Space Timesharing

“We are completely inverting the legacy economics of space, shifting from CAPEX — a huge investment in a platform — to OPEX — a lease of a module or a usage fee — which will open the field to a whole new set of customers and uses”. We are building a distributed architecture of space sensors. This incredibly flexible system allows us to accommodate any type of client both before and during the course of the mission as we can reconfigure our payloads and use residual capabilities at will. In some cases, we will become clients of our own customers. We will have the infrastructure, we can flash software as needed for any kind of mission” For Timesharing, the client pays on a usage basis, usually a combination of onboard resources (electrical power, processing power, time, data transfer) and available pre-existing payloads.

Freespin

Freespin is a Commodore 1541 demo, released in 2021. It runs on the Commodore floppy drive. It is is the first demo on this device. Freespin generates sound/music using the floppy drive mechanic (in particular, the stepper motor responsible for moving the head to the right track). Video is generated through the serial bus.

Bass Reeves

So goes one of the many tales of Bass Reeves, whose exploits were so legendary they often sound like myth. But the historical record corroborates many of the most stunning details. Some criminals were so afraid of Reeves they turned themselves in as soon as they heard he was after them. He stalked others in their nightmares. Once, Reeves even arrested his own son for murder. “We quite commonly refer to Bass as the most prolific law enforcement officer the nation has ever seen. He was an enslaved person and ends up becoming one of the most well-known lawmen of the age as a Black man in the South. Bass Reeves is the greatest frontier hero in American history—bar none. I don’t know who you could compare him to. This guy walked in the Valley of Death every day for 32 years and came out alive.”

The Human Family Tree

Our planet was very different 100 ka ago, and if we could survey that time, we would be astounded by the human diversity across its surface. To enumerate what little we know with certainty, there were at a minimum: modern humans, Neanderthals, at least 3-4 varieties of Denisovans, and 2 pygmy Homo populations in Southeast Asia. Likely there were still remnant Homo erectus in Southeast Asia as well, and other diverged lineages within Africa, and a new Homo in Nesher Ramla, Israel, in the Middle East with affinities to Neanderthals.


2023-02-04: More evidence of a much more distributed situation

“Cognitive revolutions”—such as the widespread shift some 300 ka BP from clunky, handheld stone tools to more refined blades and projectile points—were probably instances of different populations with distinctive cultural and biological features coming together and recombining their genes and ideas.

This mosaic evolution would explain certain seemingly unexplainable findings. For example, researchers found human fossils in the Democratic Republic of Congo that dated to 22 ka BP but physically resembled people living 300 ka BP. In Senegal, scientists uncovered 12 ka BP stone toolkits that could easily be transplanted to a situation 100 ka BP.

These finds probably resulted from periods of isolation where different populations in different parts of the continent each developed distinctive cultural and physical adaptations to their local environments. At the same time, instances of connectivity allowed different populations to acquire beneficial traits, behaviors, and technologies from one another, becoming better adapted and more flexible.

In-shoe navigation

Ashirase aims to develop an in-shoe navigation system to help support the visually impaired with walking and routines. The company hopes to have a viable product to market before the end of March 2023. The device fits around each foot, and includes a motion sensor attached to the outside of the shoe. Pairing with a smart phone app, the device will vibrate based on routes set in the app. The left side of the left foot will vibrate to indicate a left turn (and the opposite for a right turn), while the toes of each foot will vibrate to maintain a forward trajectory.

Great Green Wall

The “Great Green Wall”, has helped raise total forest coverage to nearly 25% of China’s total area, up from less than 10% in 1949. In the remote northwest, though, tree planting is not merely about meeting state reforestation targets or protecting Beijing. When it comes to making a living from the most marginal farmland, every tree, bush and blade of grass counts – especially as climate change drives up temperatures and puts water supplies under further pressure.

2022-02-04: Apparently people are really bad at naming, since there’s another Great Green Wall project in Africa:

In the mid-2000s, African leaders envisioned creating a huge swath of green that could help combat desertification and land degradation. The project, called the Great Green Wall, began in 2007 with the aim of planting a 15 km wide belt of trees and shrubs that would extend from the coast of Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. The World Bank has poured over $1b into this endeavor, and the initiative’s scope has grown to include efforts to fight poverty, reduce inequality and build climate-resilient infrastructure. In ecological terms, the program has been a huge success. As of 2020, nearly 4000 km2 of land has been restored to arability in Niger alone.

2023-05-13: As always, projects in developing countries that are declared “huge successes” are not, on closer look

The pace of financing is too slow to achieve this target. As of 2020, 20% of degraded land (200k km2) had been restored and 350k of the promised 10m jobs had been created. That is mainly, although not solely, because just US$2.5b of a required $30b has been spent since the project began. Donors have committed $15b to a pipeline of 150 projects. It’s not clear how much of this is grants, how much is loans and how much is existing funding relabelled as Great Green Wall money. Moreover, coordination between Great Green Wall countries and donors is weak. Trust between the African Union and international donors is in short supply. Donor nations seem to be picking and choosing which countries to invest in, with a preference for those in relatively stable regions.

Homo Nesher

The bones of an early human, unknown to science, who lived in the Levant at least until 130 ka ago, were discovered in excavations near the city of Ramla. Recognizing similarity to other archaic Homo specimens from 400 ka ago, found in Israel and Eurasia, the researchers reached the conclusion that the Nesher Ramla fossils represent a unique Middle Pleistocene population, now identified for the first time.

Put Silk in it

Researchers kept searching for the path to engineered silk. Yet, year after year, they failed. Each ran into scaling issues, production costs, and regulatory due diligence. After all this time, silk-based tech is weaving its way into health care, the food industry, and clothing.

SilkVoice is a gluey mix of hyaluronic acid and microscopic particles of regenerated silkworm silk meant to treat vocal fold disorders. SilkVoice is authorized for human use. The majority of the 40 people who have received the injections have retained their improvements.

Mori has commercialized silk as a way of protecting food. Unlike wax, Mori’s coating can cling to both water-repellent and porous surfaces, like the outside and inside of a zucchini. Mori already has pilots running at farms and food companies around the US, and larger-scale manufacturing is supposed to start later this year.

Kraig Labs claims to have produced the first “nearly pure” spider silk fabricated by silkworms and has scaled up production. It has partnered with a company in Singapore to make luxury street wear and is working with Polartec on performance outerwear. The company is also considering biomedical uses and bullet-resistant protective apparel.

Purdue University engineers have developed a method to transform existing cloth items into battery-free wearables resistant to laundry. These smart clothes are powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile. “By spray-coating smart clothes with highly hydrophobic molecules, we are able to render them repellent to water, oil and mud. These clothes are almost impossible to stain and can be used underwater and washed in conventional washing machines without damaging the electronic components sewn on their surface.”