All articles tagged with #plato
Plato argued that poverty comes from multiplying desires, not a fall in wealth, a view echoed by modern research showing happiness rises with income only up to a point before the hedonic treadmill erodes gains; the piece ties The Republic’s tripartite soul to today’s behavioral economics, and argues that addressing both material poverty and the internal sense of not having enough requires governance of appetite, not just more money.
After Artemis II's Moon flyby, six major missions are set to launch in 2026: China's Chang'e 7 will land near the lunar south pole with a rover and a small flying probe; NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will survey large swaths of the sky in infrared; ESA's PLATO will hunt for Earth-sized exoplanets in habitable zones; JAXA's MMX aims to land on Phobos and return a sample to Earth by 2031; ESA's Hera will study the Didymos–Dimorphos asteroid system after the DART impact; and BepiColombo will arrive at Mercury with two orbiters to map the planet and its environment.
PLATO, a computer system developed in the 1960s by Don Bitzer, was designed to revolutionize education by using computers. It was the first computer built and owned entirely by an educational institution, and it was a duplicate of the slightly earlier ORDVAC. PLATO's biggest innovation was time-sharing, allowing multiple students to use the system simultaneously for the first time. Many of the computing innovations we treat as commonplace started with this system, and even today, some of PLATO's capabilities have never been precisely duplicated.