Month: February 2015

Earth, population 500M

There are only ~500M of us left, after the convulsive transformations caused by climate change severely diminished the planet’s carrying capacity. Most of us now live in ‘lifeboats’, in places that were once Canada, China, Russia and the Scandinavian countries, shoehorned into cities created virtually overnight to accommodate the millions of desperate refugees where the climate remains marginally tolerable.

Before the seismic shocks of the great upheavals, people’s movements were unfettered, and they could breathe unfiltered air, roam in the woods or simply watch their kids play soccer outdoors. Today, the unprotected strips of land exposed to the elements are forbidden zones, plagued by drenching rains with howling 160-km-an-hour winds, alternating with fierce dust storms, the deadly soil tsunamis that rumble up from the deserts that blanket what used to be the United States. When there is a break in the wild weather, the scorching sun relentlessly cooks the atmosphere to temperatures of 82 celsius or more by midday, making it impossible to step outside without body armor and oxygen tanks.

GIMP sucks a little bit less


while i wasn’t looking, the GIMP turned from a paint.exe replacement into a tool with bipolar issues: as a host to amazing image processing suites like Gmic while still having the worst UI. for a while, there was seashore on the mac to paper over the UI, but development has stalled in 2011.if you work around the bugs / put in the hours, you can get pretty decent image processing for free these days.

Safer Internet Day

It takes just a few minutes to make sure your information is accurate and up to date. And as an extra thank you, we’ll add 2GB to your Drive storage plan if you complete the Security Checkup by February 17. Visit your Account Settings and take your Security Checkup today.

Child Bride Mother

In Guatemala, the legal age of marriage is 14 with parental consent, but in Petén, in the northern part of the country, the law seems to be more of a suggestion. Underage brides are everywhere. They parade endlessly through Petén’s hospital in San Benito, seeking medical care. Most have traveled from the villages along the mud-soaked roads that flow out in all directions. When I visited the hospital, there were no fewer than 4 babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, all born premature to 14-year-old mothers.

YouTube Tacit Knowledge

Today, Khan Academy has 15m registered students in 190 countries. The YouTube channel has racked up over 500m views. Khan’s vision for the future has been endorsed by everyone from Bill Gates to Barack Obama; he’s working with institutions like Stanford University and the Tate.

While Khan is perhaps YouTube’s biggest success in the field of learning, the platform is saturated with instructional videos. There are YouTube tutorials for changing a light bulb, assembling baby buggies, learning the guitar. Shawn Mendes, the 16-year-old Canadian singer hailed as the “next Justin Bieber” taught himself guitar entirely via YouTube.

It’s easy to see the appeal: instead of puzzling over an instruction manual written in 15 languages, you can just watch someone show you. “Our toilet got stuck the other day,” Khan tells me. “Normally, you would hire a plumber. But I watched a YouTube video, which said this was a case where you need an auger – I’d never heard of that – and I went to the hardware store and bought one and I was able to fix it.”

2019-09-20: The YouTube revolution in knowledge transfer

Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate how to use multimeters and how to assess breaker boxes, to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn basic knife-handling techniques from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has grown 70% year-on-year.

2022-02-01: For me, the way Sandy Munroe and crew break down vehicles to explain the engineering tradeoffs is a great tacit knowledge example. I could never have guessed that i’d enjoy engineering breakdowns of a Tesla, but these videos are now some of my favorites.