Month: July 2021

The Ideal University

The people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be their instructors. Students would have to acquire a genuine general knowledge base, not just memorize what is supposed to be on the exam. It would not have assistant deans, student affairs staff or sports teams. The focus would be on paying more money to the better instructors. Instructors would not have tenure, but would have to compete for students — by offering them classes and services that would help them graduate and improve the quality of their certification pages. The school would hire online instructors too, many of them from poorer countries and working at lower wages. None of the instructors would be required to have any undergraduate or advanced degrees.

2021-11-09: Tyler is involved in a new university:

To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations. The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.

Space Timesharing

“We are completely inverting the legacy economics of space, shifting from CAPEX — a huge investment in a platform — to OPEX — a lease of a module or a usage fee — which will open the field to a whole new set of customers and uses”. We are building a distributed architecture of space sensors. This incredibly flexible system allows us to accommodate any type of client both before and during the course of the mission as we can reconfigure our payloads and use residual capabilities at will. In some cases, we will become clients of our own customers. We will have the infrastructure, we can flash software as needed for any kind of mission” For Timesharing, the client pays on a usage basis, usually a combination of onboard resources (electrical power, processing power, time, data transfer) and available pre-existing payloads.

Freespin

Freespin is a Commodore 1541 demo, released in 2021. It runs on the Commodore floppy drive. It is is the first demo on this device. Freespin generates sound/music using the floppy drive mechanic (in particular, the stepper motor responsible for moving the head to the right track). Video is generated through the serial bus.

Bass Reeves

So goes one of the many tales of Bass Reeves, whose exploits were so legendary they often sound like myth. But the historical record corroborates many of the most stunning details. Some criminals were so afraid of Reeves they turned themselves in as soon as they heard he was after them. He stalked others in their nightmares. Once, Reeves even arrested his own son for murder. “We quite commonly refer to Bass as the most prolific law enforcement officer the nation has ever seen. He was an enslaved person and ends up becoming one of the most well-known lawmen of the age as a Black man in the South. Bass Reeves is the greatest frontier hero in American history—bar none. I don’t know who you could compare him to. This guy walked in the Valley of Death every day for 32 years and came out alive.”

The Human Family Tree

Our planet was very different 100 ka ago, and if we could survey that time, we would be astounded by the human diversity across its surface. To enumerate what little we know with certainty, there were at a minimum: modern humans, Neanderthals, at least 3-4 varieties of Denisovans, and 2 pygmy Homo populations in Southeast Asia. Likely there were still remnant Homo erectus in Southeast Asia as well, and other diverged lineages within Africa, and a new Homo in Nesher Ramla, Israel, in the Middle East with affinities to Neanderthals.


2023-02-04: More evidence of a much more distributed situation

“Cognitive revolutions”—such as the widespread shift some 300 ka BP from clunky, handheld stone tools to more refined blades and projectile points—were probably instances of different populations with distinctive cultural and biological features coming together and recombining their genes and ideas.

This mosaic evolution would explain certain seemingly unexplainable findings. For example, researchers found human fossils in the Democratic Republic of Congo that dated to 22 ka BP but physically resembled people living 300 ka BP. In Senegal, scientists uncovered 12 ka BP stone toolkits that could easily be transplanted to a situation 100 ka BP.

These finds probably resulted from periods of isolation where different populations in different parts of the continent each developed distinctive cultural and physical adaptations to their local environments. At the same time, instances of connectivity allowed different populations to acquire beneficial traits, behaviors, and technologies from one another, becoming better adapted and more flexible.

In-shoe navigation

Ashirase aims to develop an in-shoe navigation system to help support the visually impaired with walking and routines. The company hopes to have a viable product to market before the end of March 2023. The device fits around each foot, and includes a motion sensor attached to the outside of the shoe. Pairing with a smart phone app, the device will vibrate based on routes set in the app. The left side of the left foot will vibrate to indicate a left turn (and the opposite for a right turn), while the toes of each foot will vibrate to maintain a forward trajectory.