joining the Trump Administration, neither Fox nor Cavanaugh had any
experience in government, public grant administration, private grant administration, or reviewing
humanities projects for scholarly merit… In fact, as both were in their twenties, they did not have much experience
in anything at all – certainly not in anything remotely related to the humanities.
I read this earlier today and was thinking: how many such mathematically gifted individuals exist I. The world at one time? Assuming there are probably 20-30 Tao-caliber people in the US and an adversarial multiplier of 0.1 (only 1 in 10 such kids are nurtured), we reach 300 for this generation, about 1 in a million.
That means in a generation there are ~ 10k such people in the world. Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinions and more than a few people have written similar ideas.
However, I find this chain of thought both offensive to what being a slave meant and ignorant. If you think being a coder is the modern equivalent to being enslaved either you’ve never worked as an entry level employer in the service industry or else have forgotten your experience.
They cannot receive from federally funded Medicaid but some states have programs or state-funded Medicaid programs that allow non-citizens to benefit. CA and NY do for some categories. See this example for WI: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/medicaid/noncitizens.htm
Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci's book Twitter and Teargas explains why, for protest movements to be successful they should have charismatic leaders and decentralized mass protest movements have a much harder time succeeding: https://www.twitterandteargas.org
A signal cannot be both time and frequency band limited. Many years ago I was amazed when I read that this fact I learned in my undergraduate is equivalent to the Uncertainty Principle!
On a more mundane note: my wife and I always argue whose method of loading the dishwasher is better: she goes slow and meticulously while I do it fast. It occurred to me we were optimizing for frequency and time domains, respectively, ie I was minimizing time so spent while she was minimizing number of washes :-)
“Years ago, I stumbled across an image online: a Sumerian clay tablet covered in tiny wedge-shaped marks.”
Seeing weird ancient symbols and feeling a great urge to embark on a journey to learn/decipher them is common; actually doing it is much rarer. Think of Champollion who, when shown Egyptian hieroglyphs by Fourier (as it is often mythologized) when he was just 11, devoting his life to them.
However, if you are tempted to take on Sumerian after reading this, I suggest that you start with Akkadian first. Chances are you’ll try to learn ancient languages by self study and you’ll need a lot of reading material: this is the advantage of Akkadian over Sumerian. Also the grammar will be easier to grasp. And it has borrowed a lot from Sumerian, so you can take it as a later step, if you so choose.
If you want to read inscriptions from local museums while keeping the cool ancient script angle, then, of course, go with Middle Egyptian. If, on the other hand you are determined to be one of the handful experts in the world on an ancient language, I’d suggest Hurrian or Luwian.
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.