Month: July 2018

No Passport Required Queens

In “Queens, NYC” host Marcus Samuelsson heads to the New York borough to learn more about the Indo-Guyanese community’s culture, history, and food. In Queens’s Richmond Hill neighborhood, Samuelsson visits roti shops and bakeries like Singh’s Roti Shop to make and eat classic Guyanese treats like pine tarts, pepperpot, doubles, and plait bread. He visits the temple canteen inside a neighborhood mandir, makes Caribbean-style roti at home with a Guyanese family, and plays in a cricket match, followed by a meal of bake and saltfish, coconut pastries called salara, and more.

Stoner Arms Dealers

the incredible true story behind the movie War Dogs.

The e-mail confirmed it: everything was finally back on schedule after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delay. A 747 cargo plane had just lifted off from an airport in Hungary and was banking over the Black Sea toward Kyrgyzstan. After stopping to refuel there, the flight would carry on to Kabul. Aboard the plane were 80 pallets loaded with 5M rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, the Soviet-era assault rifle favored by the Afghan National Army. Reading the e-mail back in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. The shipment was part of a $30M contract that Packouz and his partner, Efraim Diveroli, had won from the Pentagon to arm America’s allies in Afghanistan. It was May 2007, and the war was going badly. After 6 years of fighting, Al Qaeda remained a menace, the Taliban were resurgent, and NATO casualties were rising sharply. For the Bush administration, the ammunition was part of a desperate, last-ditch push to turn the war around before the US presidential election the following year. To Packouz and Diveroli, the shipment was part of a major arms deal that promised to make them seriously rich.

Tracking Clothes

a new line of clothes and accessories that all come bugged with “smart chip technology,” which tracks how often you wear them and where you go with them on.

42 ka earthworm revival

1 worm came from an ancient squirrel burrow in a permafrost wall of the Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River – close to the site of Pleistocene Park which is seeking to recreate the Arctic habitat of the extinct woolly mammoth. This is around 32 ka old. Another was found in permafrost near Alazeya River in 2015, and is around 42 ka old.

60% efficient solar

Current solar cells are able to convert into electricity around 20% of the energy received from the Sun, but a new technique has the potential to convert around 60% of it by funneling the energy more efficiently. UK researchers can now ‘funnel’ electrical charge onto a chip. Using the atomically thin semiconductor hafnium disulphide (HfS2), which is oxidized with a high-intensity UV laser, the team were able to engineer an electric field that funnels electrical charges to a specific area of the chip, where they can be more easily extracted.

Easter Island Language

The earth ships appear to have been an attempt by the Easter Islanders to duplicate foreign technology in the form of magic. Something similar may have happened with rongorongo. The Rapanui seem to have intuited the concept of writing, and the power of literacy that came with it, and then set about creating a system of their own. When they did so, they began entirely afresh, building it from first principles and local materials. As a consequence, it resembles no other writing system on Earth. The signs they chose come largely from items familiar to the island. Some come from animal life: fish, squid, sea turtles, crayfish, frigate birds, caterpillars. A few seem to represent plants or human figures, sitting and eating. Others are simple geometric forms: a circle, a cross, stacks of lozenges.

The glyphs of rongorongo are unique. So is the manner in which it was written and read. In fact, it was not written, but carved. Its scribes used shark’s teeth to inscribe its symbols on wooden tablets. Wood is scarce on Easter Island, and most of these inscriptions were made on pieces of driftwood. One decorated an oar. A second, a beam. A third, a statue of a bird. However, most of the surviving examples of rongorongo decorate square tablets. These appear to have been written from bottom to top, and were read following a pattern called the reverse boustrophedon. Boustrophedon is a Greek word meaning “in the manner of an ox,” and scripts written in it move like an ox plowing a field, reversing direction with each line.

For Epistocracy

Illing: Let’s return to the “competence principle.” Why does the right to competent government trump other fundamental rights, like the right to participate in the democratic process? Brennan: I think the real question is why should we assume there’s a right to participate in democratic process? It’s actually quite weird and different from a lot of other rights we seem to have. We have the right to choose our partner, to choose our religion, to choose what we’re going to eat, where we live, what job we’ll do, etc. While some of these things do impose costs on others, they’re primarily about carving out a sphere of autonomy for the individual, and about preventing other people from having control over you. A right to participate in politics seems fundamentally different because it involves imposing your will upon other people. So I’m not sure that any of us should have that kind of right, at least not without any responsibilities. So how do we create an epistocracy? Brennan: Here’s what I propose we do: Everyone can vote, even children. No one gets excluded. But when you vote, you do 3 things. First, you tell us what you want. You cast your vote for a politician, or for a party, or you take a position on a referendum, whatever it might be. Second, you tell us who you are. We get your demographic information, which is anonymously coded, because that stuff affects how you vote and what you support. And the third thing you do is take a quiz of very basic political knowledge. When we have those 3 bits of information, we can then statistically estimate what the public would have wanted if it was fully informed. Under this system, it’s not really the case that you have more power than I do. We can’t really point to any individual and say you were excluded, or your vote counted for more. The idea is to gauge what the public would actually want if it had all the information it needed.

Bad Romance

One awkward thing about the supposed book stuffing “scam” is that it walks so closely to accepted industry practices. These compilations deceive readers by baiting them with promises of fresh content, like a new novella, at the end of a book which is otherwise all repackaged, previously published material. But mainstream authors do sometimes include bonus short stories or previews of upcoming titles in the back of a book — granted the book itself is usually original. The incentives that Kindle Unlimited generates to put out longer and longer books aren’t completely new, either — Charles Dickens’ verbose, meandering prose may reflect the fact that he was paid per installment. The 30-day Amazon Kindle cliff may necessitate ghostwriting, repetitive plots, and copycat writing, but none of these things are new in genre writing. Publishing and marketing have long gone hand in hand. Gaming the best-seller charts happens outside of ebooks — arguably, the major publishing houses live and die by their ability to game the best-seller lists.

Value Heuristics

We need to navigate complicated philosophical questions in order to decide how to act, what to do, what behaviors to incentivize, what behaviors to punish, what signals to send, and even how to have a society at all. Sometimes we can use theories from science and mathematics to explicitly model how a system works and what we want from it. But even the scholars who understand these insights rarely know exactly how to objectively apply them in the real world. Yet anyone who lives with others needs to be able to do these things; not just scholars but ordinary people, children, and even chimpanzees. So sometimes we use heuristics and approximations. Evolution has given us some of them as instincts. Children learn others as practically-innate hyperpriors before they’re old enough to think about what they’re doing. And cultural evolution creates others alongside the institutions that encourage and enforce them. In the simplest case, we just feel some kind of emotional attraction or aversion to something. In other cases, the emotions are so compelling that we crystallize them into a sort of metaphysical essence that explains them. And in the most complicated cases, we endorse the values implied by those metaphysical essences above and beyond whatever values we were trying to model in the first place.