Month: August 2016

Vetocracy in action

When a new restaurant starts to take patrons from an old restaurant we generally don’t think that the old restaurant–the long-term resident–has the right to prevent the new restaurant from opening. The same is true, by and large, for new technologies and ways of doing business. Yet when it comes to residential land we give the old residents a veto on the new.

The sad thing is that the people most yakking about their “property” are also the ones who want to impose their misguided rules on others.

Trace of the Weirding

it feels like decades worth of change happening within the space of weeks so it’s a weird kind of world happening around us right now you can’t really judge the state of it in the sense of providing an accurate snapshot but what you can do is narrate the perspective you have as you can make your way through the world. we’re gonna try to get a sense of the state of the weirding.

Life Extension Outlook

Optimists claim treatments in the pipelines will extend life for many people to today’s ceiling of 120 or so. But it may be just the beginning. In the next phase not just average lifespans but maximum lifespans will rise. If a body part wears out, it will be repaired or replaced altogether. DNA will be optimized for long life. Add in anti-ageing drugs, and centenarians will become 2 a penny.

Niku TNO

Astronomers have recently discovered a new mystery object orbiting the sun on a plane nearly perpendicular to the rest of the planets. Adding to the weirdness, the trans-Neptunian object, which has been nicknamed “Niku,” is also spinning around the sun backwards, in the opposite direction of the rest of the planets. So far, astronomers have little idea what could cause such abnormal celestial behavior.

Largest war in history

The largest war in animal history — in fact, by numbers the largest war in history — is going on right now. The supercolony grew to cover most of the United States. Then it spread to England, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. L. humile is now abundant on every continent except Antarctica, and wherever she goes, she slaughters native ant species Things have not been perfect. Near San Diego, a schism formed, and a separate supercolony was created. The battlefront extends for km; some 30M ants die there every year. But for now, a global megacolony still persists, consisting of around 1T individuals: a humble brown ant united in war against every other ant alive.

GoT got nothing on these guys. Super vicious.

Mathematica 11

i’m always amazed about how powerful mathematica is and then sad about how niche it is. not sure they could do better if they went the R route (open source things) as more and more they’re vertically integrated, but i do wonder what things would be like if it were much more widely used in education and business.

what’s the big new thing in Version 11? Well, it’s not 1 big thing; it’s many big things. To give a sense of scale, there are 555 completely new functions that we’re adding in Version 11—representing a huge amount of new functionality (by comparison, Version 1 had a total of 551 functions altogether). And actually that function count is even an underrepresentation—because it doesn’t include the vast deepening of many existing functions.

Copyright Protectionism

Dead people tend not to be very creative so I suspect that the retroactive extension of copyright will not spur much innovation from Eames. The point, of course, is not to spur creativity but to protect the rents of the handful of people whose past designs turned out to have lasting value.

europe importing a very bad law.