Cookiecutter Castles

Imagine a rolling landscape of towering, pristine castles almost as far as your eyes can see. It sounds breathtaking — and it is — just probably not in the way you’d think. These Disney-esque villas are in a Turkish housing development called Burj al Babas, and it’s completely abandoned.

Construction remains terrible

The Problem
Construction is error-prone, expensive, and suffers delays. The government thinks construction productivity has slightly decreased since 1960. It just needs some clever engineering and solutions, but which ones? This post will focus on the ubiquitous single-family home.

Why Things Aren’t Getting Better
The combination of consumer tastes, low dollar value per volume building components, and the complexity of buildings inhibit efforts to scale.

nevertheless, there’s a constant stream of “innovation” that will supposedly solve this, but that remains unlikely. For example, this lego-like modular construction

Tunnel Detection

The sensors themselves are a mixture of accelerometers, which pick up vibrations, current detectors, which measure the electrical-resistance of rocks and soil, and subsurface radar. The square kilometer they picked contains more than 100 wells, many underground storage tanks and 10s of kilometers of steel pipeline. Resead made short work of this challenge. It produced an accurate map of the area in just 10 minutes. The system could be useful for detecting tunnels on the Mexican border.

see also the opposite:

The University of Arizona College of Engineering is testing an invisible border monitoring system that could revolutionize the way the US conducts homeland security. The border-monitoring system, known as Helios, consists of laser pulses transmitted through fiber-optic cables buried in the ground that respond to movements on the surface above. A detector at one or both ends of the cable analyzes these responses. Helios is sensitive enough to detect a dog and can discriminate between people, horses and trucks. The system can be set to avoid being triggered by small animals, and can also tell if people are running or walking, or digging, and in which direction. The location of a cut cable, or people, or vehicles, can be pinpointed instantly to within one meter along a section of cable up to 50 kilometers long.

Chased by Snack Robots

because of self-checkout, people are doing fewer impulse buys waiting in line, so shoprite designed a robot to accost you with snacks throughout the store. this is the future we want, apparently. can’t wait to have to dodge tiny aggressive sales-robots AND people that aren’t paying attention when i go shopping

Restoring The Night Watch

The missing edges of Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch have been restored using artificial intelligence. The canvas, created in 1642, was trimmed in 1715 to fit between 2 doors at Amsterdam’s city hall.

Rembrandt actually used 4 different colors to paint a miniscule light effect in the eye of one of the many life-sized protagonists featured in this group portrait, which probably wouldn’t be seen by anybody anyway.

Antarctica in 650?

A new paper combines literature and oral histories, and concludes that Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, were likely the first people to explore Antarctica’s surrounding waters, and possibly the continent in the distance. They write that Māori and Polynesian journeys to the deep south have been occurring for a long time, perhaps as far back as 650, and are recorded in a variety of oral traditions.

2023-06-24: This claim is false and ideologically motivated.

“These stories, presented without nuance, qualification or critique, make extraordinary claims without offering commensurable evidence”. The Hui Te Rangiora story was a Rarotongan tradition translated by ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith​ near the end of the 19th century and debunked by Te Rangi Hīroa​ (Sir Peter Buck​) who wrote that “so much post-European information has been included in the native text” he could no longer accept the traditions as accurate and ancient.

This means O’Regan, Tau and the others were in the position of repeating work Te Rangi Hīroa did 100 years ago.

In serious historical circles, relying on Smith is problematic.

“These scholars haven’t learned anything over the past 50 years”.

Numbers inevitable?

Why do we use numbers so much? Is it something about the world? Or is it more something about us? We discussed above the example of fundamental physics. And we argued that even though at the most fundamental level numbers really aren’t involved, our sampling of what happens in the universe leads us to a description that does involve numbers. And in this case, the origin of the way we sample the universe has deep roots in the nature of our consciousness, and our fundamental way of experiencing the universe, with our particular sensory apparatus, place in the universe, etc. As long as we preserve core aspects of our experience as what we consider conscious observers some version of numbers will in the end be inevitable for us. We can aspire to generalize from numbers, and, for example, sample other representations of computational reducibility. But for now, numbers seem to be inextricably connected to core aspects of our existence.

Mesopelagic Fish

Mesopelagic fish that live 100-1000m below the surface constitute 95% of the world’s fish biomass, 10-30x more than previously thought. “This very large stock of fish that we have just discovered is untouched by fishers.”

2023-02-24: The seafloor is similarly underappreciated

The majority of the bottom of the ocean is covered in morbid ooze, 100m deep. This substance is made of the skeletons of an uncountable number of tiny creatures, raining down from above. The passage of material through this ooze is a substantial part of several biological, chemical, and geological cycles.

Ocean 20% mapped

Modern measurements of the depth and shape of the seabed now encompass 20.6% of the total area under water. When Seabed 2030 was launched in 2017, only 6% of the oceans had been mapped to modern standards. So, it is possible to make swift and meaningful gains. For example, a big jump in coverage would be achieved if all governments, companies, and research institutions released their embargoed data. Seabed 2030 is not seeking 5m resolution of the entire floor (close to something we already have of the Moon’s surface). 1 depth sounding in a 100m grid square down to 1500m will suffice; even less in much deeper waters.