Of course it’s been solved many times before. This is not a great write up and a terrible headline.
In fact, the students came up with a trigonometric proof of Pythagoras which was not circular: I.e. did not rely on anything derived from the Pythagorean theorem itself, and presented it at a regional AMS meeting.
Absolutely. Lots of humans live in a post-truth world. They learn not to trust anything they read or hear. Think totalitarian regimes wi try tight controls over media.
A more painful and pertinent question might be: Can democracy adapt to a post-truth world, and the answer to that I fear is probably no. How can a democracy function if it’s citizenry can’t remain informed?
Hahah. We did, but we were a few years too early for many parts of it. The Global Learning XPRIZE was a $15M challenge to build basically this: tablet software that could let kids without access to schools or teachers teach themselves.
We (Learn Leap Fly) were a semi-finalist in that competition. We bet heavily on AI, but again, were a few years early (Note the constraints of the problem said that the devices were NOT connected to the internet, which makes things still challenging today)
We were also a semi finalist (round 3) in the AI XPRIZE (with the same tech).
We’ve thought about whether to resurrect the core ideas and give it another go. For that we need partners. Education isn’t the most lucrative of fields, it turns out.
That said, anyone who wants to go down this path, send me a note. I’m happy to talk nerdity on this topic all day, be it AI, literacy education, pedagogy or grand challenges!
Here’s a book I don’t expect to see on too many lists (and I’m surprised it’s on mine, as I don’t typically like big-property universes like Star Trek): The Final Reflection, John M Ford. It’s an ancient book (by Star Trek standards-1984) set in the original ST:TOS universe, but it did Klingon world-building before that was a thing (it’s not canon, as it did this long before Klingons were fleshed out in any real way). Loved the worldbuilding, loved that it made a then 2-dimensional alien into a rich 3-d society.
Ever since my PhD work (where I worked with some pretty obscure computing architectures), the phrase “Von Neumann Architecture” makes think immediately of D H Lehmer’s quote [1] on working with ENIAC:
> Can we use the high speed computer to do the sieve process? This was a highly parallel machine, before von Neumann spoiled it.
In fact, in many cases, deposits in provincial Credit Unions in Canada (e.g. Alberta and BC) are 100% guaranteed. (As opposed to the big banks, which are only guaranteed to $100,000). Some provinces hve other rules, but in general, deposits to Canadian Credit Unions have better deposit insurance protection than the big Canadian Banks.
A quick suggestion, I’d love to see you add the “cyclic sighing” pattern from [1] as it’s recently gotten some amount of attention for it’s effectiveness, and is potentially less common than the others.
Not sure what you mean by >20 years to be right. I built and trained a 3-layer back-propagating neural net to do OCR on an Apple 2 in 1989 based on that paper. Admittedly, just the 26 upper case characters. But it clearly worked better than the alternatives.
RocketLab (https://www.rocketlabusa.com/) services a slightly different segment (i.e. not as heavy) but does take things regularly to space (and in the case of Capstone, to the moon!)
Web content from previous administrations, is archived by the National Archive. (Eg https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/)
You can grab the archived copy at https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024...