The human future might be one of explosion, perhaps an economic upwelling that eclipses the industrial revolution as thoroughly as it eclipsed the agricultural revolution. The world economy has grown more slowly and steadily in the last 50 years than the univariate model predicts. But it is hard to know whether any slowdown is permanent or merely a century-scale pause.
Month: July 2020
DARPA
PMs pull control away from directors by having only 1 official checkpoint before launching programs and pull control away from performers through their ability to move money around quickly. PMs design programs to be high-risk aggregations of lower-risk projects. Only 5–10 out of every 100 programs successfully produce transformative research, while only 10% of projects are terminated early. Shifting the risk from the performers to the program managers enables DARPA to tackle systemic problems where other models cannot.
Hummingbird vision
The tests showed that the birds could see every nonspectral color that the researchers threw at them. Color pairs that were closer together in hue resulted in more mistaken visits but still beat the 50/50 odds of the control experiments. Even if the neural mechanisms for color vision were clear, and even if color-mixing experiments attest to avian tetrachromacy, we still could not answer the more philosophical question of what nonspectral colors really look like to birds. Does UV+green appear to birds as a mix of those colors (analogous to a double-stop chord played by a violinist) or as a sublime new color (analogous to a completely new tone unlike its components)? We cannot say.
A Decade of Sun
For the past 10 years, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been capturing an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. To celebrate, NASA created this 61-minute time lapse video of all 10 years, with each second representing 1 day in the Sun’s life.
Hobby Lobby Gospel
wherein the bible thumpers at hobby lobby get scammed.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 