Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Rapid fence installation

https://youtu.be/Nt7hG3Z7XFg?is=JvrIzJRVJ9YudN9B

11:32 they discuss tirewinder.com, a rapid deployment of electric fence from a spool on a four-wheeler which allows controlling the goat herd along miles of brushland much more economically than installing fence by hand. To selectively remove noxious weeds 8:24 preferred by goats and avoided by other cattle, they need to move the herd rapidly and do they need to install and remove miles of fencing every day. 

Most electric driver is installed slowly by walking and unwinding, but here and here's another example of a four-wheeler-mounted system. 

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Sobering thoughts about the future of AI, from Bill Gates' interview.

This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near...part of the reason I’m speaking so loudly — as loud as I can — is that you can’t rely on the industry to self-regulate here.

The size of the brain is limited by the birth canal — it’s why humans, at first, are very limited...But the silicon intelligence doesn’t have these limitations.

OK, whatever goes on here, it can’t just be driven by profit maximization. 

A.I. has crossed the threshold that its ability to empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of millions — that exists today. The ability to do a cyberattack that scrambles all of the bank accounts, shuts down the electric grid — that exists today...there could be a control problem where the A.I., on its own, through an unintentional interpretation of what it’s optimizing, could go off and do bad things...These models, the ability to separate out making molecules for good and making them for evil — that is so hard to distinguish. 

[AI is] finding bugs in code that humans have looked over for over 20 years and said: Boy, we see there’s no problem here.

And in a few minutes, the A.I. says: No, no, I can inject this over here and this over here — at a level of complexity where, when you see it, you go: Wait. Oh, yeah, you’re right.

we don’t have a supervisory layer that has some absolutes, like: You’re not supposed to take over other computers. You’re not supposed to break out into the internet.

[How to maintain social security?] You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that’s delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay.

In low-income countries, the A.I. will overwhelmingly be a good thing, and it should be pushed forward as quickly as it can...The one application that’s going full speed ahead...is the agricultural one, because they’re getting better weather data to these farmers in Africa. We have over one million farmers in India already using the system. So it tells them what crop disease they have, what fertilizer to use, what varieties to plant.

So if you ask the American people what portion of the budget’s going to help people in poor countries...people say 10 or 15%. So the fact that it was about 0.5% and now it’s going down toward a 0.25%, that would be pretty shocking to people.

Saturday, September 26, 2026

Controlling ticks


https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19ehrB9idz/

Controlling a troublesome cattle illness by spraying parasitic worms on wild hosts. 
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Saturday, September 19, 2026

Bending metal to their whim

https://youtu.be/64-qdViQOhQ?is=jGjDW2CSeTAI_NGF

One-off specialty parts created out of sheet metal without the use of die stamps and hydraulic presses, by using opposing robot arms to coax and squeeze the metal into the correct shape. 

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Bees are capable of learning.


A fascinating series of experiments that prove bees are capable of picturing something in the future that requires a tool they've learned to use - previously only proven in primate experiments. 

Robot thinks beyond mimicking

https://youtu.be/IJvyS2aPsnA?is=kIf-0aasG4QQ6bBN

0:44 as far as I can tell, the robot is figuring out that the nut can be spun with a rapid motion once it's loosened, or perhaps generalizing from watching a human loosen other nuts. 

From an AI summary of the OM-1 robot: OM-1 is trained exclusively on human data captured through the Omnibody Hand, a wearable seven-degree-of-freedom device. The company claims the system can generalize zero-shot across robot bodies—including tabletop arms, industrial arms, and humanoids—without teleoperation data, on-robot training, or robot-specific fine-tuning. A temporal history of these streams allows the policy to reason about how contact and task progress evolve.
The model translates the twisting motion from a human demonstration directly to different mechanical bodies—such as tabletop arms or humanoids—without needing robot-specific fine-tuning.
OM-1 natively processes a continuous stream of high-frequency data, balancing tactile signals and inter-finger proximity alongside visual tracking. 

The dark truth behind targeted advertising.



https://youtu.be/U0-8SrbG0xA?is=Opkx8NFPkluRqfIL
Skip ahead to 13:13 to skip the setup that companies are definitely not listening to your phone microphone; but they are using reams of metadata. 
A gold mine of hundreds of facts about you and your interests are shared to thousands of advertisers in the milliseconds before you're shown an ad. Hundreds of times a day. 

