Black Mirror Season 4 is out today!

6 eps as usual, I'm looking for a 4K version but not easy to find...it is a bit early as it just came out on Netflix today.  I already found a 1080p HEVC version but I'd really like to get 4K so I'll have to try and be patient but if any ep this season is on the level of San Junipero from S03 it'll be unreal!

I saw there was a Star Trek'esque ep, curious to see how that will go...w/o any spoilers I had heard already Hang the DJ ep is the best (ep 4 I think just like San Junipero was)...but we'll see.  I'll update this post once I watch all 6.

Esp. if you have Netflix go and enjoy asap!!!

Cooking Oil Health Update

Two main oils we use are this great Olive Oil (for low/mid heat cooking - it was an easy decision to use Olive oil for this as there has been a myriad of studies showing all its health benefits) and for the past few years this great expeller-pressed naturally refined Canola Oil (for high heat stir frys).

As my friends know one of my main hobbies is keeping up with Science/Tech/Health research and this weekend I just read about a new study that raised my concerns on Canola Oil (even the high quality one we buy).  Before we get to that, I'll quickly reiterate why we went with Canola Oil for stir frys, it's high in monounsaturated fats and with the natural refining it can stand high heat (here's a great tutorial link on what to look for in healthy oils, I like this site as it has references to research for all their claims), also a great balance of Omega 6 to 3's, etc.  But some downsides were the very nature of Canola oil not being a good healthy oil, until Canadian plant scientists GMO'd it (for the record I have no issue with GMO if it's done properly for the right reasons, but that's a topic for another day) by selective breeding, which was the level of GMO sophistication back in the 70's.  I also knew that Avocado oil was probably the healthiest high heat cooking oil but 2-3 years ago it was a very very expensive option, today it's just somewhat expensive.

So here's the new research on Canola oil, a few things to keep in mind is that they used the very unnaturally extracted/refined regular/cheap Canola oil (which is what 90% of people buy so makes sense).  Also, as this is prelim research they can't pinpoint what exactly in the Canola oil is causing these unhealthy results.  Also it is a mouse not a human study.  So for many reasons I'm not suggesting we abandon our good expensive Canola oils (but if you have just the $3-4 ones I do urge you to dump that!) but I always preach diversity and for all these reasons, next time we stock up it will be on these 2 oils below.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171207141624.htm

For High heat cooking, we're definitely switching to Avocado oil (read this for the many benefits) and I found a very high quality one that's reasonably priced and readily available!  Loblaws has at a great price as does Walmart (their Organic section is growing).

https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/chosen-foods-100-pure-avocado-oil/6000196888795

Also, to try and work in another super healthy oil (again read this to find out why), we'll buy this great and reasonably priced Coconut Oil for baking and making pancakes!  Some people don't like how Coconut oil solidifies, well that's because of the long chain triglycerides, so what Nature's Way did is naturally replace the LCT's with the very healthy MCT's, to increase the MCT level to 92% (from the 62% in normal coconut oil)...now it's healthier and doesn't solidify.

https://www.vitamart.ca/natures-way-liquid-coconut-oil.html

PS  One final thought, as I always keep a look out for the future...seems the next dimension of diversification may be Algae Oil!  I'll keep an eye on it, as the research comes in...bottom line is that Olive Oil has by far the most research studies, nothing else comes close so it's a field you have to keep an eye on and roll with the punches!

Google's DeepMind AI Becomes a Superhuman Chess Player In a Few Hours

I've been very busy with my great new job since the summer so clearly less postings...also of course my wonderful family keeps me busy as well so little time to blog!

Just wanted to quickly share this follow up AlphaZero story, this is def another level of AI now...still a few levels at least from a general intelligence like ours but when it's laser focused on a particular game it's amazing what it can do!

https://games.slashdot.org/story/17/12/06/216256/googles-deepmind-ai-becomes-a-superhuman-chess-player-in-a-few-hours

Yet more on Future of Jobs

Ray Kurzweil spoke a bit more on the future of jobs during an interview with Fortune.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/09/25/0552259/ray-kurzweil-explains-why-technology-wont-eliminate-human-jobs

That's a great way to put it...some of the comments below the summary are worth noting, though many are not.  One that adds something is this one

https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11157175&cid=55257971

Speaking of the future, the way jobs turn out in a Star Trek society is Utopian imo!  Seems ST Discovery had a good debut, I personally liked it even though I've never been that interested in Klingons...I'm just happy to have ST back on the air, they did say Season 2 will be a whole new "non-Klingon story"

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/star-trek-discovery-premiere-ratings-cbs-all-access-1202570092/

Addendum:  Quora topic on ST Discovery reviews

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-review-of-Star-Trek-Discovery

Interesting Items Part Deux

I've been a big proponent of clean water being a priority, so when we bought our house I bought both a whole-house Kinetico water purification (and softening) system...on top of that a 5-stage Reverse-Osmosis (RO) in the kitchen.

Check the article, these plastic fibers contaminants are 10 microns, that will pass thru a lot of filters even, certainly anything the city might use but RO's semi-permeable membrane is typically 0.0001 microns :-)  Also clearly they cannot be boiled away...unless of course you mean distilling your water (i.e. catching the water vapor) ;-)

Hard to say at this point what kinds of ailments drinking microscopic plastic fibers could lead to but we have been hearing about stranger and stranger ones in the last few decades.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/09/06/2020257/plastic-fibers-found-in-83-percent-of-worlds-tap-water-study-reveals

Changing gears, this is a very cool new hack called the Dolphin-Attack using hypersonic commands on all the Siri's and other voice assistants...we of course cannot hear past audible frequencies so we have no idea anything is even happening!

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/17/09/06/2026247/hackers-can-take-control-of-siri-and-alexa-by-whispering-to-them-in-frequencies-humans-cant-hear

Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse

It is too rare to see articles regarding the positive side of automation...I mean think about it, automation didn't just start yesterday it's been going on in one form or another for at least a century or more and the avg. person's standard of living is quite a bit higher since back then!

https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/09/05/1959229/workers-fear-not-the-robot-apocalypse

Pseudo-Random Interesting Stuff

The pseudo only applies to random in the title not to interesting ;-)

Linked in report on Jobs & Salaries for 2017.  Highlights:

• STEM jobs pay the best
• Highest paid undergrad = CS (shocker), highest paid grad degree = MD (even bigger shocker haha) 
• San Fran & Seattle are tops for overall pay...NYC no longer tops 

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/blog/LinkedIn-2017-us-state-of-salary-report

Finally there’s a new approved therapy for Cancer (leukemia) that isn’t just radiation and chemo. I have seen many amazing sounding therapies but all were in experimental phase (such as 2nd link), I can't recall every seeing one finally get approved...hope this is the 1st of many! 

