Sapere Aude
Category: Uncategorized
coming from the same circle of hell as vintage filters:
For the love of Julia Child, please, please stop describing your food preferences as an allergy. That is a very specific medical term, and invoking it triggers an elaborate, time-consuming protocol in any self-respecting kitchen. It shouldn’t be tossed around as liberally as the sea salt on the house-made (gluten-free) breadsticks.
welcome to the first aerial and aquatic insect scale robot
The RoboBee is a miniature robot that has long been able to fly. Using a modified flapping technique, researchers demonstrate that the RoboBee can also swim. This is the first-ever aerial and aquatic capable insect-scale robot.
acoustic holograms to pick up and move small objects.
that’s some grade A social engineering:
Internet con artists, known as Yahoo Boys in Nigeria, often masquerade as American military officers who are deployed in war zones, a ruse that gives them plenty of unassailable excuses should a victim wish to meet face-to-face. The scammers are also fond of posing as oil workers who spend weeks at a time on deep-sea rigs, another macho cover story that allows them to fade in and out of victims’ lives at will.
take any physical process at all, and you should be able to simulate it using a universal computer. It’s an amazing, Inception-like idea, that one machine can effectively contain within itself everything conceivable within the laws of physics. Want to simulate a supernova? Or the formation of a black hole? Or even the Big Bang? Deutsch’s principle tells you that the universal computer can simulate all of these. In a sense, if you had a complete understanding of the machine, you’d understand all physical processes. Deutsch’s principle goes well beyond Turing’s earlier informal arguments. If the principle is true, then it automatically follows that the universal computer can simulate any algorithmic process, since algorithmic processes are ultimately physical processes. You can use the universal computer to simulate addition on an abacus, run a flight simulator on a silicon chip, or do anything else you choose.
2022-06-23: And now the reverse, trying to get the universe to do our computations.
McMahon and a band of like-minded physicists champion an unorthodox approach: Get the universe to crunch the numbers for us. “Many physical systems can naturally do some computation way more efficiently or faster than a computer can”. He cites wind tunnels: When engineers design a plane, they might digitize the blueprints and spend hours on a supercomputer simulating how air flows around the wings. Or they can stick the vehicle in a wind tunnel and see if it flies. From a computational perspective, the wind tunnel instantly “calculates” how wings interact with air. The physicists building these systems suspect that digital neural networks — as mighty as they seem today — will eventually appear slow and inadequate next to their analog cousins. Digital neural networks can only scale up so much before getting bogged down by excessive computation, but bigger physical networks need not do anything but be themselves.
the martian was amazing, go see it. such a delight that such upbeat, yet accurate movies about the future continue to be made.
Read a fascinating and well-written popular article on NASA’s newly released “Roadmap to Mars.” It is so good to see progress in the bureaucracy adapting to ideas some of use were bruiting decades ago — like in-situ production – on Mars – of the water and fuel and oxygen astronauts will need, instead of expensively hauling them all from Earth. (Note this concept was largely absent from The Martian.) It also includes testing our methods with asteroid retrieval projects that could wind up benefiting humanity and Earth more than the Mars missions would! Certainly it is good to see the plan almost completely leave out our sterile/useless (for now) moon. Been there. There’s nothing (for now) there.
Paternity tests revealed that the sperm came from the dead twin brother who had been absorbed before birth.
The real left behind, not some silly fairy tale for goat herders.
In south-west China a family of 4 siblings aged between 5 and 13 killed themselves by drinking pesticide. They had been living alone after their mother had disappeared and their father had migrated for work
“In the supremely unstable universe of Moebius, characters exist and abruptly change in accordance with their creator’s fluctuating whims, an aspect of his art that became a central premise, to great comic effect. (It is awkward when one’s body suddenly shifts its form, improbably and ridiculously, a point that became the hilarious core of the early story “Shore Leave on Pharagonesia” and remained a reliably satisfying spice throughout the later works.) And Moebius, who liked to abandon himself to the flow of improvisation, produced a steady rhythm of surprises in other ways. Le garage hermétique, composed as a serial with very short chapters, reflects an anarchic authorial game in which its creator deliberately introduced new and abrupt conceptual complications each month to destroy the story’s coherence and give himself problems to which he would then have to invent solutions in the subsequent month’s installment—at which time, of course, he would also introduce further complications to destroy the coherence he had just achieved, to pose a new challenge for next time. As he later explained, this state of “insécurité permanente”—the desire it inspired in him to re-create consistency and the satisfaction of then doing so—brought him “un délice absolu” (“absolute delight”)….”
moebius is my favorite comic artist. his stuff is absolutely fantastic.
2022-10-05: Social media as we’ve known it is probably doomed
Whether a decline in social media would on balance be good or bad for society I’ll leave to another discussion, but the handwriting is on the wall for a major decline in social media overall.
As with most predictions, the timing and other details will surface in coming months and years, but the overall shape of things to come is not terribly difficult to visualize.
The fundamental problem is also clear enough. A vast range of entities at state, federal, and international levels are in the process of enacting, invoking, or otherwise planning a range of regulatory and other legal mandates that would apply to social media firms — with many of these requirements being in direct and total opposition to each other.
The most likely outcome from putting these firms “between a rock and hard place” will be a drastic reduction of social media services provided, resulting in a massive decrease in ordinary persons’ ability to communicate publicly, rather than the increase that various social media critics have been anticipating.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 