Scott Aaronson has one of the highest intelligence/pretension ratios I've ever encountered. I wasn't really aware of him before last fall, when I attended a conference at New York University on an ambitious new theory of consciousness, integrated information theory. Most speakers touted IIT or tried to tease out its implications. The striking exception was Aaronson, a boyish (he turns 35 on May 21 but looks younger) computer scientist at MIT (soon leaving for the University of Texas--too bad, MIT!). Although at first he seemed nervous, even jittery, he proceeded to demolish IIT. He focused on a key IIT variable, phi, which denotes the inter-connectivity, or synergy, of the parts of a system. The more phi a system has, the more consciousness it has, supposedly. Aaronson argued--or showed, actually--that IIT's mathematical definition of phi implies that a simple information-storage device, like a compact disc, can be more conscious than a human being. Browsing Aaronson's blog, "Shtetl-Optimized," I discovered that he writes not only about quantum computation, his specialty, but also about artificial intelligence, mathematics, cosmology, particle physics, philosophy… Aaronson has things to say about almost everything. Even when he is at his most technical, he expresses himself in a down-to-earth, funny, self-deprecating and above all clear way. He exudes the spunky enthusiasm and curiosity of a 10-year-old kid, a kid who happens to have a firm grasp of mathematics and physics. He thinks I'm wrong about the end of science, and that's fine with me. Hell, he might be right! I won't say more about him here, because I don't want to embarrass him--or myself--more than I already have, and because he reveals so much of himself in what follows. Warning: this is an extra-long Q&A, but if you read it, I predict, you too will become an Aaronson fan. Come on, that's too high a bar! When I was a kid, I wanted to be the founder and ruler of a rationalist space colony, who also wrote video games and invented the first human-level AI and led a children's liberation movement and discovered the mathematical laws underlying society. On the other hand, as far as childhood dreams go, I have no right to complain. I have a wonderful wife and three-year-old daughter. I get paid to work on engrossing math problems and mentor students and write about topics that interest me, to do all the things I'd want to do even if I weren't getting paid. It's one of those things, like a joke, that dies a little when you have to explain it--but when I started my blog in 2005, it was about my limitations as a human being, and my struggle to carve out a niche in the world despite those limitations. It also gestured toward the irony of someone whose sensibility and humor and points of reference are as ancient as mine are--I mean, I already felt like a senile, crotchety old man when I was 16--but who also studies a kind of computer that's so modern it doesn't even exist yet.

Not long ago, almost every blockbuster film release was accompanied by a tie-in video game. Just look back to the noughties superhero films; from Batman Begins to Iron Man 2, each one had a playable port, and most of them were awful. Nowadays, it's done less and less, with few straight film-to-game adaptations being made, yet more game-to-films (such as Warcraft) hitting cinemas. Thankfully, Insomniac has gone the completely bonkers route and made a game based on a film based on a game. Ratchet and Clank is thus a reimagining of the original tale, giving us a new-but-so-not-new story of how a Lombax and a defected robot became friends and saved the universe from Chairman Drek.

In just our fourth session together, Steve was already beginning to sound discouraged. It was Thursday of the first week of an experiment that I had expected to last for two or three months, but from what Steve was telling me, it might not make much sense to go on. "There appears to be a limit for me somewhere around eight or nine digits," he told me, his words captured by the tape recorder that ran throughout each of our sessions. "With nine digits especially, it's very difficult to get regardless of what pattern I use--you know, my own kind of strategies. It really doesn't matter what I use--it seems very difficult to get." Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorizing strings of numbers. I would read him a series of digits at a rate of about one per second--"Seven ... four ... zero ... one ... one ... nine ..." and so on--and Steve would try to remember them all and repeat them back to me once I was done. One goal was simply to see how much Steve could improve with practice. Now, after four of the hour-long sessions, he could reliably recall seven-digit strings--the length of a local phone number--and he usually got the eight-digit strings right, but nine digits was hit or miss, and he had never managed to remember a 10-digit string at all. And at this point, given his frustrating experience over the first few sessions, he was pretty sure that he wasn't going to get any better. What Steve didn't know--but I did--was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right. Decades of research had shown that there is a strict limit to the number of items that a person can retain in short-term memory, which is the type of memory the brain uses to hold on to small amounts of information for a brief period of time. If a friend gives you his address, it is your short-term memory that holds on to it just long enough to write it down. Or if you're multiplying a couple of two-digit numbers in your head, your short-term memory is where you keep track of all the intermediate pieces: "Let's see: 14 times 27 ... First, 4 times 7 is 28, so keep the 8 and carry the 2, then 4 times 2 is 8 ..." and so on.