 

https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/08/30/1912216/fda-approves-first-cell-based-therapy-for-cancer

 

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-in-general/treatment/biological-therapy/types/gene-therapy

Now on to a Quora topic on fave math puzzles...I only took a close look at 1, this one below is very cool.  I was too tired to really dig into it so gave an educated guess, it's nearly the right answer but there is an answer a bit better but requires quite a bit more thinking and imagination to come up with it.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-favorite-math-problem-puzzle/answer/David-Prifti-1?srid=uhhZL

The rest are here, some maybe good for little kids but most better for high school kids or us grown ups

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-favorite-math-problem-puzzle

Preview of Black Mirror Season 4

While it is true the eps of this show can vary quite a bit in quality, I think even the worst ones are better than a lot of shows and the best ones like S3's San Junipero or Most Hated are priceless gems!

http://www.kurzweilai.net/black-mirror-season-4-coming-to-netflix

More on the Future of Jobs

Some more insights into an important topic for us and especially our kids.  But his comment on sustainable jobs, has a nice ring to it but I don't think there are any, sure some jobs like lawyers\doctors\bankers have stuck around for a long time but the distant future is likely to antiquate them as well.  New jobs are being created for now this is true and so for those who's fields have been wiped out have little choice but to migrate to them but I'm not convinced even that trend will continue.

Again I see a hopefully rising Universal Income being the only realistic solution, once 3D printing then Nanotechnology can build anything from the atom up...for fractions of a penny, not sure there would even need to be an Economy any more much less jobs ;-)  But there's going to be a few decades between us and this potential future so until then gotta earn however you can!

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6298520826526396417

Count the Triangles

Depending on your interest in puzzles esp. of a mathematical variety then this may be nearly trivial (I say nearly because I had to stop myself once or twice from declaring a too quick answer and look deeper).

I'm going to let Chiara tackle it, should be a good challenge for her and help teach her her to take her time and be thorough!

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/whats-hot/no-one-can-work-out-how-many-triangles-are-in-this-picture/ar-AAoUVES?ocid=ientp

Coding is the new Cursive!

Great article in the Globe & Mail...I've been saying this for awhile now!  This is why we'll be sending Chiara to coding camp in a few years.  Many great points in the article, the 1 I want to highlight is that kids learning coding now doesn't mean they are on the path to be software developers, 1 study estimates 65% of kids entering primary school now will end up in jobs that don't even exist yet!  And you can bet whether those jobs are in biology or media they will involve some futuristic form of coding!

A Climate Change Solution

One of my LinkedIn connections shared this link with the caption "someone please share this with POTUS"

The Story of Soil - not sure if it can solve all of the Climate Change problem but if we move to renewables and implement this, could make a big dent in it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08TI1RKj54g

Witty & Concise Summary of Politics

I saw this on LinkedIn, so true...so true

I told my son, “You will marry the girl I choose.” He said, “NO!” I told him, “She is Bill Gates’ daughter.” He said, “OK.” I called Bill Gates and said, “I want your daughter to marry my son.” Bill Gates said, “NO.” I told Bill Gates, My son is the CEO of World Bank.” Bill Gates said, “OK.” I called the President of World Bank and asked him to make my son the CEO. He said, “NO.” I told him, “My son is Bill Gates’ son-in-law.” He said, “OK.” This is exactly how politics works . . . HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND FRIENDS!

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

I guess a fitting start to new post about jobs is to let my friends know that I'll be starting work at BMO next week!  I'll be in a different area and floor than my wife Carol but we'll both be at FCP which is cool!

It was amazing to spend 6 months at home with my family and then to get a great job at just the perfect time!

Anyway, from Barry Ritholtz's great site I saw a link for a Bloomberg article on what sectors of the job market are losing them the fastest (often now that means never to return).  Also a great interactive table on what jobs are at Risk, you can enter the name of your job/area/field.  It is only so granular,  it didn't of course have my obscure job of Quantitative Analyst or even Risk Manager but you can get a general idea and it's very cool!  

That general idea is unsurprisingly the higher education level required for a job the less likely (usually) it will be replaced by AI/Robots quickly.  When I was job hunting this year, I noticed I got way more interviews for jobs I applied to that needed Grad school degrees as a minimum, clearly I had much less competition there.  For my work, requires balancing Math/Finance/Computing knowledge so that's pretty safe (for now) but another field that's highly educated is Accounting and they are not so safe...which makes sense as it is a very systematic/rules based field...for anyone that can program even a little, you know code to automate such tasks is not that hard.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-jobs-automation-risk/

Finally, has a great section on Coal Mining vs. Retail Sector (esp. bricks and mortar dept. stores)...Trump goes on so much about Coal Mining but the job losses there are but a tiny fraction of the loses in Retail...on one of my fave shows covered this and showed if I recall correctly that JC Penny is facing more job cuts than the entire coal mining industry!!!

New top-end Intel i9's have 18 cores/36 threads!

In 2013 when I built my current rig, I thought my i7 4930K was impressive with 6 cores/12 threads but Intel has blown past that with 12 core/14/16 & the big daddy at 18 cores!  More importantly these CPU's are in the Tera Flop range now finally...GPU's have been there for awhile ;-)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3198430/components/intels-core-i9-starts-a-bloody-battle-for-enthusiast-pcs.html

If anyone's thinking of getting it...careful as aside from price, it requires a brand new chipset of course (this is why I build new comps every 5y or so instead of trying to upgrade parts ad hoc).

Meanwhile, checking the latest Top Supercomputers list

https://www.top500.org/lists/2016/11/

we see that China has the top 2, no way US closes that gap with Trump in charge ;-)  Seems the peak speed of which is 125K Tera Flops or 125 Peta Flops!  That's now in the ballpark of Exa Flops = 1000 Peta Flops...that's key because the best computational neuroscience estimates are that the Human brain computes at the Exa scale level!

You may be wondering, this new Intel chip with it's 18/36 cores can only do 1 or 2 Tera Flops while the supercomputer can do 125,000 Tera Flops???  Did I forget to mention that supercomp has >10 million cores!!! haha

Star Trek: Discovery

Finally, a real actual Trailer is out for the new installment of Star Trek!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8mesUEFjas

It "looks" very good, we'll have to see how the stories, characters and most important for me, the science of the show is!  ST has always been one to focus more on the Sci part of SciFi (and of course the human element, reflecting current issues etc) except maybe with the previous subpar installment ST: Enterprise (barely watchable!).

It's tentatively scheduled for Fall release...fingers crossed!  Can't wait!!

Good time to Image your OS Drive

I'm sure you all saw the news on Wanna Cry, the virulent Ransomware making the global rounds. Seems it does require some form of click to install itself and most of the time it's thru phishing scams which I never fall for (though I've seen some decent ones, most are obvious) and I've helped Carol become more adept at avoiding them as well.

Still you never know, so I figured it's as good a time as any to use my OS' (win 8.1) built in ability to create an Image of everything installed on my OS Drive (C:/Drive for most of us) and save that on my D:/Drive (4TB backup drive).  My image is almost 200 gigs but I got ~1.4TB left so I'm fine :-)

I recommend doing the same, in case you don't know, what the Image would do is say you got this Ransomware or some other bad virus or corruption, you could just do a clean reinstall of windows then once you've done that...can get everything back to the way it was from the untouched Storage drive where you stored your clean OS image!  Actually, I think you can skip the clean reinstall and directly load from the Image (this may be version dependent).

Here's a link that explains how to do this...quite easy!

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/

Elon's Solar Tiles Debut

I first heard of this brilliant idea a few years ago, glad to see it come to fruition

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/10/2010211/teslas-highly-anticipated-solar-roofs-go-up-for-pre-order-today

Musk says the cost is comparable to traditional asphalt roofs (once you include energy savings, govt subsidies,...etc) but we'll have to see.  Our house is still <10 years old so I hope by the time I need a new roof this will be priced reasonably and all the kinks worked out.  Then we'd have to buy 1 or 2 of their PowerWall's as well so they can work in tandem.

https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/powerwall

Saving Space on an SSD!

