Month: January 2020

Routine meals

Variety doesn’t really matter to me. I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day. 1 survey estimated that 17% of British people had eaten the same lunch every day for 2 years; another indicated that 33% of Brits ate the same lunch daily. But it’s hard to say for sure how common this really is, since these surveys tend to have been conducted by food purveyors, who might be inclined to exaggerate the ruts that diners are stuck in.

Salvator Mundi decoded

The world’s costliest painting depicts a glass sphere with curious optical properties. Computer scientists figured out what the artist was getting at.

After comparing their renderings with the original, they have concluded that the orb is not solid at all. Instead, they show that the painting is a realistic physical representation of a hollow sphere with a radius of 6.8 centimeters but a thickness of just 1.3 millimeters.

Doctor delusions

Your patients’ last doctor was worse than you. Your patients love you Patients often come to you, but never leave you You’ve probably successfully treated most of your patients You know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know Your victories belong to you, your failures belong to Nature You do a good job satisfying your own values

Compact trash

A simple idea to reduce the tremendous volume that trash takes up. I always crush my cans and am surprised others are not.

Go to any coffee shop in America, and as you look down the silver-lined waste tube thingy, you’ll see paper and plastic cups in an ungainly pile, taking up way more space than they ought. However, this café in Korea has a better idea

AI applied to Education

The future of online education is adaptive assessment, not for testing, but for learning. Incorrect answers are not random but betray specific assumptions and patterns of thought. Analysis of answers, therefore, can be used to guide students to exactly that lecture that needs to be reviewed and understood to achieve mastery of the material. Computer-adaptive testing will thus become computer-adaptive learning.

Ebike delivery

Around the world, we have seen how freight companies use cargo bikes to move goods around dense urban neighborhoods more efficiently. NYC’s Department of Transportation is taking a step toward alleviating at least 1 of those causes of congestion: It’s implementing a pilot program to allow electric, pedal-assisted cargo bikes to make deliveries throughout Manhattan’s central business district. The goals of the pilot: reduce congestion, and improve safety on city streets.

A designey solution to this could be the Armadillo:

Bike purists may scoff that the Armadillo looks like it was designed by an engineer. (Germany’s Berliner Morgenpost calls it “a mix of go-kart, bicycle and van.”) But these are highly functional vehicles that a lot of thought went into: – Though they can carry 300kg, they’re only 86cm wide, meaning they can easily fit on bike paths “without causing problems for other cyclists.”