Facts So Romantic

 Recent advances have made deep neural networks the leading paradigm of artificial intelligence. One of the great things about deep neural networks is that, given a large number of examples,…

For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our homes, and go to fewer places.…

The phrase “Look down your nose” comes from a time when aristocrats were taller than commoners due to their superior nutrition. European elites would literally look down on their inferiors.…

Mental health is not what you’d call an “exact science.” For example, if two highly trained mental health providers meet privately with the same patient, they will agree 90 percent…

How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren’t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make…

Many have noted that the big contenders in the last two American presidential elections were well into their 70s, raising questions of the mental capacity, going forward, of these potential…

There’s a rude charm to the title, “Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You.” It’s catchy, like the title of an antagonistic explainer: Here are the causes of your lackluster…

The latest surge in COVID-19 cases in the United States has been called a pandemic of antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists. But it is more than that. Children under 12, for example, are…

During this Olympics, I’ve been rooting for Kelleigh Ryan, who is on the women’s foil team. She’s from Ottawa, where I live. Whenever she scored a point, she’d emit a victory scream,…

Last year, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and physicist Johannes Kleiner, at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in…