Month: January 2014

Cheapium

In the search for cheaper materials that mimic their purer, more expensive counterparts, researchers are abandoning hunches and intuition for theoretical models and pure computing power.In a new study, researchers used computational methods to identify 10s of platinum-group alloys that were previously unknown to science but could prove beneficial in a wide range of applications.

i hadn’t thought beyond proteins, but computational chemistry can be used to find radically cheaper catalysts than platinum, and in general, revolutionize materials science. this is potentially a very big deal, as advances in materials science are one of the few areas that tend to benefit all of mankind equally.

Roman mummies


this egyptian mummy from the roman period reminds me of a certain lady from spain who “there, i fixed it” a painting. seen at the brooklyn museum, which has an amazing egyptian collection. mostly new kingdom, but also some middle and even some old kingdrom artifacts.

Ways to make college free

If we were we scrapping our current system and starting from scratch, Washington could make public college tuition free with the money it sets aside its scattershot attempts to make college affordable today.

this is of course a flawed assumption. why would you set up college as screwed-up again if you had a chance for a do-over? why would you lump in housing, expensive facilities etc that add 0 to education outcomes? an ideal college system would have 90% fewer assets and costs.

2014 predictions

2014 predictions
every year, a few friends and i indulge in a little predicting (and then come back to it 1 year later). here are mine, i’d be interested to hear yours:

Whole genome sequencing becomes available for $1000
The supreme court rules that large scale surveillance is constitutional
Governments around the world do the same, under NSA envy, while also passing opportunistic privacy legislation
A Chinese site passes fb in traffic
1m spatial / 4h temporal resolution satellite pictures (cubesats) become commercially available
2 of the also-ran mobile os fold
NLP reaches the text understanding of a third grader
2 attacks by apt against commercial targets in the us create billions of damage
The number of detected extrasolar planets soars past 10000
A utility enters bankruptcy due to the price of solar becoming competitive with coal for the first time
Conversational uis pass the Turing test 80% of the time under a time limit of 5min
It will be possible for < 10m$ to send a message to the personal devices of 5b people within 24h. (What would it say?)
A service reaches 500m users within 1 year of launch
Popular opinion blames technology instead of banksters for the problems of the 99%
2 teams complete the second DARPA robotics challenge with the max number of points possible