Tag: video

Ancient Hairdressing

the most amazing hairdresser in the world.

The depth of her knowledge blew me away. She is fully conversant in the archaeology (including unpublished artifacts), ancient literary sources and published scholarship of Roman hairstyling, and not just Roman but Etruscan and Greek as well.

Her work in this field is unique because her experience as a stylist gives her particular insight into how hair works and what can be accomplished with what tools. She upends a number of assumptions — that Roman women must have used wigs to achieve their more elaborate hairstyles, that they used hairpins — and injects a whole new simplicity and accuracy to the very vocabulary of ancient hairdressing.

Evacuated Tube Transport

This sounds like a save the world kind of technology. For a 1T investment, 2h for New York – Beijing. This, combined with a global grid, would get us most of the way to a kardashev level 1 civilization.

2017-09-06:

CASIC will build a maglev transportation system with a top speed of 3700 km/h. The network would consist of 2 tubes per line—each tube is strictly 1-way only—with built in maglev systems, and would be powered in large part by the solar panels on top of the tubes. Given the high speeds and high-traffic density of T Flight capsules at any time, operations would be highly automated, and possibly AI-aided.

2018-03-04:

A maglev line would use partly or fully evacuated tubes or tunnels. Reduced air resistance could permit vactrains to travel at very high speeds with relatively little power—up to 8000 km/h. China has slashed air pressure in a test track tube to 2.9 kilopascal, 33x lower than normal air pressure.

Robots bricklaying

Speed this up by a factor of 10 – 100x and things will get really interesting.

2016-01-08: Construction robots are 3x faster. Construction is long due for a mundane singularity.

A new construction worker has been lending high-efficiency help to job sites, laying bricks at 3x the speed of a human worker. SAM (short for Semi-Automated Mason) is a robotic bricklayer that handles the repetitive tasks of basic brick laying

2016-07-28: Bricklaying update

All you need to input is a CAD file of the house structure and Hadrian X does the rest: the system handles automatic loading, cutting, routing and placement of all the bricks, one course at a time. Bricks are fed along a conveyor belt that sends them up the robotic arm, where the sides of the brick are coated with clear construction adhesive. The arm then rotates the bricks and extends to drop them into place. Because they are glued together, no mortar is necessary.

2021-01-28: Robot Builds from CAD. We need this at scale to break free from the BS that is “construction”, and to actually build a better world.

An Australian company called FastBrick Robotics has invented what may be an architect’s wildest fantasy: The ability to go from a CAD file to a standing structure, with no chance for those pesky human workers to muck up their design.

Build the walls of a house in one day
Maintain accuracy over distance
Safer working environments
Moving toward zero waste construction
Significant cost savings

Dog domestication

Canines have had 36 ka to co-evolve with humans. Plenty of time for canines to domesticate humans as a food source, mainly via the cunning puppy dog eyes.
2012-12-06: How to make dogs from foxes in 8 generations (and “dragons” from foxes)

2018-12-15: This fictionalization of the domestication of wolves was surprisingly good.

2020-06-06: Foxes becoming dog-like

When the foxes moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication.

2022-02-08: Dog / Human co-domestication

Based on claims that dogs are less aggressive and show more sophisticated socio-cognitive skills compared with wolves, dog domestication has been invoked to support the idea that humans underwent a similar ‘self-domestication’ process. Dogs do not show increased socio-cognitive skills and they are not less aggressive than wolves. Rather, compared with wolves, dogs seek to avoid conflicts, specifically with higher ranking conspecifics and humans, and might have an increased inclination to follow rules, making them amenable social partners. These conclusions challenge the suitability of dog domestication as a model for human social evolution and suggest that dogs need to be acknowledged as animals adapted to a specific socio-ecological niche as well as being shaped by human selection for specific traits.