What we need is for self-driving cars to become available and cheap enough in cities that are still growing fast enough, and which have legal and political support for driving such cars fast close together, so they can achieve high throughput. That is, people need to be sufficiently rewarded for using cars in ways that allow more road throughput. And then economic activity needs to move from old cities to the new more efficient cities.
Month: June 2014
NYC Abandoned Islands
New York City life is shaped by the archipelago upon which it lies. Nearly 30 of these islands bear names and distinct, if a little peculiar, backstories. We rounded up 11 such islands, all linked through the common themes of abandonment and obscurity. Many were at one point inhabited, either by individuals or institutions, but today all have slipped out of the public’s consciousness. Indeed, to many native New Yorkers, their existence remains unnoticed.
Zoos Drive Animals Crazy
Aoos are as savage as coliseums. And for what, some drooling brats? Please.
Gus was forced to live in an enclosure that is 0.00009% of the size his range would have been in his natural habitat.
Project Tango
updated tango device. decades of computer vision research combined into 1 device. this should give a nice boost to 100s of r&d labs around the world.
Dumb prison show
So, could you please explain to me why this kitchen has 12 chicks back there? Or why there’s so much cooking gear that they don’t need? Christ, it looks like the kitchen of a high-end steakhouse! Hey, look, a big assed dough mixer! For all the fresh bread that they totally make in prison all the time! And look, there’s a professional deli slicer, which they need for all the bologna and cheese sandwiches on white bread! And look! A fryer! And enormous ovens and stoves with 40 burners for all the intricate sauces that get served to the happy, well-fed prisoners!
an excellent takedown of this dumb new show
Memristors, perhaps
this will enable very interesting architectures. something to keep ourselves busy with while we mourn the passing of moore’s law.
The Machine is a hyper-dense collection of computing hardware that could be used in anything from a data center to a mobile device. It has terabytes of storage and a much smaller power draw than today’s computing devices—all because of memristor-based memory and optical interconnects.
Accounting grandeur
Accounting in the modern sense was still a new idea in the 1500s, one with a weight that carried beyond the business world. A proper accounting invoked the idea of debts paid, the obligation of nightly personal reckonings, and even calling to account the wealthy and powerful through audits.
Fossilized ideas
The recurrence of ideas over the course of history is something that Jung or Pauli would have attributed to archetypes in the collective unconscious. An alternative would be the finiteness of human imagination, and susceptibility to cultural influence. While scientific theories can become increasingly technical and abstract, the brains that struggle to interpret their meaning haven’t evolved much in the past 50 ka. If our own brain is a kind of living fossil, it’s hardly surprising that so much of what we do with it is metaphorically fossilised too.
Left-Right Is Bogus
this sums up why i’m so bored by “politics”.
We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.
Iphone self-owns
your jesusphone will naively try to connect to a computer and immediately sync data any time it is plugged into a USB port for charging, which of course can be exploited. the simplest solution is to get a device that doesn’t suck, or you can get some awkward “adapter”.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 