Sapere Aude
Tag: images
Stray dogs are commuting to and from a city center on underground trains in search of food scraps. The clever canines board the Tube each morning. After a hard day scavenging and begging on the streets, they hop back on the train and return to the suburbs where they spend the night.
Plus lots of astonishing behaviors: Crossing the streets safely, playing cute for kids to get food, etc. Sounds a bit too amazing to be true.
Bacteria use quorum sensing via standardized molecules to communicate, both intra and inter species. New medicine could target this communication to shut down pathogenicity.
2012-06-24: The Social Lives of Microbes
It used to be assumed that bacteria lived relatively independent unicellular lives, without the cooperative behaviors that have provoked so much interest in mammals, birds, and insects. However, research has completely overturned this idea, showing that microbes indulge in a variety of social behaviors involving complex systems of cooperation, communication, and synchronization. Work in this area has already provided some elegant experimental tests of social evolutionary theory, demonstrating the importance of factors such as relatedness, kin discrimination, competition between relatives, and enforcement of cooperation.
2021-07-09: Social Mitochondria
Mitochondria divide up tasks, form groups, synchronize activities and respond to both their environment and each other. The sociability of mitochondria facilitates the cooperation of cells, which in turn allows the formation of organs that depend on one another and the creation of complex organisms. The social nature of animals is an extension of the sociality seen at lower rungs of the ladder. Network approaches could yield clues about new treatments, such as improving mitochondrial communication. Part of what makes exercise healthy is that it promotes communication between mitochondria. “It makes them more social”
The robots are able to locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants. In the long run, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse.
2012-09-14: AutoMicroFarm
AutoMicroFarm is an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software. It is an open-source aquaponics system with best-of-class design, monitoring and automation to make it easy to maintain.
2016-06-01: Automation has some not so obvious consequences that should make the Birkenstock mafia happy if they weren’t so preoccupied with being luddites.
2018-05-22: New AI-enabled tractors target weeds, using 90% less herbicide
Farming is undergoing a quiet but radical transformation as machine learning and automation innovations reduce waste. One especially promising new technology targets individual weeds. This is especially important as the world slowly moves to ban glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup and others that may be linked to cancer and loss of biodiversity. Some studies have linked the chemical to changes in bee behavior.
2021-06-07: Australia’s first automated farm
Robots and artificial intelligence will replace workers on Australia’s first fully automated farm created at a cost of $20m. Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga will create the “hands-free farm” on a 19km2 property to demonstrate what robots and artificial intelligence can do without workers in the paddock. The reality of “hands-free” farming’ is closer than many people realize: “Full automation is not a distant concept. We already have mines in the Pilbara operated entirely through automation.”
2022-02-23: Verdant Robotics
Verdant Robotics announced the delivery of the industry’s first multi-action, autonomous farm-robot capable of millimeter-accurate spraying, laser weeding, and AI-based digital crop modeling, and the expansion of their robot-as-a-service offering to farmers. Combining multiple technologies, the company’s 6-row and 12-row commercial implements can treat up to 4.2 acres per hour, achieving a higher weed-removal rate per acre than other technology or human ability, and reducing chemical usage by 95%. Simultaneously, its autonomous software system collects data and uses machine learning capabilities to optimize yield and growing outcomes, ultimately unlocking new revenues to help farmers reach profitability and sustainability goals.
2023-02-23: Dogtooth strawberry picker
2023-05-01: Drones to avoid soil compaction
Early one recent morning in Vidalia, Georgia, Greg Morgan launched a Hylio AG-230 drone carrying 30l of fungicide over a field of sweet onions. The chemical, which is essential to crop survival in this humid state fell in a fine mist from the spray jets of a 36 kg drone scudding 3 meters above his cash crop. It has cut his fuel costs and already reduced his agrochemical usage by 15%. The drone has also enabled him to work his fields after heavy rains — when the ground is often too sodden for heavy equipment — and has spared his crop from the routine damage caused by tractors. It has also saved his soil from the compaction, bogging and erosion caused by farm machinery.
I finally figured out why I hate Twitter and its ilk so much: they primarily amplify the voices of the stupid, resulting in a net negative for society, feel good bs like “Arab Spring”, or whatever marginally employed journalist types tell themselves notwithstanding. Contrast that with delicious or wikipedia, where the stupid can only do limited damage, and the spoils go to the thoughtful. It seems that you’d want to make curation easier relative to creation to get a virtuous cycle of intelligence enhancement instead of a vicious cycle of appeal to the dumbest.
That’s the grand irony of Twitter: Even the real people on the service are fake.
As if you needed another reason to detest twitter. SpaghettiOs’ Dubious Tweet to Remember Pearl Harbor
If your job as a social media douchebag is to run an account for a can of pasta, how else are you going to go “viral”? working as intended. It is also all spam:
it takes a mere 458 followers to land in the top 10% of all Twitter users. It takes 2991 followers to crack the top 1%
Wow, that’s so ghetto. no wonder they won’t go anywhere.
The author argues that the advent of Twitter heralds the destruction of the nation state over the coming century. It is far more likely that the nation state will cause the destruction of Twitter, for having done more to lower the quality of discourse than any technology that came before.
Twitter is fundamentally not viable, and changing leads doesn’t change the drain-circling. TWTR to 0 in 2015
Racist Trump twitter has come up with a new coded way to share racial slurs w/ each other and avoid account suspension. Here’s the ugly list of words and their “true” meanings among white supremacists.
So who is going to buy Twitter and shut it down, doing us all a favor?
By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter. Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
The dumb Twitter audience is the problem.
Carbon dating shows that the complex is 12 ka old. Stonehenge was built around 2000–2500 BC. Gobekli Tepe hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.
There is no doubt gobekli tepe is an enormously important archaeological discovery: at 12 ka, it is far far older than any other advanced manmade structure. together with evidence that the first grains are from the same area, this may well be the birth of civilization.
Göbekli Tepe suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with 100s of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.
2022-05-20: The area might be even older and is far more widespread:
Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilization, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for 10 ka. And it was all buried deliberately. Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far We have dug up maybe 1% of the site. That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably 1000s more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be 10s more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over 100s of kilometres.’
I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways. (I didn’t know how to draw maps to look like Google Maps but it’s pretty easy.) Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before (they are included in my Unbuilt Highways Map of NYC) but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context (also I’m sure there are plenty of people who didn’t even know about these). We have become so accustomed to viewing the world through Google Maps that I feel like these maps are starting to shape our view point of the city.
Wait, whaaaaaa?
research shows not all fb friends are friends!
re: procrastination
Gregor J. Rothfuss 