Monday, September 14, 2026

Rare earth metals.

https://youtu.be/BXLGV0Sj0n8?is=jUz6af0gh9FNVJId

China's carefully crafted and executed monopoly on rare earth metals accomplished over 30 years annihilated the competition and placed a stranglehold on foreign military production. Companies like MP (Mountain Pass) are being supported by fixed prices that ensure longevity for the mine. 

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Bitterness


“Staying bitter only disturbs the one harboring the bitterness.” - folk wisdom

Thursday, September 10, 2026

Cerebellum

80% of the total number of neurons in the brain are in the cerebellum. It is not purely a motor system - many insufficiently with the entire neocortex. It is now thought to coordinate and "smooth" the output of all brain regions - regulating emotion, or planning a smooth sentence/conversation. 
Episode "Song of the cerebellum" Radiolab. 

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

60 Words

https://radiolab.org/podcast/ea1c84b585e58d5befeefebf

Really interesting podcast that studies the actual meaning of declaring war after 9/11, and how the words declaring war have been used and misused. 

Monday, September 7, 2026

Panthalassa wave generator - now I get it.

https://youtu.be/VcmDN4T90Fw?is=cjjwMY3zysF-Uv2E

These untethered wave generators incorporate AI data centers, so they float across the ocean sending AI compute results to the web, and use ocean water for passive cooling of the computer chips. 
This eliminates traditional electrical distribution entirely. The electricity generated by the ocean's waves is consumed entirely on-site by modular AI data centers housed right inside the generator nodes.
1:58 "Panthalassa" is the name of the mega-ocean that once surrounded the conglomerate continent Pangea. 

Huge N Korean scam of fake IT jobs and ID theft.

https://youtu.be/RUhdmIFpb-w?is=tu1CXtWXeSNoFl_4
This is a thorough investigation by the Wall Street Journal into an extensive scheme of raising money for the North Korean government by enslaving workers who apply for US jobs using either stolen identities or actual US middlemen criminals who share the salary for the work done remotely online. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Incredibly elaborate. 

Sunday, September 6, 2026

Breakthrough 36 passenger electric passenger plane for short-haul 2hr flights

 

https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?si=nPszTyfr-EOOde_n

2:53 Jet engines are far more complex - take the turbine blades, for example which must be grown as a single crystal of a nickel super-alloy to withstand the heat and physical forces. 

https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?is=SCbLua2xNvguGoTK

5:30 they built a 400kW electric motor. (Standard Tesla motors are 137 - 200 kW.)


7:45 actuators: Boeing aircraft have 2 or more backup systems to drive hydraulic systems (electric pump, ram-air turbine in case of total engine failure) — what backup systems will this aircraft have for flight control systems? Maybe a hydraulic pump run by the hybrid engine. 


9:45 hardest design challenge was dealing with a diverted flight destination: 1 in every 1000 flights is diverted. That's why they needed a hybrid engine design. 


12:55 first flight

Myriad detection uses of fiberoptic cable

https://youtu.be/8939X_kFwG4?is=jGBXjUpU9_xcxLFn

So intriguing. Detecting back-scatter reflections that occur at temperature or pressure points in fiberoptic cable can be used to efficiently monitor oil boreholes, seismic activity, elephants walking onto Indian railroads, whales singing in the ocean, and tankers or submarines. Telecom companies often lay down excess cable capacity, and these as-yet unused fibers can be used for such monitoring. 

Saturday, September 5, 2026

Tesla ramps up production

https://youtu.be/MvLQ0ygZoqM?is=CNria5Z1NT3uFMfT

Lofty goals to increase production rates to unheard-of rates. "Unboxed production," which really just means parallel manufacturing assembly lines, is explained at 12:32. 

Best explanation of JPEG

https://youtu.be/0me3guauqOU?is=K4Bpw4XNWvZMtrfl

Very clear detailed description of how compression happens mathematically. 

Best explanation of MP3 music compression

https://youtu.be/jFjDoELxonU?is=iC_N0zX5G_9o8f38

There are a lot of videos out there, but this poorly-edited one is actually one of the better ones. 

