College of Extraordinary Experiences

COEE is at minimum 3 things: a College, an Extraordinary Experience, and a Community. First, it’s a full-fledged College: a place for higher education and intellectual discourse, offering hands-on, real-world crash courses on Experience Design. Following 3 guiding principles — Rapid Prototyping, Co-Creation, and Flexible Focus — this intense 5-day event has the flavor of an “unconference.” There are a few loosely structured activities, as the core of the program is a co-created and co-designed immersive learning space. Information, ideas and practices flow among participants through facilitated group discussions, thought-provoking workshops (where PowerPoint presentations are adamantly banned), and impromptu conversations. One wishes all learning was as enjoyable, and all enjoyment as profound. Second, like a nested Russian matryoshka doll, COEE is itself an Extraordinay Experience, self-reflectively focusing on Extraordinary Experiences. It’s like Hogwarts meets Disneyland, thoroughly spiced with Burning Man ethos and costuming. For 5 intense days and nights, you live in a real medieval castle, nestled in gorgeous natural surroundings of breathtaking beauty. Spectacular things happen in this unusual, immersive environment, stimulated by a parade of colorful and wild activities, and playful mind-bending events. You are quickly advised to come to terms with the FOMO syndrome: there is so much going on, you can’t get to, or even see, all of it. You’ll never know when and where the next thing will happen. Whatever is in store for you, however, will certainly deserve the term “extraordinary.”

Boring Prospects

Boring Company has started work on an 29km tunnel in Chicago from downtown to the airport. Successfully completing the airport tunnel will make the tunneling company worth as much as $16B. This valuation will be before any full speed hyperloop implementation. If Boring Company succeeds in lowering the cost of tunneling by 10-100x then they will enable high-speed transportation to be used inside and between cities. This would not only mean capturing most of the existing tunnel and infrastructure projects but increasing the tunneling projects by 100x.

2021-12-17: New tunneling methods are being tried. They’re currently about as fast as Prufrock, the Boring machine (which does 10 m / hour)

Petra, a 3-year-old startup is developing tech to cut through rock without grinding into it. A mix of gas and heat above 1000 degrees Celsius breaks rock into small pieces. Sensors attached to small rods touch the rock, but the excavation is carried out by the heat and gas. Petra is testing its tunnel-drilling method in a Minnesota quarry on Sioux Quartzite, 8x tougher than most forms of concrete. In the test, Petra says its method is moving through rock at 12 m / hour. Once the rock is broken into tiny pieces, a vacuum is used to suck rock fragments out of the hole.

Mandatory dating class

South Korean universities have courses that make it mandatory for students to date their classmates. Students have to date each other in 3 randomly assigned pairings. Courses on dating, sex, love and relationships are trying to increase coupling and eventually birth rate. Most young korean woman and men don’t want to have kids. They reason it would be too difficult to balance family with work pressures. They would consider trying to have children “if the economic conditions were right.”

Wobble Palace

A comedy that centers on the trials of try-hard millennials, Eugene and Jane are a couple in the death throes of their relationship. They see other people, but they haven’t broken up because neither wants to move out of the apartment they share in downtown Los Angeles — an art-freak crash pad with AstroTurf carpets and curtains printed to look like a crowded Windows desktop, complete with the ubiquitous grassy knoll. To satisfy their desire for time to themselves, they decide to split the apartment over a weekend. Eugene’s day comes first, and he begins it by swiping through Tinder on the toilet. It would be impossible to miss that Eugene is balding. Around the shiny dome of his forehead, his remaining hair passes his shoulders. By the time Eugene’s date appears for brunch, he has fashioned a hair piece that is as fantastic as it is foolhardy: He wraps his stringy fringe into a bun and fastens it above his bald spot. It’s a style he calls the “floating toupee.”

Tail latency aware caching

RobinHood dynamically allocates cache space to those backends responsible for high request tail latency (cache-poor) backends, while stealing space from backends that do not affect the request tail latency (cache-rich backends). In doing so, Robin Hood makes compromises that may seem counter-intuitive (e.g., significantly increasing the tail latencies of certain backends).

Internal Use Only

Adventures in acquiring satellite imagery

The longest amount of time any area in the continental United States has gone without an update on Google Earth has been 8 years. From 2008 to 2016, a series of dry lake beds in Southwestern Nevada located in the Tonopah Test Range was a blind spot from the all-seeing corporate monolith continuously mapping the Earth. So we bought a satellite image ourselves. We would like to invite you to view image #103001000EBC3C00 yourself. Or — since the image is for internal use only — you can look at a painting of the image online.

Anti Solar Campaigns

In Arizona, however, where a recent poll found that 75% of the electorate wanted more solar energy, A.P.S. has spent $22m campaigning against Prop 127. “You’d think we were proposing something truly harmful and dangerous”. He hasn’t been shy in returning the blows, spending $18m supporting Prop 127 through Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona. Their biggest expense was a paid force of petitioners who spread out across the state to collect 480k signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, 2x the amount required by law. “We’re on the side of the angels. This is a black-hat, white-hat fight.”

BGP hacking

This article will show how this hijacking works, and how China employs its conveniently distributed points of presence (PoPs) in western democracies’ telecommunications systems to redirect internet traffic through China for malicious use. It will show the actual routing paths, give a summary of how one hijacks parts of the internet by inserting these nodes, and outline the major security implications.

Ben Thompson

Taiwan, I think, struggles from having 1000s of years of Chinese bureaucracy behind it. Plus they were occupied by Japan for 50 years, so you’ve got that culture on top. Then you have this sclerotic corporate culture that the boss is always right, stay in the office until he goes home, and that sort of thing. It’s unhealthy. Whereas China — it’s much more bare-knuckled competition and “Figure out the right answer, figure it out quickly.” The competition there is absolutely brutal. It’s brutal in a way I think is hard for people to really comprehend, from the West. And that makes China, makes these companies really something to deal with.