Month: January 2014

Creationist Dumbication

Between this nonsense and the mindless waste of billions culminating this Sunday, no wonder the us gets its ass kicked. A lack of a truly educated public means only fast food jobs get created, and hence the middle class has stagnated for 30 years.

A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students. Creationist teachers don’t even need to be sneaky about it—the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach “alternatives” to evolution. Meanwhile, in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, taxpayer money is funding creationist private schools through state tuition voucher or scholarship programs.

Gift from God

Not: The Internet is a source of temptations to be resisted. Not: The Internet is just the latest over-hyped communication technology, and remember when we thought telegraphs would bring world peace? Not: The Internet is merely a technology and thus just another place for human nature to reassert itself. Not: The Internet is just a way for the same old powers to extend their reach. Not: The Internet is an opportunity to do good, but be wary because we can also do evil with it. It may be many of those. But first: The Internet — its possibilities for encounter and solidarity — is truly good. The Internet is a gift from God.

This is not the language I would use. I’m an agno-atheistical Jew who lives in solidarity with an Orthodox community. (Long story.) But I think – you can never tell with these cross-tradition interpretations – that the Pope’s words express the deep joy the Internet brings me. “This is not to say that certain problems do not exist”. But still: The Internet is truly good. Why?

Exposing the War on Fun!

Kevin C Pyle and Scott Cunningham’s non-fiction, book-length comic Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun! is a marvelous and infuriating history of censorship, zero-tolerance, helicopter parenting, and the war on kids. Bad For You covers many other subjects, from the demolition of America’s playgrounds to the panic of Dungeons and Dragons; from fear mongering over Internet predators and cyberbullies to the demonization of gaming and gamers. The final section, on zero tolerance and the conversion of American schools into police-states where children are arrested by armed policemen for sassing, possessing over-the-counter medication, and having “disruptive” hair colors, is the most frustrating of all.

Nicholas Roerich Museum

The Nicholas Roerich Museum is like a mini-Frick Collection but with a few exceptions–the museum is free, and all the artwork and artifacts were painted and discovered by Nicholas Roerich himself. Housed in this 3-story Upper West Side town house are over 200 works of art ranging from paintings of the Himalayas to scenes from historical references to sketches from his early days designing sets for Russian ballets like The Rite of Spring composed by Igor Stravinsky.

Movies Within Games

Creating a tool for designing well-sculpted, appealing protagonists who fit into the same consistent art style is surprisingly complex. However, the number of people out there who want to play an AAA computer game is massive – easily enough to justify the investment in a tool capable of churning out almost infinite numbers of beautifully sculpted, world-consistent protagonists. And so, suddenly, for an independent storyteller, the projected costs of any independent animated project plummet if they’re willing to use a “Machinima” approach.

It would be possible to tell almost any low to mid-fantasy story using Skyrim or World of Warcraft, with some minor modifications. The genre of science fiction, at least in its mainstream film-friendly incarnation, is similarly well-covered by EVE Online, Half-Life 2, Dead Space and 10s of other games. (It would take some thinking, but I could probably make a fair stab at adapting any of Charlie’s SF works using one, another, or a combination of game engines.) And of course, modern-day stories are thoroughly covered by everything from The Sims to Call of Duty.

Coelacanth

The long story of sequencing the coelacanth genome, the fish most closely related to us (but not our direct ancestor)

When it turned up unexpectedly, the coelacanth was the biological find of the century. And now it is showing why. Its biographer tells the best fish story in 380 ma

Robot learning

scientists have developed an online platform where robots can learn new skills from each other worldwide — a kind of “Wikipedia for robots.” The objective is to help develop robots better at helping elders with caring and household tasks.

2024-01-22: Large-scale collaboration to share training data

The scale of this project is very large because it has to be. The RT-X dataset currently contains 1m robotic trials for 22 types of robots, including many of the most commonly used robotic arms on the market. The robots in this dataset perform a huge range of behaviors, including picking and placing objects, assembly, and specialized tasks like cable routing. There are 500 different skills and interactions with 1000s of different objects. It’s the largest open-source dataset of real robotic actions in existence.
To test the capabilities of our model, 5 of the laboratories involved in the RT-X collaboration each tested it in a head-to-head comparison against the best control system they had developed independently for their own robot. Each lab’s test involved the tasks it was using for its own research, which included things like picking up and moving objects, opening doors, and routing cables through clips. Remarkably, the single unified model provided improved performance over each laboratory’s own best method, succeeding at the tasks 50% more often on average.
Our early results hint at how large cross-embodiment robotics models could transform the field. Much as large language models have mastered a wide range of language-based tasks, in the future we might use the same foundation model as the basis for many real-world robotic tasks. Perhaps new robotic skills could be enabled by fine-tuning or even prompting a pretrained foundation model. In a similar way to how you can prompt ChatGPT to tell a story without first training it on that particular story, you could ask a robot to write “Happy Birthday” on a cake without having to tell it how to use a piping bag or what handwritten text looks like. Of course, much more research is needed for these models to take on that kind of general capability, as our experiments have focused on single arms with 2-finger grippers doing simple manipulation tasks.