Month: January 2017

Union corruption costs trillions

with all the discussion of conflicts of interest in the Trump cabinet, it strikes me that the most glaring conflict in the public sector is ignored: The CoI between state and local politicians elected with the support of public sector unions who then participate in compensation negotiations for the members of those unions. Here the temptation of the politicians to buy the support of the unions with public money is overwhelming. The impact of this is potentially trillions when public pension liabilities are included

Earth seen from Mars

The Earth and Moon, as seen from Mars. That image was taken by the phenomenal HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was more than 200M kilometers from Earth at the time. It’s actually a composite of a few separate images, processed to show the relative size and position of our planet and its moon.

Beneath Grand Central

Grand Central’s immense underground is comprised of 2 subterranean levels with 44 platforms and 67 tracks, extending over 100 blocks beneath the streets of Manhattan. It is both the largest train station and one of the largest inaccessible underground environments in the world.

This inaccessible landscape is like a cavernous portal into another world. A colossus rich in untouched artifacts, forgotten equipment, and miles of tangled track—all covered in cm of remnant soot, railroad dust, and aging debris. The Vast …Beneath Grand Central is an enchanted landscape, straddling the line between the center of the universe and a feeling 1M km away, being elsewhere unlike any other place in the City. This cavernous environment is both functional and beautiful in its efficiency and utility—duly capable of touching our solitary senses and recalibrating our allegiances to the physical world in one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world.

Racist Louisiana

Louisiana is still extremely racist, to no one’s surprise.

In 2008, John Conyers, the chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana state representative, learned about Woodfox and Wallace’s decades of confinement and visited them at C.C.R. A “massive amount of evidence” showed that Woodfox and Wallace were innocent. Brent Miller’s widow, Teenie Rogers, had also begun to question the state’s evidence, after a young investigator on the case, Billie Mizell, befriended her and made charts mapping inconsistencies in the state’s testimony. Rogers wrote Richmond a letter saying that she was “shocked to find out that no real attempt was made to find out who the fingerprint did belong to, which should have been a very simple thing to do.”

Cities and Civilization

  • Agriculture requires sedentism, but sedentism more likely lead to agriculture than the other way around.
  • Monumental stone architecture long predates cities, from Göbekli Tepe, to Nevali Çori, to the orthostats of Nabta Playa and Stonehenge, to the megalithic stone temples of Malta, to the barrows and cairns of prehistoric Europe.
  • Rather than a separate “professional” bureaucracy, or the speculative existence of social “classes,” such relationships may have emerged out of existing social structures.
  • Cities were centers of long-distance trade between cultures, but internally were run by debt/credit relationships and/or centralized redistribution networks, and not by “free and open markets” or money exchanges.
  • Cities were often autonomous and “cut off” from the surrounding countryside, both politically and economically.

Foundry

The team at MIT hopes that Foundry will become 3D printing’s analog to graphic design’s Photoshop. To aid rapid prototyping, the platform enables the designer to assign distinct material properties to each part in a composite print. For example, it could produce a dental appliance containing a rigid, tooth-like material connected to a softer and more malleable material to merge with the gums.