Industrial demand for silver soared to a record high of 508m ounces last year, according to The Silver Institute. The post Industrial silver demand reached record highs...

TL;DR -- Silver-coated glass will naturally form "Neural Networks" (our recent and hyper-successful sort of artificial intelligence) when you shock it with electricity. The sparks melt the silver, forming wires that grow like roots, and it will find whatever patterns are waiting in the jolts of your encoded data. It learns on its own! Silver wants to form a brain. The silver plates are nowhere near as efficient as our modern computers, yet they would have been easy to discover, and they only require simple tools to get working!

It began, late last year, with Silver boasting about the success of his election models and Taleb shooting back that Silver doesn't "know how math works." Silver said Taleb was "consumed by anger" and hadn't had any new ideas since 2001. The argument has gotten personal, with Silver calling Taleb an "intellectual-yet-idiot" (an insult taken from Taleb's own book) and Taleb calling Silver "klueless" and "butthurt." Here is a recap of what they're fighting about so you can know who's right (Silver, mostly) and who's wrong (Taleb). The origin of Taleb's ire can be found in Silver's success since 2008--and his some-time failures. As I described in Nautilus last month, evaluating probabilistic election forecasts can be conceptually slippery, made especially difficult by the counterintuitive properties of mathematical probability.