If you bought an SSD for your OS a few years ago at least, then likely space is a precious commodity!  I built my last rig in 2013, SSD's were about $1/Gig back then so I got a great Samsung 840 Pro 256GB.  Love this SSD but with 256GB after 3-4 years you start to run out of space, I only have 1 giant game installed GTA V, takes nearly 80GB!!  A few smaller games and then some appz. I've been fighting with 10-20GB left for awhile now...I knew there must be some software out there that can help me but I wasn't even sure how to Google it.

Long story short and to save anyone else in this situation the trouble, I found this excellent free program called WinDirStat.

Using this program I found out NVIDIA, GARMIN and RAZER etc. don't clean up after themselves after each update so you could have 10 gigs in their download folder!  I found other install files that take up 40 gigs or so but these require a bit of extra work to figure out what can be deleted etc.  So I skipped that for now.

The big payoff came when I looked under the heading <Files>, it was taking about 40 gigs...with Hiberfil.sys accounting for 26 of that!  I figured that was to do with putting a system into Hibernation which I don't do, some quick research showed how to get rid of it safely.  Finally, the Pagefile.sys was also 10 gigs, I had set that thinking I have plenty of room (when I setup my system in 2013) but upon further reflection since I have 32GB of RAM, I don't even really need a Pagefile at all since I think the most use I ever saw was 15-16GB (I did leave a minimal one)!

So mission accomplished, I now nearly have 60GB of free space, won't be going into the red zone anytime soon!

UPDATE:  I now went back to that step of safely removing the Installer Files, can't remove them all as some are in use...this great little program can do the checks for you!  I now removed an extra 34gigs in orphaned installer files!!

https://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/13/patchcleaner-remove-orphan-windows-installer-files-to-free-up-disk-space/

Nuclear Fusion - We really are getting very close to viability!

One of the energy sources that will hopefully become viable for humanity in the near future is Nuclear Fusion (not Nuclear Fission which has been around for nearly 100 years!).  However, it's been just around the corner for 50 years or so.  The Engineering challenges are vast but there have been many instances of sustained Fusion reaction now (even a few where the energy output nearly matched the input - a level called Breakeven - one of the closest to this is the LNL National Ignition Laser based experiment - but I feel this approach may not be sustainable or commercially viable) so I don't think it's a stretch to say we're getting close now as opposed to back then.  Likely it was the media's usual hyperbole that lead to this cynicism!

Here's a short summary of those Engineering challenges, actually a very good introduction to NF in general!

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/challenges/fusion.aspx

Since the article above didn't mention one of the coolest (and perhaps my personal fave approach)...The Stellarator, I'll link to details myself below.  I think this approach is very promising and some initial tests on plasma control went well, I believe a >30 minute test will take place in 2021 if that is passed then we can most definitely say we are very close indeed!

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/bizarre-reactor-might-save-nuclear-fusion

Looks like China & Australia see the potential of The Stellarator approach as they recently entered a partnership!

https://www.asianscientist.com/2017/04/academia/australia-china-fusion-energy/

Some of the latest news (few days ago) is a UK company called Tokamak Energy (Tokamak is a Russian term - most likely for Torus aka Donut - which is the shape of the most popular Reactor design) just went online and produced First Plasma (at around 100 million Celsius - about 10x hotter then core of the Sun, this is necessary since we cannot produce the immense pressures required which are provided by Gravity in the Sun's core!).

http://interestingengineering.com/uks-fusion-reactor-just-generated-first-plasma/

Universal Basic Income

It seems Ontario has now begun a Basic Income program in Hamilton, Lindsay & Thunder Bay.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/wynne-announcement-hamilton-1.4082476

The program will pay $17K for singles, $24K for families.  That's definitely a modest amount but probably reasonable for a pilot program.  Seems it will last 3 years of data gathering, then I suppose they will use that to either scrap it all together or I what I hope is to make it better.

Here's a good write up of this fascinating and ever more relevant topic...at the end of my "lecture" I point out some highlights from the link below, it's a bit long so you may prefer just to check that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

One of the most common complaints critics have is that UBI will create a disincentive to work, to some degree this is true (and there is data on this -- check the Wiki) what most people who are not in High Tech or at least very plugged into the scene (such as your humble correspondent ;-) don't realize is that this question will be moot in as little as 10 years!  Sometime in the 2020's we will reach a true AI (as I've discussed in numerous posts!) at that point pretty much any job could be replaced by said AI.  Now, this is a complex subject which I don't want to go off on too big a tangent but these AI should have rights and hence they may not want to do all those jobs etc.  So how that will all shake out is hard to say.  But don't get too hopeful, Nanotech and 3D printing are also on the rise, so between these 3 amazing technologies the future of most jobs, not just manufacturing jobs but also most types of Lawyers, Doctors and Quants (such as myself)...etc will all be taken!

The point I'm trying to make is that  disincentive for work is irrelevant when there's no work!  So it's really with good foresight that many countries are seriously testing out what form of this program (likely will require a multi-variable approach in the sense that we change/adapt the form every 5 years or so to adapt to the changes technology is making to society) works best now!

Also, related to this are the people who don't believe in UBI, they usually advocate "jobs for everyone"...I find this to be a very antiquated mode of thinking!  It's like going back to the 1800's and outlawing textile looms because it put seamstresses out of a job (which incidentally what began the group called Luddites!).  For people who understand where technology is going they can see this is not the answer, there's been a long trend of automation, going back to the very first types of work, agrarian in nature...look how many people it now takes to run a farm, just a few!  As everything becomes more automated, we all have more free time (though parents to young children such as myself have trouble seeing that sometimes!) and will continue to do so as tech progresses.  Simple example would be a Nanotech based Replicator, like in Star Trek, this actually isn't that hard compared to many of the other future tech on that show.  No more shopping, no more cooking, cleaning up dishes etc.  Think how much more free-time we'd have!  My point is, if we force companies to keep human labor we will stifle this tech evolution, for instance we may not get to the stage where we have Replicators :-(  If you think about it, do you really want to work or is the more basic thing you want...money?  I know it's the latter for me so I certainly do not want to halt technology by handcuffing companies...UBI is the answer (what form is best?...that requires much research and experimentation!).  I do want to point out that companies will pay a significant portion of UBI, not sure how the optimal details will work out but take for instance a company akin to Microsoft that may gain a monopoly on AI labor, and another on Nanotech...these 2 companies would make Apple look like a Ma N Pa operation!  They would be ridiculously rich and so should pay their fair share to UBI!  If they don't...they lose anyway as nobody would have any money to buy their products!

Some people also question...what would you even do if you didn't work?  I think this is the ultimate 1st world problem! haha  I personally could list dozens of things!  But for those who lack imagination I'm sure we could run a variety of suggestions by you and at least a few of those would interest you!  Also the size of the UBI would limit what you could do but that's just a transitional phase, as Nanotech leads to buildings for example being created for a few $, money will go the way of the DoDo haha.  Even today with a modest UBI, you could study free online courses at great institutions like MIT on say M-Theory (potentially a Grand Unified Theory of Physics) or the collected works of Shakespeare or Mandarin...etc!  You could take up painting, carpentry...any number of activities!

