Month: September 2016

Transplanting A Head

The human chimera that awoke from surgery wouldn’t really be the head donor or the body donor anymore, but someone else entirely. In that sense, a head transplant wouldn’t save Valery Spiridonov’s life so much as create a new one. A life with affinities to Spiridonov’s old one, certainly. But in many ways—medically, psychologically, maybe even spiritually—it would be something entirely new, unprecedented in history. “It goes beyond what we’ve ever contemplated, And by ‘we’ I mean humankind.” Spiridonov doesn’t worry much about the risks, psychological or otherwise, of waking up with a new body. Perhaps inevitably, given his handicap, he equates his personhood with his brain alone. “For me, a body is like a machine, doing some duties or some regular stuff, just to support living”. The transplant “is not about philosophy; it’s about mechanics.” He seemed to think that acquiring a new body would be akin to getting a new wheelchair. Still, the constant media attention, and the uncertainty about when and where the surgery will occur, have taken an emotional toll. “I’m really, really tired of being famous. It’s exhausting, and it takes a lot of your time, for nothing.” He doesn’t fantasize much about having a new body, in part because he doesn’t know how much control he’ll have over it. Will he wake up from surgery like the mouse treated with peg in Ren’s lab—faltering a little, but able to move under his own power? Or will he be even worse off than the control mouse—unable to use any of his limbs, and shackled to an alien body?

Sabotaged Gun Tracing

There’s no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible. 65% of the time, workers at the tracing center are able to successfully trace a gun used in a crime back to the original purchaser. A routine trace takes ~1 week, but they can turn an “urgent” around in 24 hours. The San Bernardino case was an urgent. The Boston Marathon bomber case was an urgent. Gabby Giffords: urgent. Charleston. Aurora. Fort Hood. Columbine. Washington Navy Yard. Sikh temple. Just figure every crime you ever watched endless horrifying footage of on TV involved somebody here in Martinsburg searching through a rat’s nest of records and then experiencing a moment of jubilance upon seeing that, yes, this is it, here is the 4473 that belongs to that lunatic. (Or his mother. Or his uncle. Or the pawnshop dealer who sold it to someone else. Tracing the gun beyond the initial point of purchase is on the cops.) This is the maddening, inefficient way gun tracing works, and there is no effort afoot to make it work any better. For all the talking we do about imposing new limits on assault weapons, or stronger background checks, nobody talks about fixing the way we keep track—or don’t keep track—of where all the guns are.

Sierra made PC Gaming

When IBM debuted their PS/2 line in 1987, Ken, seeing the new machines’ lovely MCGA and VGA graphics and user-friendly mouse support, felt a bit like Noah must have when the first drops of rain finally began to fall. Yes, the machines were ridiculously expensive as propositions for the home, but given time, their technology would trickle down into more affordable price brackets. If nothing else, the PS/2 line was at long last a start. King’s Quest IV and its first real soundtrack score stands as a landmark moment in the evolution of computer games. The game did indeed do much to break the chicken-and-egg conundrum afflicting MS-DOS audio. But King’s Quest IV also advanced the state of the art of adventure gaming in other, less tech-centric ways. As evidenced by its prominent subtitle The Perils of Rosella, its protagonist is female. Hard as it may seem to believe today, when more adventure games than not seem to star women, this fact made King’s Quest IV almost unique in its day

Zstandard

We’re thrilled to announce Zstandard 1.0, a new compression algorithm and implementation designed to scale with modern hardware and compress smaller and faster. Zstandard combines recent compression breakthroughs, like Finite State Entropy, with a performance-first design — and then optimizes the implementation for the unique properties of modern CPUs. As a result, it improves upon the trade-offs made by other compression algorithms and has a wide range of applicability with very high decompression speed. Zstandard, available now under the BSD license, is designed to be used in nearly every lossless compression scenario, including many where current algorithms aren’t applicable.

Transportation-as-a-Service

any discussion of the threat self-driving cars poses to Uber tends to imagine a world where there are magically 10Ks if not millions of self-driving cars everywhere immediately. That simply isn’t practical from a pure logistics standpoint; the time it will take to build all of those cars — and, crucially, get government approval — is time Uber has to catch up.

Moreover, it’s not at all clear that Google will be willing to make the sort of investment necessary to build a self-driving fleet that could take on Uber. The company’s recent scale-back of Google Fiber is instructive in this regard: it is very difficult for a company built on search advertising margins to stomach the capital costs entailed in building out a fleet capable of challenging Uber in more than 1 or 2 markets.

Finally, as the incumbent in the transportation-as-a-service space Uber has the advantage of only needing to be good-enough. To the degree the company can build out UberPool and UberCommute, they can ensure that their own self-driving cars get first consideration from consumers trained to open their app whenever they are out and about.