Cryonics Institute charges $28K for whole-body suspension. A fancy casket, funeral, flowers, burial plot, etc. can easily cost more than that. By spending that cash on cryonic suspension, there's a long shot of coming back in some form or other. Being turned into air pollution or worm poison is pretty much guaranteed to leave your body unrecoverable. Not much of a wager.

Here's a letter signed by 61 scientists, some of whom you've undoubtedly heard of, who assert that cryonics is legit.

There are hundreds of thousands humans alive today who spent months or years in cryosuspension as embryos.

Actually, cryonics attempts vitrification, not freezing. Patients are prepped with cryoprotectants that draw water out of cells and also replaces some of the water in cells to prevent freezing. Wikipedia has a good introduction to cryonics.

If we'd taken the $1 trillion dollars wasted in the war on drugs and had instead invested that into research to find safe and effective recreational drugs that also have positive side-effects on cognition and motivation, where might we be today?

Of all the many languages programmers use, the one we're all fluent in is profanity.

Not just question yourself, but be aggressively suspicious of your code. "What?!? It compiled and ran? Oh, you piece of crap. You're gonna make me hunt for the bugs, aren't you. Damn it!"

Neural nets are already a kind of black box. If a NN-backed expert system declines a mortgage, I doubt any customer service agent could explain its thinking.

Lojban would be a good place to start.

All the doom-n-gloomers miss what's really going on. AI isn't taking over - we're redesigning ourselves. Once viable non-biological emulation of our existing mind becomes possible, people will choose to migrate themselves onto that. Humans will upgrade. The end of biology will be a matter of consumer preference.

It's anecdotal. It argues a need for someone to take a good statistical look at the situation, but I wouldn't read much more than that into it. She's not the only practitioner in that field, and I would imagine an effect as dramatic as she paints it to have gathered a bit more notice. Probably grandstanding for professional recognition on her part.

I'm sure this verdict will encourage Marvin Gaye to produce many more creative works, now that he knows his monopoly on them will be secure.

Presumably, that's because all the gorgeous and frustrated chicks are out-of-frame, enjoying a beer.

This study concludes that "On average, the estimated health benefits of cycling were substantially larger than the risks relative to car driving for individuals shifting their mode of transport."

You can tell the poseurs from the true audiophiles, though, by their electron hygiene. It is well-known that electrons are forced to wiggle back and forth to transmit signals. What is less well appreciated is the detrimental effect of electron fatigue on the quality of the signal. All that frantic jostling back and forth to transmit an audio or digital signal has a price. Electrons get, well, for lack of a better term, tired. This explains why, on first hearing, a new cable sounds terrific, but just a few weeks later there is no longer any detectable difference. True audiophiles take care to refresh the electrons in their cables by sending them to me for cable electron replacement. For just $500 per cable, I carefully swap out the tired electrons with the finest fresh, artisanal electrons, sourced from the lowest-noise, hand-crafted electric piles. Happy electrons make for happy ears. And you really can't put a price on happiness, can you?