Month: June 2014
All the Pizza
Ronen V pulls off yet another crazy internet video stunt, ordering pizza from every known pizza joint in New York City, more than 400 of them, to mark the 125th anniversary of the invention of pizza.
$40b Missile Defense unreliable
Despite years of tinkering and vows to fix technical shortcomings, the system’s performance has gotten worse, not better, since testing began in 1999. Of the 8 tests held since GMD became operational in 2004, 5 have been failures.
awkward for international relations, given that this missile defense system was supposed to keep others in check, both rogue and not.
Faster doors
we need lower latency in our doors, elevator buttons, public “touch” screens.
Sailboat Race
good times!
Halophytes
you don’t need desalination for agriculture if you go for plants that can tolerate salt water. there are 1000s of them.
More than 97% of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400K flowering plant species around the world, 2600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?
Vermeer paintings
Vermeer’s paintings might be 350 year-old color photographs. guy spends a year building a replica of a room, then painting it with a special mirror device to achieve the photographic effects vermeer is famous for. crazy.
Supermarket slave trail
Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers
33% Turing test
If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of 5 minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.
30% seems a low bar (why not > 50%?) but this is still an interesting historical footnote.
Towards electric bliss
If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless implementation of an electrode without impairing intelligence and the critical mind — I would be the first patient –Dalai Lama
Gregor J. Rothfuss 