Category: Uncategorized

Bank Accounts for Everyone

The central bank would undoubtedly capture dominant market share of utility or ‘narrow banking’, but only because the public sector is the least cost provider of the service. Without any subsidies, implicit or otherwise, the central bank is the cheapest, safest provider of these services in the market. Not only would the resulting banking system have much lower costs and greater efficiency, not only would it throw off 10s of billions of $ in revenue to government, it would be a safer, more rational system playing much better to the respective strengths of public and private sectors.

Electoral College Sabotage

The timing of the CIA’s leak wasn’t random. It was an opening salvo by the CIA to actively influence the Electoral College and stop Donald Trump from becoming President. The CIA is trying to topple Trump. Why? Self preservation. The real reason is that Trump was working with Peter Thiel to corporatize the intelligence gathering of the United States around companies, like Palantir, that can adopt and employ technology much faster and with more efficacy. Trump is planning to turn the CIA and the NSA into peripheral collection systems.

a good night story for you

Land Lines

so fun

Start with a line, let the planet complete the picture. Land Lines lets you explore Google Earth satellite images through gesture. Machine learning and line detection algorithms were used to preprocess all images and identify the dominant lines. This enabled the analysis of brushstrokes and retrieval of the matching image efficiently without the need for a server.The project was made in collaboration by Zach Lieberman and the Data Arts Team.

Dressing for cold

The system is best used in varying combinations and is not meant to be layered sequentially, meaning one garment on top of another, on top of another, until you’re wearing all 7 levels. The conditions of your operating environment and the requirements of your mission will determine not only what you wear, but also what you stow in your pack for later use. The wind shirt (Level 4), in particular, is a very versatile garment meant to be sandwiched between your various layers. It allows for a more stable internal temperature to be managed, as well as reducing friction between insulation layers.

Shores of Titan

As humanity expands outward, the frontier is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and the only moon in the solar system to have a substantial atmosphere. Titan around 2260 is much like present-day Antarctica: home to a variety of research stations operated by scientific agencies of various powers in the inner system. Titan is much more interesting than Antarctica, however. Apart from the Earth, it is the only solar system body to have natural liquids on its surface, with a complex cycle of evaporation, rain, erosion, rivers, lakes, and seas. The largest sea, Kraken Mare, located near the north pole, is larger than Earth’s Caspian Sea. Titan’s atmosphere is half again as dense as that of Earth, and with only 14% of Earth’s gravity, it is possible for people to fly under their own muscle power.

Yeast Acid Tolerance

I took gravity readings along the way to judge how rapidly the yeast were attenuating. As you can see, for the most part, regardless of the strain the lower the pH the slower fermentation progressed. The final gravities were also affected by the high acidity. Dosing with lactic acid isn’t a preferred method for making sour beer (as you can see from the tasting notes), but clearly some strains performed better than others.