There is a concept called the Singularity which some think will happen in the near future. The idea is that there will be artificial intelligences that will be able to create smarter artificial intelligences, which in turn will create even smarter artifical intelligences, ad infinitum, resulting in an exponential rate of change and advancement that humans would have no chance of keeping up with.

I am one of those who are skeptical of this prediction. It assumes that an intelligence can quickly create an intelligence greater than itself. However, I suspect that increasing the same amount of intelligence, for whatever definition of intelligence one chooses, will require far more effort the more advanced the baseline intelligence is after some level. For comparison, we have yet to create an intelligence that is as smart as us, much less an intelligence that is smarter than us.

I would not be surprised if there are initial exponential advancements in artifical intelligence, which in fact we may be in the middle of, but I strongly suspect the rate of advancement will plateau at some point and advance linearly at most instead of continuing exponentially with no end.

I knew that crows were smart, but I had no idea that they are so smart that they could hold grudges for over 15 years. Not only can an individual crow hold a grudge against specific people, communication among crows is sophisticated enough that a group of them can share who to be wary of and continue to harass them for over 15 years.

Not that I ever planned to be mean to crows, but this is even more reason to be nice to them.

Something I learned recently was that Greenland sharks can live up to 400 years. That goes far above the 100 year mark that I thought would be around the limit for even the most long-lived vertebrates. Some of these sharks are older than the United States of America!

It is one thing to put humans into a vehicle, launch them into space, and return in the vehicle to Earth. It is another to let out all the air in the vehicle while in space, then leave the vehicle to float in space on purpose. It is not something I would expect a private enterprise to do, but SpaceX managed to do just that during the recent Polaris Dawn mission. And they did it with brand new spacesuits, not with spacesuits that are almost as old as me. I was half-expecting them to encounter problems such as minor leaks or a spacesuit ballooning up, but their first spacewalk went off without a hitch.

When recently renting a car, there was an option to rent a mystery car. It was an option to rent an unspecified type of car that would be cheaper than they would otherwise be. It was suggested that it would be either a hybrid or electric car, and that was exactly what I was hoping for. However, what I got was a giant pickup truck, which as the polar opposite of what I was hoping for.

This was disappointing. It was a lesson for me to avoid mysteries.