Mindframe

Making iffy predictions about our future: it’s been a hallmark of human behavior for at least as long as we’ve been recording our present. Perhaps the most famous early example of forecasting took place in Mount Parnassus in Delphi, Greece. From roughly the 8th century BCE to the 4th century BCE, for nine days each year, travelers could pay to pose their burning questions to the Pythia, a priestess said to channel the wisdom of Apollo. To a modern reader, perhaps a bit skeptical about the whole Greek gods thing, it may be unsurprising to learn that the Pythia phrased her answers as riddles, arguably granting her some convenient wiggle room. For instance, as the story goes, King Croesus once asked a Pythia if he should attack the neighboring Persian Empire. "Cross the border and a great empire will fall,” she told him. Encouraged, Croesus brought his troops over the border—and suffered a crushing defeat. Her reaction was to coolly point out that he had failed to make her s...

Thanks to modern jet travel, I am currently high above the American Great Plains, winging my way to Las Vegas tonight to speak at a convention this week.  Las Vegas is one of those cities you either love or hate.  For some, it boasts the sweet scent of winning, and for others it reeks of desperation born from loss. (It should be noted that most of the casinos try to mitigate the smell of desperation with their unrestrained use of industrial strength air fresheners) Clearly, building a gambling mecca in the middle of the desert strains rational thought. But Vegas isn’t about rationality. In a very real sense, it’s just the opposite. For Vegas to survive it needs irrationality, and not just a little. Vegas has 150,481 hotel rooms. The city relies on irrationality to show up from all 50 states and every corner of the globe. To be exact, Vegas is predicated on what neuroscientist Dan Ariely describes as ‘predictable irrationality’. The gambling dens of Vegas may have be...

So what is intelligence, or more importantly, how does it work? The U.S. federal government recently announced it has budgeted some 3 billion dollars to mapping the human brain in hopes of answering these kinds of questions. (I would be happy to know why I struggle with driving directions.) The larger question for the scientific world is: how does the brain make sense of the trillions of data bits thrown at it everyday? Many scientists subscribe to the theory that once data goes into the brain and gets processed, we can measure intelligence as subsequent behavioral output.   The idea being, the more complicated behavior, the more demonstrated intelligence.   For example, the fact that I can read a newspaper suggests I am more intelligent than my dog, who can fetch the newspaper but couldn’t make it past the first headline. Famed mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing took this concept to its logical conclusion: something is intelligent the more it behaves like ...

So imagine it’s 1826 and you want to know what the weather will be doing tomorrow. You really have one choice: pull out your trusty Farmer’s Almanac and get down to business. The Almanac is still around today. As Sandy Duncan, managing editor, says, “The formula we use dates back to 1818. It is a mathematical and astronomical formula that takes sunspot activity, tidal action of the moon and position of the planets into consideration. The complete formula is known only by our weather prognosticator: Caleb Weatherbee." Sounds pretty cool. There’s only one problem: analysis shows that its accuracy falls in the 50/50 range. That is to say, garden variety coin toss territory. So, would I be better off checking in with the National Weather Service? In short: yes. Meteorology has come a long way since 1818. No longer must we rely on the whims of a man named Caleb. Now we can pull up software that feeds past weather results, current temperature, wind and precipitation patterns ...