Tuesday, February 28, 2023
A New Mining Ship Sucks Metals Off The Seafloor. Is That A Good Idea?
Sunday, February 26, 2023
The Country Restaurant
So intriguing - the more you read about this solitary, self-made independent resourceful chef, the deeper the mystery becomes.
This device corkscrews itself into the ground like a seed
Thursday, February 23, 2023
Surprising Predators
Any guesses what predator in nature has the highest "kill rate," once it starts chasing its prey? You'd be surprised by the answer.
1:42 in this video: https://youtu.be/poTtbb1P6VM
Also, guess what deadly predator sends a lightning-fast harpoon at its victim, and has hundreds of chemicals in its venom and can produce a different cocktail of venom from one victim to the next? Not a creature you'd associate with speed and accuracy.
If you want more detail about the second one, it's in this episode.
https://radiolab.org/episodes/golden-goose
Cone Snails Stab and Swallow Fish Whole
Deadly accuracy and speed aren't things you'd associate with a snail.
The hundreds of venom compounds they produce can have human benefits.
Pain Therapeutics from Cone Snail Venoms: From Ziconotide to Novel Non-Opioid Pathways.
The persistent researcher who has studied the cone Snails for decades
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Happiness 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose | Hidden Brain Media
Experiment: those asked to write about goals before climbing a steep hill focused on how difficult the hill was because it was an obstacle to those immediate goals. But those asked to write about their purpose in life, rated the climb less difficult.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
5 Ways ChatGPT Will Change Healthcare Forever, For Better
"For physicians, data comes from classroom lectures, published research and professional experience. For AI, it's the totality of digitally published material. A physician will recall (or look up) the relevant information that applies to a patient's symptoms. Generative AI will use billions of parameters to pinpoint appropriate text. Physicians compare possible diagnoses, whereas today's ChatGPT tests sentences. Both weigh the options and predict among (all of available possibilities) the best match."
"...next generations of generative AI will be able to monitor patients 24/7 and provide ongoing medical expertise...Syncing with wearable devices... Comparing...against the expected ranges preset by each patient's doctor...Reminding patients at home when they they're due for preventive screenings, Rx refills or daily exercise."
"Next generations of ChatGPT with video capability will be able to observe doctors and nurses, compare their actions to evidence-based guidelines and warn clinicians when they're about to commit an error."
How Millions Of Jeans Get Recycled Into New Jeans
Farming robots that will feed the world
1:48 It all started from an engineer's idea to pick up garbage on a beach...
0:46 The cost of fruit wasted last year because no one could be found to pick it was 35 million pounds in the UK alone.
4:26 it inspects for 17 different kinds of defects
5:40 it recognizes ripe fruit 🍓
7:21 for now, it's shower than a human at picking - 7:43 about 25% as fast.
https://youtu.be/hBkhUClyJvs
Effect of Dark Clothing Color of Female Pedestrians on the Severity of Accident
"clothing color had a significant influence on pedestrian accidents, and...dark clothing color increased the probability of accidents, especially at night." [although] "females in the older age group tended to wear darker clothing than younger females aged 30 or less."
"clothing had the greatest effect on increasing the probability of female pedestrian accidents"
"both pedestrian dark clothing and illumination, the crashes that occurred on an urban highway were 9 times more likely to be fatal" "driver's age and pedestrian's clothing had a considerable effect on the distance at which the drivers initially reacted to the presence of pedestrians."
"When pedestrians wore a biological motion reflective clothing, they were recognized more often than when they wore a reflective vest."
Saturday, February 18, 2023
5 European Auto Delivery Programs | Kiplinger
Volvo, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche - Save on purchase price, vacation in Europe with car insurance included, ~2 months to deliver to USA.
Starlink: Elon Musk's 42,000 Satellites
Car Companies Still Use Clay Models
Making clay models with specialized clay that fruits slowly and behind by earning to 140 degrees in an oven.
