Month: October 2012

Is information or ignorance stronger?

In the Web 2.0 age, when many see 100s of articles every day, are we more informed than previous generations were?

this is fascinating. i especially liked this tidbit about how high culture used to be disseminated:

In cigar-making factories in New York City, lectors sat on high stools reading Shakespeare, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Hugo, Balzac, and Tolstoy as cigar rollers performed their work.

Forecast liabilitiy

If you thought rationality is only under attack in the US, think again.

“The verdict is perverse and the sentence ludicrous”. It called for protests against the sentence’s severity and at scientists being criminalized “for the way their opinions were communicated”.

Leading political figures in Italy suggested that the case had blurred the lines between science and public life. “The risk is that doubt will no longer be allowed to form part of scientific judgement. The role of science is not the same as politics or administration.”

Soft exoskeletons

I wonder whether the space or disability applications will come on line first.

2013-05-24: Warrior Web

The Army is nearing completion of a five-month series of tests to evaluate multiple Warrior Web prototype devices. The testing evaluates how each prototype incorporates different technologies and approaches to reduce forces on the body, decrease fatigue, stabilize joints and help Soldiers to maintain a natural gait under a heavy load. The testing uses a multi-camera motion-capture system to determine any changes in gait or balance, a cardio-pulmonary exercise testing device to measure oxygen consumption and a variety of sensors to collect force, acceleration and muscle activity data.

2015-07-20: Harvard Soft Exosuits

compared to a traditional exoskeleton, these systems have several advantages, the wearer’s joints are unconstrained by external rigid structures, and the worn part of the suit is extremely light.

2016-09-25: Exoskeleton to get average soldiers to run 24km/h

2018-07-06: Powered Clothing

Seismic is combining clothing and robotics into what they call Powered Clothing. They aim to get exosuits into stores by the end of 2018 in the US, Japan and the UK. The suit’s ‘electric muscles’, powered by tiny motors, contract and mimic human muscle. These electric muscles are part of the clothing around the joints of the body and attached via grips in the clothing. The grips act like tendons in the human body. A computer and sensors tracking body movements are also integrated into the suit; software tells the muscles in the clothing when to activate. The hard technology components such as motors, batteries and control boards are incorporated into hexagonal low-profile pods, designed for maximum comfort.

The walk to subsume all

lots of “walk for the cure” today: breast cancer, alzheimers, ms. the breast cancer one had inappropriate cow mascots (!?!). this got me wondering, maybe we should organize a walk for the cure (of death). it would, by definition, subsume all the other ones.

Open Source Brewing

If you contribute an idea in the early stages of recipe formulation (e.g. a hop variety to use, an adjustment in a malt bill, changes to water chemistry, etc…) that we end up adopting, we’ll invite you to participate in one of our tasting panels once we’re up and running. If you can’t make it out to the brewery, we’ll acknowledge your contribution for all to world to see in a suitably awesome way.

Once a recipe is in production, we’ll up the ante. If you bring us a homebrewed version of our beer that we like better than our own and provide details of what you did differently, we’ll invite you to brew the beer with us at the brewery. Suffice it to say, we’ll make sure you have a great time and are crowned king of Modern Times for the day.