Category: Uncategorized

Sailboat Race

good times!

Halophytes

you don’t need desalination for agriculture if you go for plants that can tolerate salt water. there are 1000s of them.

More than 97% of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400K flowering plant species around the world, 2600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?

Vermeer paintings

Vermeer’s paintings might be 350 year-old color photographs. guy spends a year building a replica of a room, then painting it with a special mirror device to achieve the photographic effects vermeer is famous for. crazy.

Supermarket slave trail

Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers

33% Turing test

If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of 5 minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.

30% seems a low bar (why not > 50%?) but this is still an interesting historical footnote.

Towards electric bliss

If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless implementation of an electrode without impairing intelligence and the critical mind — I would be the first patient –Dalai Lama

The food4patriots scam

The interesting innovation in Reboot’s Patriot Alliance is that they’re not selling a product wrapped in ideological garb; they’re selling ideology itself. “I’ve never been so passionate about anything in my life,” the Bates character promises, pitching what’s essentially a conservative newsletter with scattered survivalist tips. Judging from the writing in the letter, it seems like Baler has struck gold again. “Bates’” fearmongering about Obama’s America is nearly indistinguishable from some of the red meat that frequently appears in the respectable kind of conservative outlet.

reminds me of the health section of whole foods

remember aibo?

Softbank has unveiled a robot called Pepper, which can read human emotions. It uses an “emotional engine” and a cloud-based artificial intelligence system that allows it to analyse gestures, expressions and voice tones. People could communicate with it “just like they would with friends and family” and it could perform various tasks.

McLeod’s Daughters

The award-winning Australian television series McLeod’s Daughters aired from 2001 – 2009. A drama, the story begins by following the lives of half sisters Claire and Tess McLeod, reunited after they inherit a vast outback cattle farm (“Drover’s Run”), that has been handed down through the men in their family for generations. 224 episodes were produced, and all are available on YouTube.

V.C. Firm Names AI To Board of Directors

Humans are emotional and subjective. They can make mistakes, but unlike the machines they can make brilliant intuitive decisions. Machines like VITAL use only logic. The intuition of the human investors together with machine’s logic will give a perfect collaborative team. The risk of the mistake will be minimized.