Finally, there's many more interesting tangents to explore in this topic, but I have to do more research myself so let's save it for a future post!  I'll finish with a few highlights from the Wiki on UBI:

• Administrative Efficiency - The lack of means test or similar administration would allow for some saving on social welfare, which could be put towards the grant. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) describes one of the benefits of a basic income as having a lower overall cost than that of the current means-tested social welfare benefits,[9] and they have put forth proposals for implementation that they claim to be financially viable.[10]
• First, although most basic income supporters tend to be politically left, right-leaning supporters, at least since the 1970s, have argued that policies like basic income free welfare recipients from the paternalistic oversight of conditional welfare-state policies. Second, Philippe Van Parijs has argued that basic income at the highest sustainable level is needed to support real freedom, or the freedom to do whatever one "might want to do."
• Fox Piven holds the view that an income guarantee would benefit all workers by liberating them from the anxiety that results from the "tyranny of wage slavery" and provide opportunities for people to pursue different occupations and develop untapped potentials for creativity

Update:  A story about San Fran mulling a proposal to tax robots that take people's jobs...the money can be used to retrain those workers etc.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/02/1958221/san-francisco-politician-jane-kim-is-exploring-a-tax-on-robots

Science News: Event Horizon Telescope & a big step towards true AI

The cool idea I introduced a few blog posts ago, a virtual telescope (from Hawaii to Antartica to Spain) with a combined diameter of the Earth (10,000K!) built to observe the Event Horizon of Black Holes has been turned on and taken it's first series of pictures.  The story below provides details, alas the data goes to supercomputers and it will take months to create a "picture" from the data.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-astronomers-piece-image-black-hole.html

Just saw this, new TED Talk about the EVT
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like

In other news, a great piece (from MIT's Technology Review zine) on a more mysterious but almost surely more powerful form of AI which has begun to come to fruition!  The article isn't short but well worth the read, touches on many tangentially interesting topics as well.  This form of AI is more biological in nature, it's an extreme in a way, you give the program the power to observe and experience then it develops it's own algorithms (genetic algorithm's I presume) to try and achieve a task.  NVIDIA used this approach with an autonomous car and got some promising but somewhat scary results, the car certainly was driving but by the very nature of the approach, a black box is essentially created that neither the programmers or engineers can tell you much about...it's akin to the AI created a brain and now we need to study it to figure out how it works!

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

I highly recommend this story to even my readers who aren't super interested in science, AI has become almost a regular dinner table topic of conversation these days.  A far cry from the small corner of science it held back when I began to follow it in High School (long time ago!).  It will affect more and more of your life as it becomes intertwined in all aspects of society, so probably not a bad topic to at least casually keep up on!

Baby Gender Swaying

I first heard a legitimate scientific method for increasing the probability of having a baby of a certain gender >10 years ago, I didn't believe it at first so I googled it (ya you could google things >10y ago :-)  From what I could see it seemed legit. As I was going to pass this advice onto a friend recently (who may become a parent in the near future) I thought since 10 years have passed I should try to make sure nobody tweaked or overturned these results...good thing I did because that's exactly what happened!

Turns out this is eponymously named The Shettles Method.  Seems the evidence against it really started piling up in 2006, I checked this maybe 2004 or so...explains why I had no chance to find it! Now, I do want to point out that even if this or some other method worked well it could be an issue if predominantly a country were say to want all boys etc. but the way we wanted to use it is to have a girl first then a boy, which is balanced so I don't see any issue with that.  Clearly since we have 2 wonderful daughters we saw it didn't work the second time, but of course we knew it was only probabilistic (and if it were true, girls would be a higher probability target than boys) so after thinking about it I thought I figured out something that didn't allow us to reach that higher probability.  Of course now I realize that it wasn't going to make a difference anyway.

So if Shettles doesn't work...are there any factors that can influence whether you end up with an XX or an XY?  Most scientist believe there are!  The next question is, OK how can I make use of this fact for gender swaying?  The current answer to that is...it's far from clear :-(

I'm going to point you to some links for further reading, the 1st is a good place to start if you are going to dive deeper into this topic.  I was a bit concerned about the source (I mentioned this before but before you trust anything, especially if you don't have say a scientific background, need to make sure it's a top quality source!) as it's a msg board but they provide legit links to scientific papers to back up their facts.  This will bust or confirm some myths about differences between X & Y sperm, which is ultimately what decides on XX or XY (as eggs are always X).

http://genderdreaming.com/forum/swaying-studies-and-scientific-research/1562-what-real-differences-between-x-sperm-y-sperm.html

Second, this slightly academic article examines different mechanisms (mostly errors either in DNA or in the meiosis process in males) that can cause a higher probability of ending up with an XX or XY baby.

http://sciencequestionswithsurprisinganswers.org/2015/05/05/is-it-completely-random-whether-a-baby-is-a-boy-or-a-girl/

And finally, last but not least a whole group of myths about gender swaying debunked from a top quality source, The Cleveland Clinic!  I want to point out, in fairness to Dr. Shettles that this article should have mentioned his work was from the 1960's!  It was amazing work for that time with the limited technology available to him...of course in 2006 and beyond, tech has come a long way and they can accurately differentiate X & Y sperm...etc so it's easy to see where Shettles went wrong!

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/2014/10/boy-or-girl-can-you-choose-your-babys-gender/

If after all this you are still interested in this topic and want to dig even deeper then I suggest reading more about Capacitation and how it could alter the gender ratio, or this recent theory that is gaining supporters...all these years Doctors said it was the Father who decided whether it's XX or XY but perhaps it's actually the Mother!  The mechanism that could allow this is if a woman's body could somehow differentiate between X or Y sperm...and depending on various factors, decide to favor one over the other!  It sounds a bit crazy but that's what so cool about Science!  Here's the paper showing some evidence of this! How can you make use of this?  You'll have to wait awhile for that as this is bleeding edge research, it's in early stages still...

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2164-15-293

PS  I nearly forgot, a very interesting tangent here is that with the advances of Biotech, we're getting quite close to same-sex couples being able to have a child that has genetic contribution from both parents.  I'm still learning more about this but I believe it would be easier for 2 Men to have either a boy or a girl since they have both X & Y chromosomes.  What's much trickier is for 2 Women to have a boy (a girl is not that hard as that's just XX, one from each mother...easy peasy ;-) but to have a boy you will need to make a Y sperm from the genetic material of two Mom's.  I have heard this is theoretically possible (I'll need to do more research to understand how) but it's going to take 20 years or so to get that sorted out.

Here's a good link on it, has links inside to less technical News stories on this
https://ipscell.com/2015/03/babysamesexcouple/

QUORA--Are scientists on the verge of finding out how to slow down aging and increasing how long humans live?

One of my fave topics...there's some smart and very informed (esp. wrt timeliness) people on Quora so I learnt a few new things reading this topic.  I'll highlight my fave responses but feel free to peruse the rest of the answers!

Actually after reading a bunch of answers, the 2 that were my faves are probably the only 2 that are sufficiently informed...one person points out that we should focus on raising the standard of living globally before working on reversing aging.  That's a nice well intentioned thought but very naive, based on a complete missunderstanding of how the world works (but I won't go on a long tangent explaining why...).

