The 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who many have called “the godfather of AI”. The award seems apt for the time we are in.

If cultural pundits can invent an Anthropocene Epoch then a Digital Epoch makes even more sense. In 2000, only in Japan did you see people on trains four inches from other humans chatting other humans on other trains, most of whom they'd never meet. Now that is everyone in the developed world.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) vegetarian advocacy group has a paper out arguing that common broiler chickens not only learn more than the obvious, like which bowl has food, they get happier learning. 

Their marketing of the paper suggests they know who their key demographic is; middle-aged wealthy white women. And if you want them, you invoke "The Gilmore Girls", a show about a genius single mother with an equally intelligent daughter and they are best friends and talk really fast and use a lot of Proust references.

Earlier this year I mentioned here that I would be writing an article on how the utility function of experiments in fundamental science could be specified, as an enabling step toward the formalization of a co-design optimization problem. Now, as the deadline for submission approaches and the clock keeps ticking, I am returning to this topic and am mulling over the matter, so I thought it would be appropriate to dump here a few thoughts on the matter.
Co-design

Last year, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a health advisory on the use of social media by adolescents. This was based on mounting scientific evidence that social media has both benefits and risks for teens, and that parents and guardians needed better advice on how to balance the two.

It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow told me he wouldn't hire anyone who didn't know how to use a slide rule. Another only a decade older than me said he only wanted to work with people who had built their own crystal radio or some equivalent.

In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed, and in the Duat, the Netherworld, it revealed a truth man's words could not hide.

The 42 gathered gods would measure the heart and if it weighed more than the Feather of Truth which adorned the head of Maat, their Goddess of Justice, Order, and Truth, it was consumed by the Goddess Ammit, Devourer of the Dead, who had the body of a crocodile, a lion, and a hippopotamus, and you were gone from existence forever.

People had a lot of ways to get heavy hearts. Theft, anger, even eavesdropping added weight. 

In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors expensive. President Obama did that when he began to subsidize the domestic solar energy industry at unprecedented levels.(1) He brought in Dr. Stephen Chu, who had advocated $9-a-gallon gasoline, from inside his high-paying job in academia to be in charge of energy policy for Democrats. He was right in his agenda, solar could be feasible if its conventional energy competitors were forced to be 300% more expensive.

Once upon a time, wealthy white women virtue signaled to other wealthy white women when they spent $500 on snacks at stores they're paid to promote, like "upscale" grocery chain Erewhon, where its overpriced nonsense supposedly leads to a "radiant" lifestyle.

That time is still now. This one is especially fun, because two words after assuring us it "has literally sold out everywhere" she tells gullible viewers that you can buy it at the store she's being paid $5 to promote.

Aging is not a smooth and gradual process.