The newly restored UN is quite amazing. Removing decades of nicotine made the general assembly brighter than ever. In essence, the 60s and 70s were disgusting decades.
Category: Uncategorized
The Ocean race
The 2014-2015 Volvo Ocean Race begins today, leaving Alicante, Spain headed for Cape Town, South Africa. The longest and most dangerous sporting event in the world, the epic sailing regatta covers 71744 km and will take nearly 9 months to complete, covering the toughest conditions on earth. there is no prize for winning.
Small plates
trolling after my own heart:
we treated 6 second graders to dinner at Daniel, where the 7-course tasting menu goes for $220 a person
Visualizing AI
this very cool. on a related note it triggered the fan on my computer for the first time.
My summer intern (well, okay, late fall intern), Christopher Olah has been investigating various ways of visualizing the behavior of neural networks. As part of this work, he has produced a very nice writeup of various ways of visualizing the 784-dimensional space of MNIST digits, including several nice interactive visualization techniques. I’ve really enjoyed working with Chris as he had developed many of these approaches, and there are more cool visualizations coming down the pike.
Shiny, but crappy
much of china’s infrastructure is new & shiny, but not well built
Santa Maria
The wreck of Columbus’ Santa Maria is still undiscovered.
A UNESCO mission of experts has concluded that a shipwreck near Haiti, cannot have been the flagship of Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to America. The mission was requested by the Haitian Government, following claims earlier this year by an American explorer that he had found the remains of the Santa Maria.
Cafeteria Corruption
The average school-nutrition director is not unlike the chief executive of a medium-size catering business, but with a school for a landlord and a menu regulated by the government. With lower subsidies, the lunch ladies needed cheaper calories, and they turned to the increasingly efficient processed-food industry to find them. School cafeterias also began to rely more on revenue from so-called competitive foods — snacks and lunches that are not regulated by federal guidelines and “compete” with the regular school lunch on cafeteria à la carte lines.
Self-portraits with people
Czech photographer Dita Pepe takes portraits of herself integrated into the lives of other people.
Met Roof Garden
Solar Powered Lasers
There has been progress towards using solar powered lasers for Magnesium production. Having a profitable industrial application to fund and drive and scale the development of solar powered lasers is good news for accelerating solar powered lasers for space applications. They are scaling to 1 megawatt of solar collection and 30 watts of laser per square meter of collection area. A space based system could have 60 watts of lasers since there is no atmosphere blocking sunlight. Space based being application would then need another fresnel lens to focus the lasers for long range beaming.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 