This one is great, perhaps 2 mistakes are making such a big deal about CEO Liz Parrish (patient zero) apparent age, considering the treatment she underwent was not focused on her outward appereance.  The other is perhaps being overly cautious about everything he reports (I guess it's a refreshing change since almost all news medium's these days do the opposite!)

https://www.quora.com/Are-scientists-on-the-verge-of-finding-out-how-to-slow-down-aging-and-increasing-how-long-humans-live/answer/Roey-Tzezana?srid=uhhZL

This next one is good, well informed, with shoutouts to the guru of Aging research Aubrey de Grey. I did a quick google to checkout the poster's bonafides, didn't find anything crazy so it should be legit (confirming my educated guess).

https://www.quora.com/Are-scientists-on-the-verge-of-finding-out-how-to-slow-down-aging-and-increasing-how-long-humans-live/answer/Johnty-Andersen?srid=uhhZL

QUORA -- How do I prove to you people in 2017 that I'm a time traveller from 3060?

I've seen questions like this on Quora a few times, maybe the poster believes they are from the future maybe they are just a Troll but often some of the answers are very interesting!

Here are 2 answers I found fascinating for very different reasons, I'll say little about the first one as I don't want to destroy the aura of mystery it generates!  Can read the comments after as I'm sure you'll have questions or ask me :-)

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-prove-to-you-people-in-2017-that-Im-a-timetraveller-from-3060/answer/John-Geare?srid=uhhZL

Then this answer which is very practical, scientific...perhaps the most interesting part is the comments, especially of "Shin Daniel", this 8th grade kid seems quite smart!

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-prove-to-you-people-in-2017-that-Im-a-timetraveller-from-3060/answer/Luveh-Keraph?srid=uhhZL

Space as a Muse for New Physics

It's great these days that by following the right Blogs (of Professors or Post-Docs in whatever your field of interest) you can cut out the middle man (Science Journalist's) and get news in a much more timely manner, without the jumbled interpretation of said middle man.  I would point out that there are exceptions, Quanta zine's Natalie Wolchover has (I believe) a Grad degree in Physics and is great at explaining new interesting results in an entertaining and accurate manner.

One of many Blogs I follow is a Post-Doc currently at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, he's a Theoretical Physicist...goes by the Handle 4Gravitons, physics jargon (Feynman Diagram -- I believe is the reference there).  He's written a great post outlining the many deep and difficult areas of Fundamental physics illuminated by Astronomers/Astrophysicist's in their study of Space.

https://4gravitons.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/what-space-can-tell-us-about-fundamental-physics/

His usual audience are people who at least have studied Physics in Undergrad or more likely Grad school.  But this one he tried to make as accessable as possible, provides some great links too.  I was already familiar with most of what he wrote about, I think #4 is especially cool, I have tried to read Nima & Maldacena's paper (2 Super Geniuses -- in the 180-200 IQ range) and I couldn't follow well at all, even a summary written and simplified by Lubos Motl (word is that Sheldon from BBT is loosely based on LuMo) was difficult to comprehend...other than it being obvious what a genius idea this is!

The one item that was new to me was this amazing idea that seems to have been put in motion and is nearly complete...the Event Horizon Telescope!  Check the link but it's basically a Very Large Array of smaller telescopes that has an effective diameter of Earth!  With this powerful VLA they believe they can view a Black Holes Event Horizon!  Now you may wonder how can you see an Event Horizon (the point at which even light cannot escape the immense gravitational pull of a Black Hole) but there are many ways it could be seen, if a Black Hole is syphoning gas from say a nearby Star then there will be an accretion disk that gets very hot as it enters the Event Horizon.

Another way is a currently a huge theoretical debate, something called the Firewall Paradox, this is a fascinating area of Theoretical Physics as it points out an important way that we likely don't understand Quantum Gravity.  Which of course is a nascent theory far from complete, and that's probably the best case description referring to M-Theory.  The original authors that discovered this paradox believe that space-time ends at the Event Horizon, in a Firewall that annihilates all matter/particles that enter that region!  I don't personally believe this is the correct interpretation, I lean more towards an amazingly creative genius hypothesis put forth by Maldacena & Susskind, it's called ER=EPR.  Try and read about it, it's mind blowing...basically the fabric of space is due to quantum entanglement (that idea is not entirely theirs, check the link) and all entangled particles are joined via microscopic wormholes!  Far out!!

PS

LuMo in one particular post on the Firewall problem, had a couple of guys who thought they were much smarter than they actually are and posted some arrogant comments, LuMo's blog is definitely the wrong place to do this...check out LuMo eviscerate these guys, it's very inside Physics so maybe not accessable to all but I was def LMFAO!! :-)

Frozen Foods Shedding Their Bad Image

For the longest time, when people heard frozen foods or frozen dinners, they probably would have trouble deciding which is worse fast food or frozen food?  I generally agreed until over 10 years ago or so when Amy's began making Organic Burritos, their ingredients were great, not a single artificial or processed ingredient etc.  However, back then they kinda tasted like cardboard...they've come a long way since then, they taste much better!

I digress as I've covered my fave Organic/Natural frozen dishes in an earlier post.  What this article shows is that surprisingly some veggies are better bought frozen than fresh, I know it's hard to believe but it's true!  In cases like Green Peas, even more nutritious frozen!

Also in general, especially the organic veggies and other organic frozen foods are not bad for you at all...which is great news and something I've suspected for a long time.  But don't get me wrong, I'm not recommending anyone go out and get those cheap Salsbury Steak dinner!  Yuck!  Those are bad and always will be :-)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/these-are-the-only-vegetables-you-should-buy-frozen_us_58bed08be4b0ec3d5a6ba29c?ir=Canada&utm_hp_ref=canada

Retirement Investing Advice

Just posted this on LinkedIn, let me know if you have any questions :-)

https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6244600129823784960

Movie Recommendation

Saw the movie Nerve this weekend, while not perfect it's def a very cool & fun movie to watch. The soundtrack is awesome too, picked up a lot of good contemporary songs (for ex. Halsey's Hurricane). It's totally something that can happen, look how many vids on Utube are posted with ppl doing dangerous crazy stunts for no reason other than getting views on Utube!

Here's trailer and reviews, I def lean towards the critics that gave it a score in high 60's and above...

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/nerve

Subway

Just saw this article on Subway's Chicken (or lack thereof) Subs.  Only 50% or so of the Chicken is actually Chicken...yes some of it is spices etc. But a good portion is also preservatives, salt & filler!

https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/02/28/2047230/dna-test-shows-subways-chicken-only-contains-50-percent-chicken

Even at the store there's a huge difference between cold cuts that cost $1.50/100g or $3.50/100g and even the $3.50 cold cuts aren't perfect I'm sure but they taste pretty good.  I can guarantee that Subway isn't using the $3.50 cold cuts :-)  (or even the $1.50! :-(

I like this 1 comment on the article (after someone commented that the companies responses seem reasonable -- umm ya sure it's called PR!)

Read the response in detail & between the line (Score:5, Insightful)

by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @05:59PM (#53949691) Homepage

Yes, read the response, but like all communications from large companies, you have to read it critically

For example, from the end of Subway's response:

We will look into this again with our supplier to ensure that the chicken is meeting the high standard we set for all of our menu items and ingredients.