If you've watched "Game of Thrones," you've probably come to realize that the show and real life have at least one hard truth in common: people die and you don't always know when to expect it. And, like many a pondering soul, you may also wonder when that judgment day will come. Now, students at the Technische Universität in Munich, Germany, have developed an application that may help you answer that question (at least as far as John Snow and company are involved). The students reportedly developed a computer algorithm in a programming course that mines the internet -- the place where people spend extensive time mulling over things like how tall Tyrion Lannister is, or whether he will die an untimely death while sipping on mulled wine -- and recycles that information in order to predict who will get the axe, or sword, next. "We tested 24 characteristics - for example, how many relatives of the character are already dead," Tatyana Goldberg, one of roughly 40 researchers who worked on the project, said.

"This project has been a lot of fun for us," says Dr. Guy Yachdav, who lead the class and was in charge of the project. "In its daily work, our research group focuses on answering complex biological questions using data mining and machine learning algorithms. For this project we used similar techniques. "Only this time the subject matter was a popular TV show. The epic scale of the worlds created by George R. R. Martin provides an almost endless resource of raw multi-dimensional data.

That's a lot more than those parts of Alphabet lost a year ago, when other bets posted an operating loss of 633 million. But the good news for other bets is that they're at least bringing in more cash than they did a year ago -- revenues of 166 million in the quarter was more than double the 80 million in revenue Google reported a year ago. This is the first time Alphabet has reported quarterly numbers for its other bets companies. Last quarter, the company revealed just how much money the companies lost throughout 2015 as a whole ( 3.6 billion, if you're keeping track). As a refresher, companies under the other bets umbrella include Verily, Google Fiber, Google X, the company's self-driving cars team, the Ventures investment group, Nest, Calico and a number of others.

See if your favorite'Game of Thrones' character will survive or die with this machine learning algorithm. You don't have to be a diehard Game of Thrones fan to know that characters are killed off left and right in the HBO series. What real fans don't know is the fate of their favorite characters in season 6, especially since war is coming. If you can't bear to wait one more second wondering what happened to Jon Snow out in the cold, you can check out this site that uses a machine learning algorithm to reveal which GoT characters will probably kick the bucket next. The algorithm was developed as part of a project called "A Song of Ice and Data" by students in a JavaScript Course at the Technical University of Munich.

If you haven't been eagerly awaiting Game of Thrones season six, then you're probably no friend of mine. I'm also going to hazard a guess that you haven't quite hit it off with the cultural touchstone that is George R R Martin's fantasy epic, or its HBO adaptation. Spoiler alert: a lot of people die in Game of Thrones, generally in a grisly way and usually unexpectedly. That's why any news around who might die next is always welcome. Thanks to some researchers at the Technical University of Munich, we may know the next Game of Thrones star to shuffle off this mortal coil. Using the power of "Big Data", the research team put together a set of machine-learning algorithms to trawl through data from both the book and the TV show to predict who will get the axe next.

Prince performs during the halftime show of the NFL's Super Bowl XLI football game between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts in Miami, Florida, on Feb. 4, 2007. Celebrities and musical artists spoke out online Thursday to pay tribute to musical icon Prince, calling the singer and multi-instrumentalist a "musical genius," "a visionary musician and artist" and "a true legend." The singer's publicist Yvette Nelson-Schure told the Associated Press that Prince died at his suburban Minneapolis home Thursday. Many expressed admiration for Prince's musical abilities and his legacy as an artist. He was a true legend and a musical genius!