Month: March 2009

Robot agriculture

The robots are able to locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants. In the long run, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse.

2012-09-14:  AutoMicroFarm

AutoMicroFarm is an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software. It is an open-source aquaponics system with best-of-class design, monitoring and automation to make it easy to maintain.

2016-06-01: Automation has some not so obvious consequences that should make the Birkenstock mafia happy if they weren’t so preoccupied with being luddites.
2018-05-22: New AI-enabled tractors target weeds, using 90% less herbicide

Farming is undergoing a quiet but radical transformation as machine learning and automation innovations reduce waste. One especially promising new technology targets individual weeds. This is especially important as the world slowly moves to ban glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup and others that may be linked to cancer and loss of biodiversity. Some studies have linked the chemical to changes in bee behavior.

2021-06-07: Australia’s first automated farm

Robots and artificial intelligence will replace workers on Australia’s first fully automated farm created at a cost of $20m. Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga will create the “hands-free farm” on a 19km2 property to demonstrate what robots and artificial intelligence can do without workers in the paddock. The reality of “hands-free” farming’ is closer than many people realize: “Full automation is not a distant concept. We already have mines in the Pilbara operated entirely through automation.”

2022-02-23: Verdant Robotics

Verdant Robotics announced the delivery of the industry’s first multi-action, autonomous farm-robot capable of millimeter-accurate spraying, laser weeding, and AI-based digital crop modeling, and the expansion of their robot-as-a-service offering to farmers. Combining multiple technologies, the company’s 6-row and 12-row commercial implements can treat up to 4.2 acres per hour, achieving a higher weed-removal rate per acre than other technology or human ability, and reducing chemical usage by 95%. Simultaneously, its autonomous software system collects data and uses machine learning capabilities to optimize yield and growing outcomes, ultimately unlocking new revenues to help farmers reach profitability and sustainability goals.


2023-02-23: Dogtooth strawberry picker

2023-05-01: Drones to avoid soil compaction

Early one recent morning in Vidalia, Georgia, Greg Morgan launched a Hylio AG-230 drone carrying 30l of fungicide over a field of sweet onions. The chemical, which is essential to crop survival in this humid state fell in a fine mist from the spray jets of a 36 kg drone scudding 3 meters above his cash crop. It has cut his fuel costs and already reduced his agrochemical usage by 15%. The drone has also enabled him to work his fields after heavy rains — when the ground is often too sodden for heavy equipment — and has spared his crop from the routine damage caused by tractors. It has also saved his soil from the compaction, bogging and erosion caused by farm machinery.

Google Maps Kenya

here’s hoping that bandwidth is plentiful

Maps of the African continent have been around for centuries. Largely created by explorers, historians and cartographers from Western parts of the world, ancient African maps mainly depict trade routes, emerging trade centers and navigational points. Over time, maps increasingly became more detailed for the inland areas of Africa, in many cases as administrative instruments for former colonial powers. These maps still form the basis for many of the currently available paper maps for large parts of Africa.

EMP Aftermath

A what-if of the aftermath of a high power EMP blast in the stratosphere.

Suppose, one fine spring day, with no warning or evident cause, the power went out. After a while, when it didn’t come back on, you might try to telephone the power company, only to discover the phone completely dead. You pull out your mobile phone, and it too is kaput. Nothing happens at all when you try to turn it on. You get the battery powered radio you keep in the basement in case of storms, and it too is dead; you swap in the batteries from the flashlight (which works) but that doesn’t fix the radio. So, you decide to drive into town and see if anybody there knows what’s going on. The car doesn’t start. You set out on foot, only to discover when you get to the point along the lane where you can see the highway that it’s full of immobile vehicles with their drivers wandering around on foot as in a daze.

The Quiet Coup

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. 1 of the most alarming is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the US, it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

after 3rd world infrastructure, the us takes the next step: 3rd world oligarchies.

we’re watching the most pitched, highest-stakes, most determined battle between politics and finance which has been staged. I am expecting finance to win.

Against Twitter

I finally figured out why I hate Twitter and its ilk so much: they primarily amplify the voices of the stupid, resulting in a net negative for society, feel good bs like “Arab Spring”, or whatever marginally employed journalist types tell themselves notwithstanding. Contrast that with delicious or wikipedia, where the stupid can only do limited damage, and the spoils go to the thoughtful. It seems that you’d want to make curation easier relative to creation to get a virtuous cycle of intelligence enhancement instead of a vicious cycle of appeal to the dumbest.

That’s the grand irony of Twitter: Even the real people on the service are fake.

As if you needed another reason to detest twitter. SpaghettiOs’ Dubious Tweet to Remember Pearl Harbor

If your job as a social media douchebag is to run an account for a can of pasta, how else are you going to go “viral”? working as intended. It is also all spam:

it takes a mere 458 followers to land in the top 10% of all Twitter users. It takes 2991 followers to crack the top 1%

Wow, that’s so ghetto. no wonder they won’t go anywhere.
The author argues that the advent of Twitter heralds the destruction of the nation state over the coming century. It is far more likely that the nation state will cause the destruction of Twitter, for having done more to lower the quality of discourse than any technology that came before.
Twitter is fundamentally not viable, and changing leads doesn’t change the drain-circling. TWTR to 0 in 2015

Racist Trump twitter has come up with a new coded way to share racial slurs w/ each other and avoid account suspension. Here’s the ugly list of words and their “true” meanings among white supremacists.

So who is going to buy Twitter and shut it down, doing us all a favor?

By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter. Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

The dumb Twitter audience is the problem.