Translate this into normal english and it is "We do not adequately QA our supply chain & our lowest-bid supplier is giving us a chicken/soy blend. We only care about this because we just got caught out"

Movie Recommendation

We just watched this great movie

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/captain-fantastic

highly recommend...very interesting picture, sometimes Ben (Viggo Mortensen) reminded me of myself, teaching the kids M-Theory, explaining what Crack is regardless of age ha & calling Coke "poison water" :-)  But the survivalist stuff...hmm not so much ;-)

Anyway, check the trailer...very unique, interesting movie (oops I said the I-word -- reference to the movie)

Site Recommendation -- Wait But Why

In my previous post on Quantum Teleportation, one of the many links in there was on a fun Philosophical discussion called "What Makes You You?".  After enjoying that write up immensly, I tried a few more on this site "Wait But Why", run by a smart/funny Harvard grad (Tim Urban) and they were great as well.  He's not a true expert in any of these topics but he really does his research (sources are usually impeccable, for non-experts that's already an accomplishment!) and has a knack for making these serious/very technical topics fun for all levels of expertise!

I'll paste the 3 articles I enjoyed, will surely read more in the future!

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html

Note: I thought Tim did a great job covering the many cases/angles to look at this question, my fave example naturally is the Transporter one.  My personal evolving (somewhat still) view isn't any of the ones he listed, it's that I disagree with the way most people incl. Tim think about what is "You", they've made it almost as sacred & permanent as a Soul (which I also don't believe in ;-)  My view (actually matches almost perfectly 1 of the commenters on this article named Joel) is that "You" is most likely an illusory emergent phenomenon, created by the complex processes of any sentient being, be it Carbon or Silicon or Other based when the "Mind" is fully awake/conscious & receiving power/energy/inputs.  For example, my theory applied to the great Teleporter example is that, 2 "You"'s were created, one in Boston & the other in London at that exact moment of creation (effectively there is no difference between the 2). But once the 2 "You"'s step off the Teleporter pad, they are receiving different sensory inputs and of course each brain has generated a conscious mind...neither will be OK with being obliterated!  Which one is the real "You"?  They both are but it's almost like traveling back in time say 1 minute, which is the real "You"?  Both are!  I'm quite different now in every way then when I was a teenager but nobody argues I'm not "Me" anymore (There's many degrees/shades of "You", these 2 Me's from the Transporter are much closer then I am with my teenage self!). It is quite a mess though to have that kind of malfunction, as essentially now you have someone even closer than a twin brother!  What if your married?  I guess you can have the wife go thru the same accident then we have 2 pairs again ha!  I'll point out, that Quantum Teleportation which is likely the only way we could ever achieve this in reality will never have this "accident" as a crucial step in the process is that the original quantum state is destroyed (well this is messy because I'm not sure that this necessarily means the person is destroyed)...anyway I digress!  There was a brilliant Star Trek Next Gen ep on this, check here!

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

Seems this one above is WBW's most popular article, it's a fairly long 2 parts but even for me that knew 99% of this already it was a fun read...well it's a weighty topic so not sure fun is the right word. This has to do with AI and the exponetial growth of Technology, something I go on about a lot but Tim writes it up for a general audience much better than I could.  At the very start he makes a statement that he did not know much about this topic prior to this research he underwent and it has now blown his mind and changed his worldview!  I think he covered pretty much every important facet except the Mind Uploading angle, I personally think we likely have no chance to contain an ASI and frankly I'd feel better if the 1st ASI was a Human (not Trump plz!!) who uploaded and evolved online to ASI level...but I dunno if that's how it'll go down. The other related topic is Merging, we need to merge with the AI's once they get to AGI level else we get left behind or worse!  2045 here we come!

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Finally, I haven't finished this one yet but an old interesting thought on Aliens by the genius Enrico Fermi, is called the Fermi Paradox.  Have an enjoyable read about it above.

Quantum Teleportation & Beyond!

Even before I studied Math & Physics in University, I had already read many popularized accounts of the 2 pillars of Physics, Quantum Physics & Einstein's General Relativity. I also read biographies of the geniuses like Erwin Schrodinger that contributed the most to these theories. But it wasn't till I studied the math behind Quantum Mechanics that I understood (about as well as anyone can!) where all those weird properties that exhibit themselves in the world of atoms come from.  This isn't what I'll be focusing on in this post but aside from the more technical links above, here's a great introductory link at a high level that covers the many strange properties that pop up in the micro-world!

Probably the most out there result (that's on solid theoretical & experimental footing) is what Einstein called "Spooky action at a distance", something called Quantum Entanglement (for a good high level summary, check Chris Craddock answer then Brian Dodson's).  This phenomena is essential to most of the other interesting aspects of QM such as below.

I've been reading quite a bit about new research in Quantum Teleportation, which at our current understanding has 3 parts in order of how well we have understood & tested

1. Quantum Teleportation of States (Paper appeared 1993 -- essentially transporting Quantum properties of 1 particle to another, arbitrarily far away with some caveats of course.  AFAIK the best anyone has done is teleport 2 quantum properties of a Photon.  So why is this Teleportation? Because most quantum particles are indistinguishable and hence if you can pass over their handful of quantum properties (from 1 particle to another) they are effectively cloned or transported if you will potentially half way across the galaxy!
2. Quantum Energy Teleportation (Paper appeared 2008 -- the simplest explanation I have seen is part of this thread on QET -- "The analogy Hotta uses is that the vacuum energy is in a safe. Alice unlocks it with a key and puts some energy in the safe. Weirdly, opening the safe tells her what the key is, rather than her having the key initially. She then sends her key to Bob, who is able to open the safe with it and get at the energy Alice put in!")
3. Quantum Teleportation of Particles with Mass (this last one is at the very edge of current research so it's all a bit tenuous but I believe QT of Electrons has not been achieved yet, though at least we are close due to this new research -- also 1 other reliable link I found on this but don't fully understand yet).

While each of the 3 topics above is very interesting in their own right, the possible applications are what's mind blowing.  

First, the most prosaic one is the application to quantum computers & communication, essentially building a Quantum Internet.  Last year, a Chinese consortium placed the first Quantum Satellite in orbit, this article sums all these topics nicely.  Essentially, the most obvious benefit of a Quantum Internet is security but new applications ideas are popping up all the time, such as the cool one at the end of the article.

My fave application comes from Star Trek, an actual Transporter that can transport people across vast distances.  However, this problem is still being debated from a theoretical point of view...from an Engineering point of view it's going to make creating AI or the 1st Quantum Computer look like child's play!  I personally believe it is theoretically possible (which means at some point - who knows when - it will be implemented).  This link from a CalTech PhD, working at Perimeter explains it very well in fairly simple terms (the link also explains #1 above very well too at the same time, he also explains how Physicist's fall into 3 groups on their views regarding the feasibility of...he too is in the same camp as me).

Before we get into some technical details/highlights from the math/physics...I highly recommend reading this wonderful philosophical account of "What Makes You You?", it's not a short read but it should blow your mind!  Also, one of the sections in the prior link is called "The Cell Replacement Test", many people believe somehow the particles that make us up have something (individually) to do with our identify/sense of self so it surprises them to know that most of our cells (particles) are replaced in 7-10 year cycles (crucially not neurons in the cerebral cortex so this alone isn't conclusive of anything just more evidence).  Finally some interesting insights that I mostly share can be found here (check Bill C. Reimers answer)...I especially like his simplistic but effective analogy of a conscious human being vs. a book, it's not the paper or the particles it's the Information contained that gives us and the book life.  Based on all the facts I've seen to date, I believe our consciousness is an emergent phenomena.

