Month: August 2013

NYC 2030

i’m a fan of nyc’s plan for 2030, the sort of large-scale, long-term thinking cities ought to be invested in, but which is very rare in practice, even though most of society’s wealth is produced in cities. it’s fun to contrast this to Hyperurbanization which is full of eye-opening stuff like

The next 10 years will see the largest transformation of our built environment ever. 50% of what will be the built environment in 2030 doesn’t exist today.

5 ka game tokens

The find confirms that board games likely originated and spread from the Fertile Crescent regions and Egypt more than 5 ka ago (Senet from predynastic Egypt is considered the world’s oldest game board). The tokens were accompanied by badly preserved wooden pieces or sticks. Sağlamtimur hopes they’ll provide some hints on the rules and logic behind the game.

Towards Utility Fog

Gershenfeld created a new 3D interlock structure — which is made from tiny, identical, interlocking parts — to chainmail. The parts form a structure that is 10x stiffer for a given weight than existing ultralight materials. But this new structure can also be disassembled and reassembled easily — such as to repair damage, or to recycle the parts into a different configuration.

Courtroom evidence

In the 1970s, Loftus published a series of influential studies about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. She has been trying to make the implications of her findings known ever since, but only now is her work is beginning to have a real impact. As an expert witness, Loftus has testified on behalf of mass murderers, but that’s the least controversial aspect of her work. Her role in legal cases involving allegations of childhood sexual abuse based on recovered memories has made her the target of lawsuits and death threats, and her research into using false memories to modify behavior is regarded by some as highly unethical. The so-called “memory wars” began in 1990, when Loftus got a call from a lawyer defending George Franklin. Franklin’s daughter accused him of murdering her best friend decades earlier, after apparently recovering long-lost memories of the crime during therapy. “There I was, witnessing the conviction of a man based on nothing more than the claim of a repressed memory.” Intrigued, she scoured the scientific literature and, failing to find any convincing evidence for the claim that traumatic memories can be buried and recovered, testified to that effect in the trial.