David Perell writes about the difficulty of finding serendipity, diversity, and “real” experiences while traveling. Google and the like have made travel destinations and experiences increasingly predictable and homogeneous.
Call me old-fashioned, but the more I travel, the less I depend on algorithms. In a world obsessed with efficiency, I find myself adding friction to my travel experience. I’ve shifted away from digital recommendations, and towards human ones. For all the buzz about landmarks and sightseeing, I find that immersive, local experiences reveal the surprising, culturally-specific ways of living and thinking that make travel educational. We over-rate the importance of visiting the best-places and under-rate the importance of connecting with the best people. If you want to learn about a culture, nothing beats personalized time with a passionate local who can share the magic of their culture with you. There’s one problem with this strategy: this kind of travel doesn’t scale. It’s in efficiency and doesn’t conform to the 80/20 rule. It’s unpredictable and things could go wrong. Travel — when done right — is challenging. Like all face-to-face interaction, it’s inefficient. The fact that an experience can’t be found in a guidebook is precisely what makes it so special. Sure, a little tip helps — go here, go there; eat here, eat there; stay here, stay there — but at the end of the day, the great pleasures of travel are precisely what you can’t find on Google. Algorithms are great at giving you something you like, but terrible at giving you something you love. Worse, by promoting familiarity, algorithms punish culture.
Some of the most eye-catching and spontaneously interesting fashion models popular today have a secret: they may not be human at all. Advances in computer illustration and photography have made virtual high fashion models a super trend. Can you tell them apart from people? Avant-garde stylists are exploring this creative intersection of life + art. These digital personas are rising in the fashion world’s spotlight. This is Miquela: she’s a 19 year old model and singer. But she’s not real. She’s computer generated, created by mysterious start-up called Brud co. Their team of story-tellers dictate her every move. She has 1.2M followers and she collaborates with major artists, brands — and is popping up everywhere. She’s released her own songs with auto-tune and lyrics videos.
When we were in Tokyo earlier this month I went to teamLab’s Borderless interactive exhibition at the Mori Building digital Art Museum in Tokyo. To say we were blown away is almost an understatement. The 10k square meter space has ~12 very large experiential spaces, each of which would have been worth the price of admission. The different spaces combined light, sound, and 3D design to create pocket universes that either stunned people into blissed out silence or made them run around gleefully. I wasn’t expecting it to be as magical as it was.
When law enforcement won’t help, citizens always have another option: hit the bad guys in the wallet. But it’s not that easy. The forensic work of identifying anonymous online perpetrators is expensive, and many attorneys won’t take the cases because the individual trolls usually don’t have much money to cough up even if you can find them. It’s a powerful defense, invoking the First Amendment in a defamation case—and in this particular one, Gilmore’s opponents may hold additional firepower. Because he spoke to the media about the car attack, they say, the court should treat him not as a private citizen but as a “limited-purpose public figure.” That’s an important distinction because public figures face a much higher standard of proof. They must show not just that the statements about them were false and harmful but that the statements were made with “actual malice”—with full knowledge that they were false or with a reckless disregard for the truth. What would a ruling against Gilmore on this point mean? His lawyer worries that it would create a devastating precedent. “Every witness to a crime or a terrorist attack or anything else is a de facto public figure simply because they saw something horrible”. Just think about Gilmore’s fraught decision to tweet his video. “The consequences would be potentially dire because it would make people certainly think twice before sharing what they saw.”
It exploits the fact that wireless signals travel faster than sound. The receiver could pick up the construction noise and beam the anti-noise signal to the MUTE earpiece before the sound has enough time to hit his eardrum
The author surveys the resources available on the Moon, Mars, near-Earth and main belt asteroids, and, looking farther into the future, the outer solar system where, once humans have mastered controlled nuclear fusion, sufficient Helium-3 is available for the taking to power a solar system wide human civilization of trillions of people for billions of years and, eventually, the interstellar ships they will use to expand out into the galaxy. Detailed plans are presented for near-term human missions to the Moon and Mars, both achievable within the decade of the 2020s, which will begin the process of surveying the resources available there and building the infrastructure for permanent settlement. These mission plans, unlike those of NASA, do not rely on paper rockets which have yet to fly, costly expendable boosters, or detours to “gateways” and other diversions which seem a prime example of (to paraphrase the author in chapter 14), “doing things in order to spend money as opposed to spending money in order to do things.”