Some points on Teleportation I would add/highlight are:

• Some argue Teleportation (of people) is impossible due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but this was shown to be not necessary in the groundbreaking 1993 Bennet et al paper I linked in #1.  For more explanation of this non-trivial point check here and here.
• Next common argument against is the Quantum "No Cloning Theorem" (a general Quantum State copying machine cannot exist) , this one took me some time to research (my initial argument against it was arbitrary approximation, which at the scale of humans may be needed but not at the particle scale), turns out that this theorem doesn't prevent Teleportion, in computer parlance it is NOT a Copy-And-Paste procedure but instead a Cut-And-Paste (c.f. Erik Anson's answer), so the original Quantum State is destroyed.  This does mean most likely you will die (in some sense) when you get Teleported but it may only be in the same discontinuity sense that you lose consciousness as you sleep, then awake the next morning with usually no memory of your dreamless sleep!  Check section 4.3 here.

This topic continues to have new research shedding light on the true answer of whether it's possible or not from many sources, Quantum Physics, Neuroscience, Computer Science (Information Theory/Quantum Computers), Philosophy...etc.  So I'll continue to follow it but I haven't seen anything conclusively rule it out, quite the opposite in fact!  However, I'll say again, from an Engineering standpoint it's nearly an impossible task given our current state of technology but let's keep in mind our Smart Phones have the computational power of Supercomputers back in the 1990's that were the size of entire rooms!

PS  I spent a lot of time thinking about (Quantum) Teleportation but actually the idea from Star Trek that would likely have the biggest impact on our daily lives is The Replicator, it's like the ultimate 3D copier, it can create dishes (with plates), drinks, pretty much any consumer product!  For those that don't delve into deep science it might sound just as hard as the Teleportation to create these things but the amazing fact is that it's soooo much easier!  We're getting pretty close!  Just think of how much time could be saved, not going shopping, not cooking (except on rare occasions where you'd like to!), not cleaning up after etc!!  Here's where we are at today on this topic, we don't need it to work exactly like it did in Star Trek (they were just very imaginative/smart guesses at the future) so we don't need to try and convert Energy to Matter via E=MC^2, it's much easier to use Nanotechnology and rearrange molecules etc.  Turns out though that Scientists are close to even achieving this energy/matter conversion in the labratory via the "fancy physics" way so who knows (but this approach to Replication would take far longer than the Molecular Assembler)!

Khan Academy & The Future of Education

I've always enjoyed listening to the few future gurus that seem to have an intuitive feel of certain trends that will persist, Ray Kurzweil is my fave when it comes to Technology but Sal Khan is my fave when it comes to the future of Education.  While watching his TED talks I find myself repeating "exactly, that's what I thought too!".

Education became an important topic to me when in Grade 12 (I was coasting thru school in General level, I guess now they call it Applied) my Guidance Counselor said "This is your last year of school...what are your plans for the future?"...I said "dunno", so he said "Well let's look at a Community College course catalog", I saw programs like "Retail Meat Cutter", then I had an epiphany, a flash of light in my brain that reminded me I didn't enjoy the physical labor type part-time jobs I did up till then and I wanted a career that uses my brain/intelligence!  I don't have anything against Comm. College, I think for many people they'd actually have a better career with a Comm. College diploma than a University degree but it just wasn't for me.  So long story short, after that day I became obsessed with my education, I had to take many aptitude tests (& score high) just to join Advanced (now called Academic) then I had to take courses at Summer & Night school to catch up and graduate on time from OAC and get into University.  My plan was to become a Professor of Mathematical Physics.  I also regularly brought back a dozen or so books from the Library and devoured them all, books on Science, Philosophy, Fiction, Non-Fiction etc.

Of course that's not the road I envision for my daughters, Chiara & Aria, they will have extra tutoring here at home from us but focusing on increasing their interest in virtually everything, not via rote learning though.  They'll have Science/Robotics/Computer Programming (making video games) camps, then at home I can use the computer, telescopes, microscopes etc...to show how cool Nature & learning is (Carol will focus on passing on her amazing study skills)!  Of course, to be well rounded they participate in Sports & Arts activities as well.

Finally, my main point here is to introduce people to the wonderful Khan Academy, if you watch Sal's TED talks first (especially his latest one) you'll see there are 2 major ideas behind the Academy

1.  While Teachers range form amazing to terrible and of course many average ones (think Normal Distribution), we can put everyone on a level playing field by Teaching via a video that has already researched the most effective way of teaching a particular topic and have someone clearly demonstrate that visually.  Incidentally, Sal's idea for the Education system is to invert the current process, meaning Teachers assign video lessons for homework then the next day the kids do the exercises under the Teachers supervision, where they can ask question relating to the video or the exercises!
2. Mastering a topic before moving on, this most often happens in math but it applies to virtually all subjects, Sal's analogy is building a house, start with the foundation have a housing inspector come in and say...I'll give it a C- but it's a passing grade go ahead and keep building on this somewhat solid foundation!  You have to master (basically ace the test, not with good guesses but a perfect understanding of the material) the material before building on that and moving on to more advanced topics!

Some people think the Khan Academy is just for kids who've fallen behind, need tutoring.  It is great for that yes but it is so much more, many bright kids get bored with the current school system (especially K-8) where they feel the pace of learning is so slow and the interesting topics aren't delved into deeply enough for them, the Khan Academy can help here as well!

I recently started an account for Chiara, she's doing the "Early Math" section, she can watch the teaching videos by herself on her Tablet and then try to earn points, badges and unlock secret functionality (just like video games!) and we're always nearby if she has questions or needs help. We were on it last night and it was so much fun to see Kiki have a breakthrough and count to 100 by herself (she still has to practice more to crystallize)!  So, I highly recommend signing up for FREE on their website (I created an account for me as a Parent then sub-accounts for the kids) no matter what subject you and your kids are interested in to explore further!  They also have an App for both Ipad and Android I believe!

PS Thinking about all this stuff recently, out of curiosity I looked at the kind of courses kids take in High School these days vs. back in my day, it's really amazing the differences!  I looked at a Private School we have here in Whitby called Trafalgar Castle School, they can learn Mandarin which is cool but I saw almost zero Computer Science type courses (I won't go off on a long tangent here but Carol & I are quite sure that almost any career in 20 years will have CS as it's core) which shocked me...anyway I found this accredited Virtual Private High School online and they had at least 3-4 Comp Sci classes which was more assuring!  Check this course on Data Science which is a hot topic these days, the syllabus is amazing, will prepare the kids very well!

PPS  A tangentially related article I just read on LinkedIn, it is thought provoking (and adds some unique points to this topic that is gaining momentum in the media).  I definitely agree the jobs of the future will tilt more towards higher IQ jobs, probably the last frontier of jobs I see AI replacing is Theoretical Physicists working on Grand Unified Theories, the top ones have IQ's in the 180-200 range!  Also, areas in Pure Math that require similar IQ's just to even grasp much less do research in!  I keep up on this stuff, since I left Grad School and it's truly humbling how high these sky scrapers of human ingenuity are...I think the stars of these fields are definitely 2-3 levels higher than me on the IQ scale (and I've never been accused of being overly humble ha)!  Nonetheless, AI once created will quickly reach these levels and just as quick surpass them (just think about how much more powerful computers get each year)!

