Saturday 20th of April 2024
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de-vo-lu-tion...

evolution of the dumbest

Joe Scarborough writes in The Washington Post: 

[G]ood luck getting George or Barbara Bush talking about themselves. They just don’t do it and they never will. First of all, their parents didn’t allow it. And besides, that kind of thing wasn’t done in the world from which they came. It is just one small way that the ethos of Walker’s Point is so radically different from the mindset that infects Donald Trump’s garish corner office high above 5th Avenue in Trump Towers.

As [Jon] Meacham and I walked down the driveway after saying goodbye to the Bushes, Jon lamented the fact that the same Republican Party that nominated a man like Bush, who rarely spoke about himself, would a quarter century later select a reality TV showman who obsessively talked about little else.

Meacham paraphrased Henry Adams in saying that the historical devolvement from Bush to Trump proves that Darwin’s theory of evolution was less compelling when applied to American politics.

Read Joe’s full column here. 

read more:

http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/joe-the-devolution-the-gop

do we deserve better?

Of course... but the deceitful idiots in the US democratic and republican parties have taken over the process... 

planet of the apes...

With the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, see toon at top...

wisdom of the waggling dumb...

Crowd wisdom is more usually harnessed via polls or voting. This does have an amplification effect, says Rosenberg – we tend to make better decisions as a group than as individuals. But Rosenberg’s approach is designed to go one better. “Swarms will outperform votes and polls and surveys because it’s allowing the group to converge on the best answer, rather than simply finding the average sentiment,” he says.

Picking an answer all at once is important because it stops those who get in first from swaying others. In public votes, people who vote first can influence a group, for example. And in prediction markets, those with more money have greater sway on the final outcome. Such forces can distort the real picture.

So Rosenberg, who cut his teeth building augmented reality systems at the US Air Force’s Armstrong Labs in the early 1990s, turned to bees. When a swarm of bees wants to set up a new colony it must come to a collective decision about where to build it. A few hundred scout bees will set off in different directions to look for potential locations. When they return, they perform a waggle dance to communicate information about what they have found to the swarm.

Read more:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161215-why-bees-could-be-the-secret-to...

See toon at top.