Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s actions as a teenager are at the center of a public firestorm.

“I’ve been really troubled by the excuse offered by too many that this was a high school incident, and ‘boys will be boys,’ said Sen. Chris Coons during testimony by Christine Blasey Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27.

But Trump surrogates such as Kellyanne Conway have dismissed his actions are merely those of a "teenager.” The adult Kavanaugh cannot be held accountable, such logic goes, for these alleged youthful indiscretions.

Once upon a time, non-fat milk (the cream removed) was only used for fattening pigs. It was clearly a technological process to remove the cream but it is not considered "unnatural" - in 2012, the Obama administration even told schools to start serving it as a healthier alternative to regular milk. Meanwhile, the same administration delayed a salmon because it had a gene from a similar salmon that would allow it to grow all year 'round. The second technology was "unnatural."

Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence? For me, this is a simple question with an even simpler, two letter answer: no. But not everyone agrees – many people, including the late physicist Stephen Hawking, have raised concerns that the rise of powerful AI systems could spell the end for humanity.

Clearly, your view on whether AI will take over the world will depend on whether you think it can develop intelligent behavior surpassing that of humans – something referred to as “super intelligence”. So let’s take a look at how likely this is, and why there is much concern about the future of AI.

Christmas tree farms don't cause global warming, according to European Union politicians, and that is why Europeans have decided to meet their emissions targets by...burning wood.

Casual reader, be warned - the contents of this article, specifically the second part of it, are highly volatile, speculative stuff. But hey, that is the stuff that dreams are made of. And I have one or two good reasons to dream on.


The environment

The number of articles retracted related to nutrition now numbers unlucky 13 - and that bad lack shares one name in common: Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

People often ask, "How close are we to sending humans to Mars" and it's not surprising given the optimistic presentations by Elon Musk and others. However, Mars is just too far away to send humans at this stage.

So you're planning ahead for your next trip to a remote location, and you try to make sense of those TripAdvisor listings. Great tool - there's a bunch of there around, but let's focus on that one here. It allows you to type in your preferences, location, restrictions, and it dumps a list of facilities together with easy access to the reviews of previous customers. How could we possibly live without it, twenty years ago?
Now, the point of this article is to make sure you can USE the data you are able to get on the web. I use to say "there's not such a thing as too much information", but then I shoud qualify that statement: it all depends on whether you have a brain and a will to put it to work. 

This originated as my answer to a question on the Quora question and answer site: "In what general knowledge domains do alternatives to Wikipedia exist that are significantly superior?". Of course there are examples of much better specialist encyclopedias for various knowledge domains. But you can also do better than Wikipedia using content derived from Wikipedia itself. I think my own new wikis are an example of this, for a simple reason. Because we can fix various errors that can't be fixed there and add new content that can't be added there.