When I share enthusiasm for some new space exploration or colonization initiative, I occasionally hear the retort that we should focus on saving Earth first, often with climate change in mind as the imminent existential threat. A recent articulate example from Facebook: “It seems to me that we are in such a significant emergency (really interrelated emergencies) that we need to focus all of our ingenuity and resources on transforming our energy systems, infrastructure, agriculture, transportation, political systems, etc. right here on this planet. I am afraid that we will end up exporting our exploitative culture to space and not make the changes here that we need to restore the life support systems of our planet.” And my reply: When I have heard these concerns in the past, I have dashed off a retort about the false dichotomy, but the concerns persist, so let me try to be a bit more thoughtful, and please let me know if you find any of this to be persuasive: 1) Positive inspiration: living in space is the ultimate recycling and sustainability challenge. A fair number of people like to dream of something grand as they simultaneously solve the problems of today. You mention transforming energy, ag and transportation. Think of the advances that some of the “space people” have made in this area. Tesla came after SpaceX. Some of my most recent investments have been in fusion power and animal-free meat manufacturing. They are both HUGE priorities to save the Earth (we have to stem the growth of hundreds of new coal power plants in China and meat manufacturing globally, both major sources of GHG). But they are also essential for off-world colonies — energy and food production challenges are more acute when imagining a lunar or Mars base. For a breakthrough solution, you often have to imagine a challenge greater than the creeping incrementalism of “problem fixing.” 2) Direct synergy: where would the environmental movement and the climate change science be without space? From the whole-Earth image of our pale blue dot to the Earth observation satellites, one could argue that space initiatives have been the greatest advance for the environmental movement (Sierra Club). The founders of Open Lunar are the founders of Planet; like me, they still have their day jobs where they image the entire Earth every day from space. Other space entrepreneurs are putting up GPS-RO satellites to measure upper atmosphere weather (essential to climate models and weather prediction) and this data cannot be gathered from the ground. These satellite constellations are now cost-effective because of the lowering launch costs from SpaceX and some of their competitors. 3) Differential advantage: not everyone on the planet should be focused on the same thing. You provide a partial list of priorities, but should a domain expert on poverty or the diseases of the poor shift entirely to something on your list of emergencies? Do you want to argue that climate change trumps other priorities, and even if it does, do you have a rank list of what to prioritize within that domain? This climate-change prioritization list surprised me as to the space-synergies. 4) Experimentation zones: this is a new opportunity. If we want to perform experiments in geoengineering, Mars and Venus might be better places to start as we hone our skills and verify our simulations. And if we can make one habitable, and humanity becomes multi-planetary, it would be one of the greatest accomplishments for our civilization. These experimentation zones could include the “political systems” you mention and go beyond the “charter cites” that Paul Romer espouses to “charter civilizations” with experiments in better governance among the off-world colonies. In short, exploring the final frontier and saving the Earth are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are deeply synergistic, inspirational and focused on the ultimate sustainability challenge. And the entrepreneurial drive to forge a future that inspires future generations with the potential of progress is a worthy endeavor in its own right.
Scientists studying wasps that target oak leaves found that a second parasite, a vine, can get its tendrils into the homes set up by the wasps, called galls, subverting their diversion of the host’s resources. After that, things don’t go so well for the wasp. When the researchers dissected 51 love-vine-infested galls from 1 wasp species, they found that 45% contained a mummified adult wasp, compared with only 2% of uninfested galls. That suggests that the love vine interferes with the wasp’s nutrition such that it develops fully but is not able to leave. And the host tissue within dissected galls was twisted toward the vine’s entry points, hinting that it was co-opting the gall’s nutrients.
Strikes with microwaves more plausibly explain reports of painful sounds, ills and traumas than do other possible culprits — sonic attacks, viral infections and contagious anxiety. In particular, a growing number of analysts cite an eerie phenomenon known as the Frey effect, named after Allan H. Frey, an American scientist. Long ago, he found that microwaves can trick the brain into perceiving what seem to be ordinary sounds. The false sensations may account for a defining symptom of the diplomatic incidents — the perception of loud noises, including ringing, buzzing and grinding. Initially, experts cited those symptoms as evidence of stealthy attacks with sonic weapons.
Combining these technologies, we were able to read and write data in our laboratory system at a linear density of 818K bits per inch. (For historical reasons, tape engineers around the world measure data density in inches.) In combination with the 246200 tracks per inch that the new technology can handle, our prototype unit achieved an areal density of 201 gigabits per square inch. Assuming that one cartridge can hold 1140 meters of tape—a reasonable assumption, based on the reduced thickness of the new tape media we used—this areal density corresponds to a cartridge capacity of a whopping 330 TB. That means that a single tape cartridge could record as much data as a wheelbarrow full of hard drives.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 