Also, useful to view this description of how human hearing functions, at 1:31 in this video. 

Lidar satellites see more

https://youtu.be/UKLuei1CnZY?is=ZKH-uyd20wjBr7pU
Unimpeded by clouds or smoke, LIDAR satellites pan across Earth's entire surface every 12 days. 2:16 Successive images can be compared to observe sub-mm movement. (That implies the satellite plane above the earth is more stable than a sensor on the ground itself.)
4:09 They mapped the interior of a pyramid by listening to it vibrate [from background seismic vibrations] from space. 

Friday, September 4, 2026

Man who made counterfeit $100 bills describes his journey through crime and punishment

https://youtu.be/FGAVpJfG1yQ?is=NlNNU3ase1EYAOy1

This man started counterfeiting at age 19 and spent months protecting his craft and avoiding "bill checker" methods for years and millions of dollars. He used an eye-shadow product to mimic the shiny ink, a fine-tipped glue nozzle to make raised lines, and sprayed a chemical to make the bill-checker pen show the correct color. Ironically, he has to go to bookstores and steal blank pages from Bibles to get the right paper quality. 

World-record most massive vehicle

https://youtu.be/U8772vEfUu8?is=eaUExVAGMvn7h7r0

It harvests a low-grade coal in Germany that's uneconomical unless mind at a huge scale for nearby use in generating power. 

960 frames per sec on a $700 camera

https://youtu.be/Wpko8vAJcEk?is=2-Ww2b0rKcwFelCz

This guy does a very feel dive on the specs, but the footage he achieved is pretty amazing. 

Drone warfare on Ukraine's front line

Intense front-line embedded reporting from Ukraine with access to drones, pilots, and their successes and failures and challenges. 
Different reporter, same intense journalism from the front lines. 
https://youtu.be/rqr2sQzYhQw?si=6eBgCO3nGi5FMsuQ

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Surprisingly agile and adaptable "Sunday robotics" home robot

https://youtu.be/QfBw0gMuhaI?is=1-Uf4wlK0htBoBrj
Handling wine glasses is particularly difficult because they're delicate and transparent. 
Folding socks, which are deformable objects, is hard for robots. 

Monday, August 31, 2026

How EV predicts and calculates range and battery state of charge (SOC)

https://youtu.be/0Z4s6LYB7ls?is=d-1kjpYLxPPRresl
Range anxiety is countered by knowing exactly how much that you have left. Calculating it is not straightforward! 
Can't use voltage because a large portion of the curve is flat. 

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Micro mini drone

https://youtu.be/wZlViCPCWJw?is=cjrgdRuPeiBwYjo-

I'm surprised how well the flight controller adjusts to the new configuration seamlessly and flies with stability. 

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Subliminal messages increase strength and hostility


"death-related words were subliminally primed...We recorded handgrip force..,male participants in the priming-plus-self condition had a higher peak force output than the priming and control conditions" 

When people are exposed to death-related concepts—even flashing words like "death" subliminally for milliseconds—it activates unconscious existential anxiety. To cope with this hidden fear, the human mind clings tighter to its cultural values, beliefs, and familiar groups to regain a sense of safety and meaning...subjects frequently display heightened intolerance, harsher judgments, and increased hostility toward anyone who looks different, holds opposing views, or belongs to a different racial or social group.

Sunday, August 23, 2026

WAMI wide-area motion imagery

https://youtu.be/cWbBsfwtCIo?is=FcDSbLoyAWbIjGVI

Developed to trace military bomb drop-offs back in time to their origin, this deep dive of modern wide-area, AI-assisted surveillance is, well, eye-opening. 

For more of a deep dive into thei technology, there's thie following book: "Eyes in the Sky," by Arthur H. Michel. 

High-tech cars may not keep up with software updates

https://youtu.be/_FfIx2cOEYs?is=cVWPAca1XV1PMQ0O

2:52 the average age of cars on the road has reached an all-time high of 12.8 years. 

Saturday, August 22, 2026

Robot copies human movement

https://youtu.be/YJSw0Jf8DZ0?is=QAx6NlsCPqaxbrqU

A humanoid robot that can watch a human and immediately reproduce their movement. 

