Sapere Aude
Month: January 2015
i saw this when i was last in chicago. it’s a great service.
Touting the program’s convenience and affordability, Chicago officials unveiled Monday the city’s new gun-sharing service, “QuikShot,” which allows individuals to check out a loaded firearm for short periods of time.
very mad max
An estimated 3000 fish, brought to the roofless, flooded building 10 years ago by nearby vendors in hopes of controlling a burgeoning mosquito population, are being removed by Bangkok Metropolitan Administration staff. Once the fish are captured, they’ll be brought to Thailand’s Department of Fisheries research and development labs before being released into various water bodies across Thailand.
short documentary about a japanese ryokan run by the same family for 1300 years.
See also Kongo Gumi, which was the oldest before being acquired in 2006.
what astronomers may have taken to be 2 massive balls of plasma locked in a gravitational embrace could actually be a very large, very hungry civilization devouring a hapless star.
The EU governments got together on January 11th to condemn the attack on Charlie Hebdo. However, they concluded that the best response is to curtail free speech, ramp up propaganda, increase surveillance on citizens, and place a ban on the types of things Charlie Hebdo published.
it will be very interesting to observe the parallels.
“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity… There needs to be a firm message about the values of the republic and of secularism.” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls
Based on this statement alone, it looks like France is about to fall into a Red Queen’s Trap. In this case, an all consuming struggle between an increasingly hollow nation-state and a large and growing population of people unwilling to assimilate.
Fun speculation
I have heard people say that the technology will never catch on. People won’t be tempted because a duplicate of you, no matter how realistic, is still not you. But I doubt that such existential concerns will have much of an impact once the technology arrives. You already wake up every day as a marvelous copy of a previous you, and nobody has paralyzing metaphysical concerns about that. If you die and are replaced by a really good computer simulation, it’ll just seem to you like you entered a scanner and came out somewhere else. From the point of view of continuity, you’ll be missing some memories. If you had your annual brain-backup, say, 8 months earlier, you’ll wake up missing those 8 months. But you will still feel like you, and your friends and family can fill you in on what you missed. Some groups might opt out — the Amish of information technology — but the mainstream will presumably flock to the new thing.
a more literate article about the recent progress in culturing the 99% of bacteria that don’t grow in lab conditions.
This idea of going after cryptic bacterial strains has been around for a long time, but getting it to work has been another thing entirely. This is the most solid example that I’m aware of, and I hope that it’s just the opening of a new platform for antibiotic drug discovery. The traditional search for natural product antibiotics has pretty well come to a shuddering halt over the years – no matter how much effort you put into increasingly exotic soil samples and the like, you keep finding the same things (if you find anything at all). Unculturable organisms are the new frontier, and the iChip is going to be nowhere near the last word in exploring it. And at the same time, you have outfits like Warp Drive Bio trying to get organisms to express unusual compounds that aren’t normally seen, so the hope is that there are a lot of useful things out there that that we have never heard of.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 