Sapere Aude
Category: Uncategorized
The next steps towards the transparent society.
it will be good for society if the powers of surveillance are shared with the citizenry, enabling the public to watch the watchers. this continues the trend promoted by Adam Smith, John Locke, the US Constitutionalists and the western enlightenment, who held that any elite should experience constraints upon its power. And there is no power-equalizer greater than knowledge.
The japanese deliver, by sending a talking robot to the space station, for emotional support.
“It’s one small step for me, a giant leap for robots”
you can see both french fries tower as well as empire state building, and the east river.
this is how we’ll feed the next few billions.
the method is neither genetic modification nor bioengineering. It is naturally occurring nitrogen fixing bacteria that forms a symbiotic relationship with the plant.
some ad strategies are little games in themselves.
You’ve seen them. Peeking out from sidebars, jiggling and wiggling for your attention, popping up where you most expect them: those “One Weird Trick” ads. These crudely drawn Web advertisements promise easy tricks to reduce your belly fat, learn a new language, and boost your credit score by 217 points. They seem like obvious scams, but part of me has always wanted to follow the link. What, I wonder, makes the tricks so weird? How come only one trick (or sometimes “tip”), never more? Why are the illustrations done by small children using MS Paint? I’ve never pursued these questions, though, because a fear of computer viruses and identity theft has always stayed my hand. One curious click, I imagine, and I could wake up hogtied on an oil tanker headed to Nigeria.
If the flynn effect is true, the click through rate on these should decline over time as the dumbest get smarter.
If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past 6 years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)
this will be pretty interesting once you can stick a gigapixel camera on a drone.
This is a 150-gigapixel image shot from the top of the Tokyo Tower. It was shot in September 2012 with the kind assistance from the management of the Tokyo Tower.
boring, why not 3d printer/scanner/fax? i thought that is standard these days.
looks like there is an even bigger clown coming in:
Many Egyptians fear that Fattah al-Sisi wants to return Egypt to a familiar style of secular authoritarianism. But his record suggests he may have very different — although equally undemocratic — political intentions: a hybrid regime that would combine Islamism with militarism.
in related news, we have also passed peak boring lifestyle.
America’s homeownership rate has been declining for several years, and for multiple reasons, some tied directly to the housing collapse. For one class of would-be homeowners, it’s simply harder today to qualify for a mortgage than it was at the height of the housing boom. For another, the allure of homeownership itself has declined. And then of course there are people who were homeowners until the crash nudged them off of their property.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 