Friday, August 21, 2026

Every life form struggles to prevent cancer


45:20 from the very first multi cell organism onwards, life has been about cells shooting at each other to prevent one feel from becoming cancer. As soon as one cell starts replicating faster, it is naturally selecting for itself. 

Thinning of forests, instead of clear-cutting

https://youtu.be/ggWBECTC81w?is=-Zlt7T5VoDMlHkOT

Keeping the large trees standing mitigates fire risk. The logging company realized they needed to fund the environmental analysis and re-tooled the mills to handle small logs. 

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Timeline for tsunami modeled


I didn't realize it takes hours for a tsunami to traverse Puget sound. https://www.facebook.com/share/1CxTLwCxnz/
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BYD EV for $7800

Interesting video explaining all the people losing money on cheap EV's from China, notably factory workers enduring "slavery-like" conditions, and billions of Chinese government subsidies. 
Have they started selling Chinese EV's in Canada? I heard the PM is allowing 49000 of them in under a reduced tariff (NPR story )

Friday, August 14, 2026

A better lifeboat system

https://youtube.com/shorts/fDe_ya9VZcI?is=gdrGX-ETbhTQEA8h

This flexible escape shaft and self-inflating raft seem a lot gentler than the traditional design, and, as they point out, can deploy even if the shop is leaning at any angle. 

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Claude learns your skill and copies your workflow

This could be a really good time saver... until it made a mistake and went rogue. I would be reticent to give AI complete control over my files like this...

Sunday, August 9, 2026

How GPS works

To get accurate position, the satellites are "told" their position from earth stations that locate relative to quasars. That enable accounting for tectonic movement. 
Signals from the satellite are 50 watts, so only a quadrillionth of a watt reaches your phone - easily drowned out by jamming signals. 
The signal from the satellite gets distorted on the ionosphere, adding several meters of uncertainty. 

Wackadoodle car propulsion idea

A very thorough discussion of the physics of a wacky compressed air vehicle that slides the wheels back and forth. He even builds a 3-D printed model of the idea. He also explains why  rapid cooling as air expands is the downfall of previous compressed-air-driven vehicles, and the volume of air required to achieve range. 
https://youtu.be/WvePFAgMECo?is=4tptWfWhdXPOq3hB


Thursday, August 6, 2026

Using stored terrain data to locate position

As humans, we navigate by recognizing landmarks. This system recognizes everything from buildings and rivers to mountain peaks to determine position when GPS is jammed. 

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

Electric Nissan RV with 400 mile range

87 kilowatt-hour battery pack...real wood cabinets and countertops, a 90-liter refrigerator, and induction stove...Truma-Eezy auxiliary heater...$103,479...doesn't seem to be coming to the U.S.
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Dan's quote

No employee is ever perfect. If they were perfect they wouldn't be working for you


Are 2nd babies born at a different time of year?

A highly popular strategy among second-time parents is to deliberately wait until August or September to conceive. This ensures they experience the bulk of their pregnancy during autumn and winter, allowing them to wear comfortable layers and avoid peak summer heat entirely while heavily pregnant.
First vs. Second: Across the general population, a massive volume of first-born conceptions happens spontaneously during late fall and winter holiday seasons, leading to an involuntary influx of late-summer births.
Intentional timeline: Because second-time parents are more experienced with tracking cycles and managing family timelines, they are far more likely to practice deliberate contraceptive spacing to override seasonal patterns and force a preferred birth month.
Energy conservation: Couples take into account that managing a first-born's outdoor summer activities while simultaneously experiencing third-trimester exhaustion and heat stress is structurally unsustainable. This makes planning for a winter or spring birth much more appealing the second time around.

Your customer service chat bot puts the company on the hook

Air Canada's chatbot lied to a customer. Then the airline argued in court that the bot was on its own — it didn't go well.

Jake booked a flight after his grandmother died. Before buying, he asked Air Canada's website chatbot about bereavement fares. The bot told him he could book now and apply for the discount within 90 days.

So he did.

Then Air Canada rejected the refund. Because that policy the chatbot described? It didn't exist. The bot made it up.

