while most of NASA is a sad IRS style bureaucracy, there is a part that is like DARPA.
Category: Uncategorized
Kickstarter internet
it costs $10M to blanket the planet in 24 cubesats, and stream content to everywhere on earth at 100MB/s. i’d expect 10s of such schemes within 10 years, as prices drop another 10x at least.
15 and Learning to Speak
Patrick Otema, 15 was born profoundly deaf. In the remote area of Uganda where he lives there are no schools for deaf children, and he has never had a conversation. Raymond Okkelo, a sign language teacher, hopes to change all this and offer Patrick a way out of the fearful silence he has known his whole life.
Dancing magnetotactic bacteria
Sandy on Ellis island
Starbucks Ebola Rant
The thing that I was not aware of is that… what Starbucks was doing, is they were taking specimens of male semen, and they were putting it in the blends of their lattes. It’s the absolute truth. My suspicion is that they’re getting their semen from sodomites. Semen flavours up the coffee, and makes you thinks you’re having a good time
Cyberknife
I don’t always use knives on my testicles, but when I do, I use cyberknife.
Fishing Watch
see also: Overview Effect
For now, Global Fishing Watch only displays ship activity from the previous 2 years, but Oceana aims to eventually incorporate more recent data that will allow authorities to act quickly.
“The plan is that we will build out a public release version that will have near-real-time data, Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing within hours to days.”
Oceana has already used the system to monitor boats that have already been tagged for illegal fishing, though it still doesn’t pick up boats that haven’t registered with the automatic identification system, as well as vessels that go dark before reaching restricted waters. But the hope is that over time, Global Fishing Watch will serve as an important check to encourage fishers to stay within the law.
Goldberg Robotics
“In the future, robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic”—as well as in the cracks of otherwise inaccessible archaeological sites. We need to send machines capable of not exactly of replication, but something more like budding or fruiting, using 3D printers. Imagine a robot being sent into “the wreckage of a nuclear power plant,” for example, where it encounters a stairway it had not been anticipating needing to climb. For the moment, it’s stuck. So what does it do? “The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs.”
What it takes to explore
This is nuts
In the story of how European Space Agency researchers are scrambling to locate—and possibly move—the Philae probe, which they successfully landed on Comet 67P 2 days ago, there’s an interesting comment about computer vision and the perception of exotic landscapes.
“It’s an entirely manual process, because the complex and bizarre landscape of comet 67P defies any kind of automated search. We don’t have an algorithm for this”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 