Fast Food harms you in new novel ways!

New research shows that not only is most types of Fast Food bad for you in a multitude of ways (this link uses Instant Ramen Noodles as a great example), but now even the packaging, which is coated with various chemicals (stain resistant, water repellent & non-stick) can migrate into your food.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/02/05/0743242/report-finds-pfas-chemicals-in-one-third-of-fast-food-packaging

Just like anyone else, sometimes at home I don't have time to make a fresh from scratch lunch, but I've found there's many Organic frozen meals that taste great with all natural (mostly organic) ingredients.  It's just like if your Mom made a great lasagna from scratch and froze it for you...but not in plastic haha as they can leach in extreme temps, such as frozen or heat (similar to the fast food container story). Ok, actually you can use plastic containers as long as they are the correct type but I'm not sure I fully trust that this is the last word on this tricky complex subject so I put parchment paper (even this has silicone but this is quite inert) in the container to prevent sticking during freezing.

Here's some of my fave fast Organic (or Natural) foods with no bad ingredients

Sprinkle with Pine nuts before putting in oven
https://www.amys.com/our-foods/pesto-pizza

https://www.amys.com/our-foods/vegetable-pot-pie

https://www.amys.com/our-foods/black-bean-burrito

Healthy Planet has this for 40% cheaper
https://www.frozenbutcher.ca/shop/antibiotic-hormone-free-beef-chili.html

Also at Healthy Planet I like a few of the IndianLife products, such as these wraps...they make great all natural Tortilla's as well (for when I make Tacos)
http://www.indianlife.com/product/naan-wrap-with-lentils-brown-rice/

Carnegie Mellon AI beats top poker pros — a first

Yet another step towards the Singularity :-) AI claimed Chess back in 1997, Jeopardy in 2011, GO in 2016 and now, Poker in 2017!  Notice the progression is not linear at all!  Looks exponential to me, as Kurzweil has been saying!

http://www.kurzweilai.net/carnegie-mellon-ai-beats-top-poker-pros-a-first

The Supercomp running the code (learning based algos) is still on the order of 1000x times "weaker" than the human brain so there's some room for improvement ;-)  Also, let's not forget that when we build a computer with a comparable number of interconnections (Current estimates say 10^15 [Quadrillion] -- Synapses connecting Neurons in humans) then we will be no match for that computer for 1 main reasons, processing speed!  Our synapses fire at ~0.1 - 2Hz  (compare to a typical i7 firing at 3 Billion Hz [GHz]), furthermore, the speed at which these signals travel is very slow in Humans (286 Mph) compared to nearly at the speed of light in computers (186,000 Mph -- or the actual speed of light in Optical computers).

If we think about the firing rate as a kind of time keeping device, we can see why seconds became our shortest (in most cases) units of time (1 Hz is 1 cycle per sec)...compare that to a computer running at 1 Billion cycles per sec, convert that to 1 cycle per Nano sec.  If the computer equivalent of a second is a Nano second, then 1 Billion Nano seconds (i.e. 1 sec) is a long time to think for a computer...it is the equivalent of saying 1 Billion seconds is a long time to think for a human (10^9 sec = ~32 years!).  Consider how much you can accomplish in 32 years!  These computers that reach our level of interconnections, with their much faster processing speed can do as much each second!  I found a link that show's we are still years away from this (I say only years again due to the exponential increases) so you have some time for that info to sink in and make peace with it haha (I'll remind my readers again, this is why I say we join them rather than try to beat them...I'll leave the details of that for a future post!).

PS  Just saw this hilarious comment regarding the last link (simulating 1 sec of 1% of the human brain)

Richard Krupski  ArchAngel570 • a month ago

If they had used Donald Trump's brain they could have done it in real time by now :D

New Show - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Just an FYI on a new show we're really enjoying...Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency!  It's based on the Douglas Adams book (have not read this one but of course his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is one of my all time faves).

Here's a trailer for it.  The ratings on Metacritic are a bit divided between Critics and Users, I guess it is that kinda show but this time I totally agree with the User ratings.  From what I hear the show doesn't follow the books plot super closely but I can definitely tell from the dialogue...it is Adamsesque!

Seems BBC America developed the series and Netflix is also helping distribute it, so I presume you could watch it there (that's not how I got it).  Hmm, just googled it, seems you can!  Also I'm a fan of Elijah Wood, glad he plays an integral role...guess it's hard to avoid typecasting after playing Frodo!

TekSavvy - Not perfect but by far best ISP out there

If like me your ISP is TekSavvy then you may have received a nice rebate on your monthly fee's this month!  By the way, TekSavvy "rents" Rogers' infrastructure, this is important to know because it could lead to 1 drawback of switching to them, if you seem to have a lot of issues with Rogers and it's not your entire area but specific to your home than going to TekSavvy may not be a good idea...Rogers will definitely put your name at the back of the line when it comes to servicing your request!  I've not had any issue with just our house in 6 years here in Whitby so works for me!

We're in a Grandfathered plan, we get 60 Mbps down (this is essential if you have a few people in the house and each has 1 or 2 devices on the WiFi, each device takes part of the stream...last I checked my Router I think I saw ~10 devices! <For the hacker minds out there, yes all devices are ours haha> ) and 10 Mbps up (this is very useful if you want to make HD video calls or if you want to be a good P2P node), also we have a 400 Gb monthly cap, which I do make use of!

Most importantly, I have the best most stable modem out there (now I sound like Trump ;-) the Motorola Surfboard! Unlike Rogers or Bell, TekSavvy has been very good at letting their customers use virtually any Modem they want until recently...now it seems all their higher speed packages require this sub-par unstable Modem (technically this one is US version).

So while I still recommend anyone that can to go with TekSavvy (they offer much lower prices for equivalent speed/usage than Rogers or Bell and have great customer service), this new wrinkle (which I'm sure is Rogers doing as I think they get a cut of these modems) makes me hesitate on this great deal I just saw...I could switch to 100 Mbps down/10 Mbps up with Unlimited cap for $63.95 (that's not just an intro offer for a few months like you see on Rogers or Bell sites -- and that's just a few bucks more than I'm paying)!!  I'm checking with TekSavvy now but I don't think they will allow my modem (even though it's a DOCSIS 3.0 and can handle speeds to 300 MBPS +) to switch to that deal :-(

If that is the case, we'll stick with our deal for now and I'll keep researching that CISCO modem that's required for these new high speed packages.  They def get a lot of bad reviews but I think it's mainly cause many people try to use the Router component of the modem to save money instead of buying a good Router...as you might guess the Router part of the modem is a piece of crap.  I would recommend that nobody ever use the Router component of a Modem/Router combo but instead buy a good modem such as mine or something equivalent and use these types of Combo Modems in Bridge mode (ignores built in Router, can flow thru your better one).

At some point when they're offering 1 Gbps speeds (Rogers & Bell I think already do) at reasonable prices we'll definitely have to switch, so I'm hoping at that point they have a good modem option (like they did in the past) or at least the Modem component of these CISCO's is decent (but I have my doubts, most average modems can't handle the complexity of P2P traffic - I had one once, would hang all the time, whenever I noticed no internet, I had to power cycle the modem).