I hope none of you traveled by air this past Wednesday...

Water? Highway? Train tracks? All were viable options.

Heck, even cobblestone roads were getting some decent mid-week action.

But, when the FAA's "Notice to Air Missions" (NOTAM) system went haywire, airports plunged into pandemonium and US air travel came to a screeching halt.

First Southwest, now this. What's next - no more space tourism for billionaires? Yikes!

As always, please forward IQNEWS to a friend if you're a fan!

Everyone who was freaking out about Bitcoin last year is now freaking out about artificial intelligence (and ChatGPT in particular). It's hard to deny how cool the functionality is...

Articles on robot-written essays and AI-generated profile pics bury the lede, though. The REAL story hear is that scientists are actively trying to build conscious robots.

"This topic was taboo," Hod Lipson, head of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia, says. "We were almost forbidden from talking about it. This is not just another research question that we’re working on - this is the question. This is bigger than curing cancer."

One of the issues facing scientists like Lipson is that consciousness doesn't have a firm definition. We've never cleanly linked it to a brain region, for instance. Lipson's definition is "being able to imagine oneself in the future."

Thus, he and his peers seek to build machines that can imagine how they might be better and can evolve accordingly via machine learning.

Of course, scientists love to project human features onto devices they create. Thus, we must ask whether those machines actually possess deeply human qualities or whether folks like Lipson will simply project humanity onto non-conscious machines because that's what they're hoping for.

In any case, prepare for the topic of consciousness to massively heat up in coming years.

Band-Aids are annoying.

You never know how tight to wrap them, they get sweaty, and - more often than not - they slide off your finger before you'd like them to.

However, I've stumbled upon a method that makes Band-Aids dramatically less sucky.

Check out this video. In it, some total genius makes a few tweaks that totally change the Band-Aid game.

You haven't seen a wrap this strong since your 2am Taco Bell visit last Saturday!

1. Losing two socks is less frustrating than losing one sock.
2. We don't check the refrigerator multiple times to find new food, we check to see if our standards have dropped enough to eat what's available.
3. Tolerating the sound of your voice in a video is the highest form of self acceptance.
4. No matter how many times you walk on an escalator that isn't moving, that first step onto it will always feel unnatural.
5. We laugh at dogs' excitement when they hear a bark on TV, but if TV was a stream of unintelligible noise and then someone spoke to you in your language, you'd freak out.

Lou Holtz: "Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it."

Today I learned that the Placebo Effect can still be observed even if the person is told they are receiving a placebo. (more here)

lodestar [ lohd-stahr ] - noun
a star that shows the way; a person or thing that serves as an inspiration or guide
She was his intellectual lodestar.

Q: What country does "The Jungle Book" take place in?
A: (see below next section)