in short, the NHTSA tries to play FDA and is chasing philosophical nonsense like the “trolley problem”
NHTSA (DOT) releases 116 pages of regulations for robocars, and it’s not good.
Category: Uncategorized
George Church update
Church predicts that de Novo sequencing and inSitu sequencing will be in use within 1-2 years. This will be full reads of millions of base pair sequences. It took 15 days to knock out all of the retroviruses to make humanized pigs.
Toddler Skaters
yep, now 3 year olds are better at skating than you are.
Human Pigments
see also, human skin used for book bindings.
Eugene Delacroix’s most famous painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” hangs in a revered spot in Paris’ Louvre Museum. Inspired by the 1830 Paris Uprising, it has been held up as an embodiment of the French national ethos, and most recently as a justification for the country’s controversial burkini ban.
But “Liberty Leading the People” may also have been literally painted with people.
From at least the 16th century until as late as the early 1900s, a pigment made from mummified human remains appeared on the palettes of European artists, including Delacroix. Painters prized “mummy brown” for its rich, transparent shade. As a result, an unknown number of ancient Egyptians are spending their afterlife on art canvases, unwittingly admired in museum galleries around the world.
Knome
we’re now in the age where kickstarters for $1k genome reads are a thing.
Draken Harald Hårfagre
for the first time in 1000 years, a viking ship has crossed the atlantic, (and then made it’s way down to nyc):
Fermi Explainer
nice fermi’s paradox blurb
A New Terror-Alert System
Just before 8 on Monday morning, New Yorkers got a message on their mobile phones: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The news came through the same emergency-alert system, with its disorienting buzz, that government agencies use to send news of a flood, and so it suggested some uncanny Pynchonian transference, in which terrorism had become as mundane and as universally affecting as the atmosphere. By 11:30, the alert had made a “significant contribution,” as Mayor Bill de Blasio put it at a lunchtime news conference, to the capture of Rahami, who was found sleeping in the doorway of a bar in his home town of Linden, New Jersey. The alert had an “extraordinary effect.” His new police commissioner, James O’Neill, called it the “future.”
in reality, the message was incredibly dumb & vague, due to unreasonable implementation of this system. plain text, no photos. we can do way better.
Internet Justice League
the software is designed to use machine learning to automatically spot the language of abuse and harassment
if you applied this to twitter, you’d be left with 1% of the current “volume”
Thieves disable bomb
The day Ahmad Khan Rahami planted 2 bombs in Chelsea, 2 thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street
Gregor J. Rothfuss 