Jake took them to a tribunal. Air Canada's defense was that the chatbot is a "separate legal entity" responsible for its own actions. In plain English, the airline argued it shouldn't be on the hook for what its own bot said.

The tribunal was not amused. The ruling basically said a chatbot is still just part of your website. You're responsible for everything on it, whether it comes from a page or a bot. Air Canada paid up.

The lesson isn't "don't use chatbots." It's simpler and scarier than that: whatever your AI says, you said. There is no version where the bot is the one who messed up. The customer doesn't see a bot. They see your company making a promise.

A lot of owners are racing to automate customer-facing stuff right now to save a few bucks. Fine. But every automated word that goes out under your name is a word you're legally and morally on the hook for.

If a human employee promised something wrong, you'd own it. The bot is no different. It's just faster at being wrong.
https://www.facebook.com/share/19BJsMwjiz/


Sunday, August 2, 2026

Truck reversing

Wow, some clever driving! Especially with all the idiots trying to go around his truck in tight spaces. 

Friday, July 31, 2026

Dramatic rescue

Can you imagine going through this? I can't believe he was still conscious when they picked him up. 
https://youtu.be/GBLQEnYy_68?is=EKbAk0cgTKttUpza


Wednesday, July 29, 2026

What a cute story! Skagit County teens and seniors swap life, tech skills

...putting teenagers and senior citizens in a room together so they could learn from one another.

The event, called “Ageless Intelligence,” took place in Sedro-Woolley where a banquet hall was set up like a science fair. There were booths with titles like, “How to do a reverse image search,” and, “What’s a large language model?”

Around 30 seniors between the ages of 60 and 85 mingled with more than 100 16- and 17-year-olds. 

...a giant skills swap. The teenagers gave presentations about AI and technology. The seniors gave presentations about animal rescue and how to fix a flat tire.

[A senior] explained the art of writing a letter — by hand.
...they almost had to cancel the event because they couldn’t get enough seniors to enroll. 
“I saw a different side of the teenagers. They were polite, caring, interested in each other and talking to older people."
https://www.kuow.org/education/2026-05-28/teens-seniors-swap-life-and-tech-skills


Sunday, July 26, 2026

Boston's "Museum of Bad Art"

Many paintings submitted are rejected. "Works must demonstrate serious artistic intent, possess an "Oh my God" quality, and above all, not be boring." https://whichmuseum.com/news/museum-of-bad-art-where-artistic-failures-become-celebrated-masterpieces-83

Here's a documentary about it. 


Saturday, July 25, 2026

Friday, July 24, 2026

Contagious cancer in fish

The cancer cells on the fish were all similar to each other and very different from their hosts. The possibilities of such a tumor happening in humans are particularly ominous. 

Thursday, July 23, 2026

Radical Acceptance

1:19:25 in the Hidden Brain episode "Changing our Mental Maps," in the Q&A appended section about the show "Radical Acceptance." 

What's the difference between "It is what it is," and radical acceptance? 
Radical acceptance invites me through acceptance to not become passive. Passivity, as the outcome of acceptance, means you've not changed your mind about everything. What radical acceptance is supposed to do is to free you to change your mind about what can be not get stuck on what can't be and then move into that. The reason acceptance helps is you're no longer wasting your time on something that didn't require your attention, so you can do that which deserves your attention to some distance pointed out day. 

Victor Borge Claire de Lune

https://youtu.be/1mPJ3hm6M5I?is=0X6isbzXsE2D4Sz2

Absolutely beautiful performance. I love how he plays around with the tempo so delicately. 

Here's a rare recording of Debussy himself playing it. 

And here's Victor Borge at his best doing comedy. 
Very funny - the "page turner" 

Preventing relapse into depression

Comedian Gary Gulman describes having to be "vigilant" so he doesn't relapse into depression. 
What does he mean:
11:09 "Exercising every day, eating right, getting enough sleep, taking on projects that keep me busy, and accepting invitations." 

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Training robots pays

https://youtu.be/yfZhpEupz5M?is=9BWaAP3yxoZ7n1zC
This innovative idea pays people to clean houses for free, while wearing cameras to gather data about household chores. 
Smart startup - have your home cleaned for free by people wearing headsets that train robots for everyday tasks. 
You just have to ignore the privacy concerns.