Friday, February 17, 2023
Tentacle robot can gently grasp fragile objects
Clever.
Reminds me of the coffee-grounds robot gripper, but more versatile.
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
How ChatGPT is Trained
Human supervision and preference were used to fine tune the model - which basically just predicts what the next word in each generated sentence will be.
I tried using AI. It scared me.
Well worth a look. He goes into painstaking detail to explain how society is at an important inflection point, as ChatGPT takes over simple repetitive tasks, and the pitfalls of trusting it to do so.
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Pursuit of happiness - ignore it and enjoy the moment.
Interesting podcast - Two big points - if you stop to think about whether a situation makes you happy, you feel less happy. (philosopher John Stewart Mill quote "Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so" - so pithy) So just enjoy the moment, and concentrate on enjoying others and enjoying the outdoor of the goal at hand. And 2, if you suppress your emotions, you connect less with those around you. I need to work on expressing emotion and not holding it in. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/happiness-2-0-the-path-to-contentment/
NYTimes: Heckling of Biden Reflects a New, Coarser Normal for House G.O.P.
Heckling of Biden Reflects a New, Coarser Normal for House G.O.P. https://nyti.ms/3I9AaWJ
A sad decline in decorum that makes one pine for a former America before 1963.
"images of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, her mouth wide open as she booed and gave a thumbs down to the president — reflected the ethos that has come to define the Republican-led House, where an emboldened right wing that styles itself after former President Donald J. Trump is unapologetic about its antipathy for Mr. Biden and eager to show it in attention-grabbing ways."
"The coarsening in conduct in Congress, he added, could have real consequences at a time when political extremism is on the rise in the United States." Tuesday, February 7, 2023
Sand blasting with dry ice
On a home renovation show we're watching, they're cleaning charred fire-damaged joists after a house fire with dry ice pellets fired under pressure at the blackened surfaces. It did a remarkable job of cleaning it like new, and there was no clean up (other than running an air filter.) Pretty clever! They promised that it would get rid of the smoke smell in the home. It took about 500 pounds of dry ice to clean a room.
As they point out laboriously in this video, sand blasting leaves a lot of mess to clean up, but does a better job of penetrating deep rust that has removed the surface of the metal.
Crashing Your Car at the Nürburgring Will Cost You at Least $4,000
As you can see, crashing your beloved car is pretty easy to do at the Nürburgring.
Driving the famed Nürburgring is cheap, but if you crash, the costs add up very quickly!
ICON • DERELICT
These guys took a 70-year-old car, built a new modern frame, and replaced the engine with Tesla electric components configured to look reminiscent of a V-8 engine, and made all the controls look vintage. Wow.
Monday, February 6, 2023
TOROIDAL PROPELLER on a DRONE | DIY 3D printed
Impressive idea, and skillful flying also.
I imagine these props would be heavier and less efficient, but more crash-proof than regular propellers.
Sunday, February 5, 2023
Final Boeing 747 leaves Everett, leaves message in virtual sky
I think you'll like this story. The very last Boeing 747 was sold a few days ago, and as the pilots flew away in their new plane, they traced a curious path in the sky.
An Ancient Solution to Modern Problems | Hidden Brain Media
When people moved in synchrony, their endorphin levels were higher
Rituals are characterized by repetition, rigidity and redundancy.
When a crowd feels a sense of one-ness with each other:
"Émile Durkheim described this feeling of collective effervescence... What we found is that during the ritual, their heart rates began to synchronize to a really impressive degree. In fact, they were more synchronous during the ritual where some of them are walking on fire, some are watching, some are preparing for their own walk. They were more synchronous during that time than the time they were marching up the hill in synchrony. But we also find that this effect only holds for group members, because we also mapped the social network of the village. So we knew who was related to whom and to what degree, whether by blood or by friendship. And we see that we can actually use the degree of social proximity to predict the degree of physiological synchrony."Saturday, February 4, 2023
NYTimes: Do Cash Handouts Work to stimulate economic growth??
