Month: July 2018

Rural E-Commerce

Shang was from a family of peanut farmers in rural Henan, and found village life slow and constricting. Men married at 18 and became fathers at 20. “You can see the end of your life at its beginning”. As soon as he finished high school, he left to join the Army. One of his teachers had given him a valuable piece of advice: “The future belongs to those who know English, computers, and their way around a vehicle.” Shang knew that his English was hopeless and his computer skills average at best. That left driving, without which his new career would have been out of reach. On the sidewalk, Shang’s phone rang. Someone who had been planning to pay in cash had suddenly realized that he didn’t have enough on hand. Shang arranged to make the delivery another time. This wasn’t unusual with younger customers, adding that almost everyone he delivered to was under 40.

Supersonic Jets

Boom Supersonic believes there is a potential global market for 2000 supersonic jets. Boom Supersonic plans to make 1-way supersonic air travel from London to New York cost about $2600. They have developed prototypes of a 55-seater jet that will have a cruising speed of 2335 km/h, faster than the Concorde. They hope to begin passenger flights by 2025. Traveling at 50% of the time will really require a separate system for aircraft boarding and clearing of customs. The pre-clearance systems for getting quickly through security checks will be more common and even separate airports, terminals and gates for supersonic and other high-end travel.

General Evolvable Brains

Those who are trying to improve such systems have long wondered: what is the secret of human general intelligence? In this post I want to consider we can learn about this from fact that the brain evolved. How would an evolved brain be general? if we are looking to explain a surprising generality, flexibility, and rapid evolution in human brains, it makes sense to consider the possibility that human brain design took a different path, one more like that of single-celled metabolism. That is, 1 straightforward way to design a general evolvable brain is to use an extra large toolbox of mental modules that can be connected together in many different ways. While each tool might be a carefully constructed jewel, the whole set of tools would have less of an overall structure. Like a pile of logical gates that can be connected many ways, or metabolism sub-networks that can be connected together into many networks. In this case, the secret to general evolvable intelligence would be less in the particular tools and more in having an extra large set of tools, plus some simple general ways to search in the space of tool combinations. A tool set so large that the brain can do most tasks in a great many different ways.

2023-03-25: Intelligence is modular and extremely prevalent, for generous definitions of intelligence

One implication of this hierarchy of homeostatically stable, nested modules is that organisms became much more flexible while still maintaining a coherent ‘self’ in a hostile world. Evolution didn’t have to tweak everything at once in response to a new threat, because biological subunits were primed to find novel ways of compensating for changes and functioning within altered systems. For example, in planarian flatworms, which reliably regenerate every part of the body, using drugs to shift the bioelectrically stored pattern memory results in two-headed worms. Remarkably, fragments of these worms continue to regenerate two heads in perpetuity, without editing the genome. Moreover, flatworms can be induced, by brief modulation of the bioelectric circuit, to regrow heads with shape (and brain structure) appropriate to other known species of flatworms (at about 100 million years of evolutionary distance), despite their wild-type genome.

17th century food

Most people in the early modern world—not just in Europe, but everywhere—were illiterate farmers and pastoralists whose diet was hyper-minimalist by contemporary standards. This is not to say that their food tasted bad, necessarily. But it was clearly very simple, and very starch-heavy. From China to Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, gruels and stews made out of staple grains or legumes were the daily fare. Italian farmers weren’t eating eggplant parmesan or spaghetti with meatballs. They were typically eating either boiled beans or grains, day after day after day. The acute eyes of Bruegel the Elder captured one example of this universal food of the premodern peasantry. In Bruegel’s The Harvesters, a team of peasants is taking a break for a mid-day meal which seems to consist entirely of bread and bowls of what I am guessing is a wheat-based gruel, something akin to Cream of Wheat. The jugs they’re drinking out of probably contain small beer.

Tesla Production Hell

This April, Musk took over manufacturing engineering personally. “I’m back to sleeping at factory. Car biz is hell.” Field, who’d been in charge of the factory, took a leave of absence the following month; he later left the company. In mid-June, Tesla announced it was laying off 9% of its workforce, more than 3000 people. Musk turned 47 in late June, during the final sprint to make 5000 cars a week. “First bday I’ve spent in the factory, but it’s somehow the best.” On the Friday before the deadline, Musk seemed giddy with excitement about what he expected would be a spike in Tesla’s stock price. He tweeted a music video of the 1958 single Short Shorts, by the Royal Teens. On Sunday he announced that Tesla had hit the milestone and proclaimed his love for his employees. Tesla’s stock price gained 5% on Monday morning.

Punking Dick Cheney

Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind Ali G and Borat, is back with a new show which premieres this weekend. In the promo for the satirical half-hour series, called Who is America?, the British comedian can be heard asking, “Dick Cheney, is it possible to sign my waterboard kit?” The former Vice President answers, “Sure!” and is then shown autographing an empty plastic water jug. It then cuts to him, “That’s the first time I’ve ever signed a waterboard.” Troll level: expert.

Freeing FB Friends

There are no easy answers to this privacy-versus-portability conundrum. However, there are a few critical takeaways in terms of things that Facebook can and should do now to promote portability—and which are in its own interest to do, as it may face unwanted regulatory action if it doesn’t. Help Set Clear Technical Standards. Solve the Graph Portability Problem. Allow Competitive Apps to Use the Facebook Platform.

Camping near NYC

All of these campgrounds are no farther than 3 hours from NYC, because you know that really means 4-5 hours.

Turbo Rocket

The Turbo rocket is the only rocket with the delta-V to get back to earth from the moon.

A SpaceX BFR needs 5 refueling missions to go to the moon and back. SpaceX BFR would be $12k per kg to the moon and back. This is ~16x more expensive than the turbo rocket. The Turbo Rocket architecture represents a new paradigm for access to space economics.

Large payload fractions of 35-50%, Low Construction Cost and Full Reuse
Cost to LEO: less than $85/kg w/10 flights
Cost to Luna: less than $715/kg w/10 flights
Staged Combustion: Lowest Cost to LEO
Nuclear Thermal: Lowest Cost for Near Earth Return and Larger Payloads to Everywhere

Melatonin

Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.

the correct dose is 0.3 mg:

Most drugstore melatonin supplements are 10x or more the recommended dose. the FDA chose to label it a dietary supplement, which does not require FDA regulation. Clearly, this was wrong because melatonin is a hormone, not a dietary supplement. Quickly, supplement manufacturers saw the huge potential in selling melatonin to promote good sleep. After all, millions of Americans struggled to get to sleep and stay asleep, and were desperate for safe alternatives to anti-anxiety medicines and sleeping pills that rarely worked well and came with plenty of side effects. Also, manufacturers must have realized that they could avoid paying royalties to MIT for melatonin doses over the 1 mg measure. So, they produced doses of 3 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg and more! Their thinking–like so much else in our American society–was likely, “bigger is better!” But, they couldn’t be more wrong.