“Are we alone in the universe?” is one of those since the dawn of time questions. It has always been fundamental to our understanding of our place in the universe, though in recent decades it has become more the province of science than of the human search for meaning. Yet the search for alien life, scientifically driven as it is, is still, at its heart, a quest to answer some very human questions.
Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past.
The history of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in movies is often presented as a hero’s journey. Starting in the 1980s, a scrappy group of computer scientists went up against the large, powerful, but inert, Hollywood studio empire, and forever changed how movies are made.
Classical models of inference, such as those based on logic, take inference to be *conceptual* – i.e., to involve representations formed of terms, predicates, relation symbols, and the like. Conceptual representation of this sort is assumed to reflect the structure of the world: objects of various types, exemplifying properties, standing in relations, grouped together in sets, etc. These paired roughly algebraic assumptions (one epistemic, the other ontological) form the basis of classical logic and traditional AI (GOFAI).