Do Handouts Work? https://nyti.ms/3Hxq00C
"Michael Faye et al co-founded GiveDirectly in 2009 while studying economic development at Harvard"
"Giving cash has become more practical in recent years because of technology such as mobile payment systems, which can be used even by people who don't have bank accounts"
"I won't try to sort out the academic debate over whether unconditional cash transfers create lasting change. Niehaus pointed me to several studies, including one in Uganda and one in Sri Lanka, that showed long-term benefits from unconditional cash transfers."
"cash transfers raised prices of perishable foods in some markets (presumably by increasing demand)"
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
The Native American Women Who Fought Mass Sterilization | Time
1970's forced sterilization - what? How could this heinous practice have happened?
And such deplorable living conditions - "One government official estimated in 1916 that approximately three-fifths of Indian infants died before age 5."
$4Bn Tunnel Network Under Chicago
A 30-foot diameter tunnel system 200 feet underground that diverts street runoff into giant reservoirs in Chicago until the water can be processed.
6:30 the reservoirs had to be sealed and reinforced to be impermeable, with 500-foot deep holes drilled every 5 feet around its perimeter, and pumped with grout that infiltrated the surrounding rock.
The Future of Manufacturing
12:50 "co-bots" - robots designed to sense nearby humans and prevent running into them or injuring them.
Taking hormones to combat menopause
Women Have Been Misled About Menopause https://nyti.ms/3wIGZIj
"Imagine that some significant portion of the male population started regularly waking in the middle of the night drenched in sweat...stumbled to work, exhausted, their morale low...It suggests that we have a high cultural tolerance for women's suffering...Now imagine that there was a treatment for all these symptoms that doctors often overlooked."
"perimenopause, the biologically chaotic phase leading up to a woman's last period, when her reproductive cycle makes its final, faltering runs. The shift, which lasts, on average, four years, typically starts when women reach their late 40s."
"higher risk for severe depressive symptoms. Bone loss accelerates. In women who have a genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease, the first plaques are thought to form"
"Women's Health Initiative, which remains the largest randomized clinical trial in history to involve only women, studying health outcomes for 160,000 postmenopausal women, some of them over the course of 15 years...one arm of the trial — in which women were given a combination of estrogen and progestin, a synthetic form of progesterone — had been stopped prematurely...a small but statistically significant increased risk of cardiac events, strokes and clots"
"A woman's risk of having breast cancer between the ages of 50 and 60 is around 2.33 percent. Increasing that risk by 26 percent would mean elevating it to 2.94 percent. (Smoking, by contrast, increases cancer risk by 2,600 percent.)"
" wanted to be able to measure health outcomes — how many women ended up having strokes, heart attacks or cancer — but those ailments may not show up until women are in their 70s or 80s. The study was scheduled to run for only 8½ years. So they weighted the participants toward women who were already 60 or older. That choice meant that women in their 50s, who tended to be healthier and have more menopausal symptoms, were underrepresented in the study. "
" even after 20 years, the mortality rate of women who took those hormones was no higher than that of the control group...For healthy women in their 50s, life-threatening events like clots or stroke are rare, and so the increased risks from hormone therapy are also quite low."
" It was possible, researchers have hypothesized, that hormones may be most effective within a certain window"
" women who had more hot flashes — at least four a day — tended to have more signs of cardiovascular disease. "
How do Fed Rate Increases Fix Inflation?
"As buying a house or a car or expanding a business becomes pricier, people pull back from doing those things. With fewer consumers and companies competing for the available supply of goods and services, price gains are able to moderate."
"Banks pass on the cost of a higher federal funds rate to their customers when those customers want to access regular lending products...As the theory goes, if it's more expensive to borrow money or carry a balance on a credit card, consumers will spend less. When spending declines, demand will fall and, eventually, so will the price of everyday goods."
"The philosophy is that if goods and services become too pricey, less people will buy them, and sellers will have to lower their prices to retain customers."
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