Month: December 2016

Electoral College Sabotage

The timing of the CIA’s leak wasn’t random. It was an opening salvo by the CIA to actively influence the Electoral College and stop Donald Trump from becoming President. The CIA is trying to topple Trump. Why? Self preservation. The real reason is that Trump was working with Peter Thiel to corporatize the intelligence gathering of the United States around companies, like Palantir, that can adopt and employ technology much faster and with more efficacy. Trump is planning to turn the CIA and the NSA into peripheral collection systems.

a good night story for you

Land Lines

so fun

Start with a line, let the planet complete the picture. Land Lines lets you explore Google Earth satellite images through gesture. Machine learning and line detection algorithms were used to preprocess all images and identify the dominant lines. This enabled the analysis of brushstrokes and retrieval of the matching image efficiently without the need for a server.The project was made in collaboration by Zach Lieberman and the Data Arts Team.

Dressing for cold

The system is best used in varying combinations and is not meant to be layered sequentially, meaning one garment on top of another, on top of another, until you’re wearing all 7 levels. The conditions of your operating environment and the requirements of your mission will determine not only what you wear, but also what you stow in your pack for later use. The wind shirt (Level 4), in particular, is a very versatile garment meant to be sandwiched between your various layers. It allows for a more stable internal temperature to be managed, as well as reducing friction between insulation layers.

Shores of Titan

As humanity expands outward, the frontier is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and the only moon in the solar system to have a substantial atmosphere. Titan around 2260 is much like present-day Antarctica: home to a variety of research stations operated by scientific agencies of various powers in the inner system. Titan is much more interesting than Antarctica, however. Apart from the Earth, it is the only solar system body to have natural liquids on its surface, with a complex cycle of evaporation, rain, erosion, rivers, lakes, and seas. The largest sea, Kraken Mare, located near the north pole, is larger than Earth’s Caspian Sea. Titan’s atmosphere is half again as dense as that of Earth, and with only 14% of Earth’s gravity, it is possible for people to fly under their own muscle power.

Yeast Acid Tolerance

I took gravity readings along the way to judge how rapidly the yeast were attenuating. As you can see, for the most part, regardless of the strain the lower the pH the slower fermentation progressed. The final gravities were also affected by the high acidity. Dosing with lactic acid isn’t a preferred method for making sour beer (as you can see from the tasting notes), but clearly some strains performed better than others.

Moore’s Law over 120 Years

I updated the Kurzweil version of Moore’s Law to include the latest data points. Further UPDATE here, post Tesla AI Day. Of all of the variations of Moore’s Law, this is the one I find to be most useful, as it captures what customers actually value — computation per $ spent. Humanity’s capacity to compute has compounded for as long as we can measure it, starting long before Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noticed a refraction of the longer-term trend in the belly of the then fledgling semiconductor industry. But, Intel has ceded leadership for Moore’s Law. The 7 most recent data points are all NVIDIA GPUs, with CPU architectures dominating the prior 30 years. The fine-grained parallel compute architecture of a GPU maps better to the needs of deep learning than a CPU. There is a poetic beauty to the computational similarity of a processor optimized for graphics processing and the computational needs of a sensory cortex, as commonly seen in neural networks today.