Новости за 21.11.2016

Parisian father’s account of losing his wife in the terrorist massacre at Bataclan, and comforting their 17-month-old son. “Melvil waits. He waits to be big enough to reach the light switch in the living room. He waits for me to make his dinner before I read him a story. He waits for bath time, for lunchtime, for snack time. And tonight, he waits for his mother to come home before he goes to bed. I wait too. I tell myself she will come through the bedroom door and join us for the last couplet”

There are three basic parts to any political campaign. The first is to get potential voters registered. The second is to persuade them to vote for you. The third is to actually get them out to vote. The Clinton campaign concentrated on parts one and three, but failed at part two, the persuasion. “Their models showed that the best way to defeat Trump was to paint him as unqualified for the office of the presidency, which they successfully did. Voters just ended up not caring”

Conversation about consciousness with philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti. “Instead of a world where we merely interact with external occurrences, we also have experience of the occurrence. This addition of experience would be puzzling enough in itself. But it is even more puzzling that experience is usually described as experience of something else. I experience a red apple. You experience a piece of music. How is this possible?”

Laurie Santos, a cognitive psychologist who studies animals, talks about the difference between animal and human thought. “When you probe what nonhumans are doing, they seem to be thinking in terms of the facts that they know about the world, and they can attribute to other individual facts that they themselves have. But they can’t make predictions about an individual who lacks the facts that they have. They can’t think about another individual being ignorant”

In praise of Siam Qian, court astronomer and calendar keeper in the reign of the Chinese emperor Han Wudi, around 100 BC. “Herodotus is one of two men who can claim to have invented history. Sima Qian is the other. That a great thinker could profitably spend his time distinguishing truth from legend, then presenting what is found in narrative — only in Greece and in China did this notion catch hold. The work of every historian finds its genesis with one of these two people”

A naked man is found lying by a dumpster. He claims total amnesia, and is given the name Benjamin Kyle. “For years, every attempt to restore Benjamin Kyle’s identity ended in failure. The government could find no record of Kyle’s previous life. His picture, appearing repeatedly on television and the internet, was viewed by millions, yet not a single person stepped forward to say they knew him. A decade after he was discovered in front of the dumpsters at Burger King, he was still called Benjaman... Читать дальше...

A computer-driven hedge fund limited to 300 investors has produced has produced $55 billion in profits over the last 28 years. The Renaissance Technologies Medallion Fund is “perhaps the world’s greatest moneymaking machine”, producing annualized returns of almost 80 percent. “In addition to language specialists, astrophysicists have historically had an outsize impact on the system’s success, according to people familiar with the firm. String theorists have also had a major role”