If you're opposed to abortion, I'ts not very clear that supporting actions like the Texas law that may restrict the number of facilities offering reproductive services is a good idea.

It's entirely possible that the absolute number of abortions (which is what you should care about if you think abortions are morally wrong) will stay the same or go up because of the fact that people will have less access to birth control.

At the same time, it's entirely plausible that the number of at-risk people (poor, teenagers) having babies will go up.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where roadside bombs are a constant threat, have left more than 1,300 American soldiers mangled in this way. But a team of doctors and scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine is now ready to help—by performing the first penis transplant in the U.S.

That is a cringe-worthy picture.

Terribly heartbreaking to be volunteering at my daughter's book fair and to see how many kids come in with like 50 cents or less hoping to buy a book.

How come nuclear power is so expensive in the USA compared to some other countries?

As Tyler Cowen points out this is also a good way to understand the cost of health care in the US.

I somewhat often come across theists on the internet complaining about atheists loudly denouncing religion…and I'm sympathetic to this argument if only because atheists can be irritating to listen to.

But. I'm always reminded of the movie They Live (https://goo.gl/7L5psi) with the atheist in the position of John Nada in the film.

If you put yourself in the shoes of someone like the drifter in They Live or the atheist who believes religion is a big lie, it should at least inform your thoughts about the atheist who chooses to speak his mind.

You may think they're wrong, but your irritation should at the very least be tempered by the knowledge that a person who believes as they do certainly isn't a off their rocker merely for raging at the machine.

It's completely obvious that many (most?) advances are coming, and yet, I'm often blown away by them when they do come.

Like this next generation ATLAS robot from Boston Dynamics. They probably didn't develop any revolutionary new tech to make it work so much better than the last generation ATLAS robot, it's just incremental advances is computing speed and other stuff….

Yet, it's crazy to see this bipedal robot stumbling around in the snow in the forest and not falling over.

A 70,000-starlings-strong murmuration in the UK.

 That's pretty interesting.

The part I find particularly interesting is this bit:

the AIs largely worked out how to tackle the problem themselves. “They’ve come up with protocols that are different from how humans solve these problems,” says Foerster. “We don’t yet fully understand what the solutions are, but we know that they work.”

This is something I see pretty often in AI projects.  The solutions that AI's come up with are novel and often non-intuitive…if we can even understand the solution.

It reminds me of this thing I've shared before:  http://goo.gl/Dkl5WQ

Basically, starting from a random design an evolutionary algorithm designed a computer chip for distinguishing tones.  After 4000 generations, the chip could distinguish between a 1khz and a 10khz tone.

…no one had the foggiest notion how it worked.

Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.

The relevant part of this story is that there were parts of the chip that served no apparent purpose, and in fact, were totally disconnected from the rest of the chip.  However, if the research disabled these parts, the chip stopped working.

It seems as if the operation of the chip became dependent upon these disconnected parts of the chip not through an electrical connection but (possibly) through the magnetic fields caused by electrons traveling in them.