AI: The Metamorphosis

Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher discuss AI: "The Metamorphosis"

Henry A. Kissinger served as national security adviser and secretary of state to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Eric Schmidt is the former CEO and chairman of Alphabet.

Daniel Huttenlocher is the founder and former dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech and the current dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Fake French Minister

Con man wears fake latex mask of French defense minister, swindles millions from wealthy victims:

For two years from late 2015, an individual or individuals impersonating France's defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, scammed an estimated €80m (£70m; $90m) from wealthy victims including the Aga Khan and the owner of Château Margaux wines.

The hustle required targets to believe they were being contacted by Mr Le Drian, who then requested financial help to pay ransoms for journalists being held hostage by Islamists in the Middle East...

So, in meetings arranged on Skype, the fraudster wore a custom-made Le Drian mask and sat in a facsmile of Le Drian's ministerial office, complete with flags and portrait of then-President François Hollande.

Light Posting Notice

Admin note: Posting may be lighter than usual the remainder of this week and next week, due to external obligations.

Amazon Nomads

"Anderson is an Amazon nomad, part of a small group of merchants who travel the backroads of America searching clearance aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on Amazon." (Via H.R.)

GE Smart Light Bulb Reset

Bruce Schneier: "Resetting Your GE Smart Light Bulb:"

If you need to reset the software in your GE smart light bulb -- firmware version 2.8 or later -- just follow these easy instructions:

Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.

1. Turn on for 8 seconds
2. Turn off for 2 seconds
3. Turn on for 8 seconds
4. Turn off for 2 seconds
5. Turn on for 8 seconds
6. Turn off for 2 seconds
7. Turn on for 8 seconds
8. Turn off for 2 seconds
9. Turn on for 8 seconds
10. Turn off for 2 seconds
11. Turn on

Bulb will flash on and off 3 times if it has been successfully reset.

Welcome to the future!

Crawford On Bicycles

Jason Crawford: "Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?"

Lightning Attractor

"This Cell Tower in the Swiss Alps Is Struck by Lightning More Than 100 Times a Year". (Via H.R.)

Tourism Secret

"The Best Way to Tour a City Is Through Its Grocery Store"

The secret museum in every city is a grocery store. It’s where you can grab and squeeze and not-at-all-weirdly smell indigenous produce. The fishmonger runs an aquarium. The butcher is a zookeeper. But groceries also hoard the culture’s guilty pleasures — its Netflix-and-chill snacks are in its potato-chip flavors (my native London favorite was a packet of sea-salt-and-Chardonnay-wine-vinegar crisps, and Marmite ones always hit the spot, too). Its childhoods are in its confections (I loved Icelandic Prince Polo chocolate bars, which are actually imported from Poland).

Grasping Adversarial Objects

"Robots Have a Hard Time Grasping These 'Adversarial Objects'"

Filming The Tour De France

"The helicopter team that films the Tour de France is one of a kind". (Via H.R.)

Pizza Hut In Klingon

"Watch this fantastic 1994 Pizza Hut TV commercial that's entirely in Klingon"

Great Wave

Thoughts on digital access to The Great Wave by Katsushika Hokusai.

BTW, this is one of my favorites pieces of artwork.

Translating Long-Lost Languages

"Machine learning has been used to automatically translate long-lost languages"

Botanical Sexism

"Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies":

It’s the time year for watery eyes and itchy noses, and if you’re among the afflicted, you may be surprised to learn that decades of botanical sexism in urban landscapes have contributed to your woes.

Serial Toilet Clogger

Headline of the day: "Sheboygan serial toilet clogger sentenced to 150 days in jail, probation". (Via Marginal Revolution.)

AI Poker Update

"No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game"

Kitty Litter

"How Kitty Litter went from happy accident to $2 billion industry". (Via H.R.)

Escalators

"How the Escalator Forever Changed Our Sense of Space"

Goats Vs. Backyard

Video: "Timelapse of Goats Eating a Backyard"

Emojis and The Law

"Emojis are increasingly coming up in court cases. Judges are struggling with how to interpret them."

Alive After 41,000 Years

Worms frozen for 41,000 years in permafrost were found to still be alive after thawed.

Self-Driving Tesla Update

"Is a real, honest-to-goodness, self-driving Tesla on the way?"

Musk, in response to an inquiry about Tesla’s hardware systems, said late Sunday that the company could offer its new Fully Self Driving chip — FSD for short — as an upgrade to more than 500,000 older-model Teslas by the end of this year.

“End of Q4, most likely,” was how Musk replied to a question about when the company would start retrofitting cars that currently include Hardware 2 (HW2), a set of sensors, radars and cameras that Tesla rolled out almost three years ago, with the implication that such cars would eventually have full, autonomous driving capabilities.

Magnus Carlsen 2.0

Tyler Cowen: "The new and improved Magnus Carlsen"

Cowen describes a unique strategy adopted by the current world #1 chess master:

Other grandmasters prepare the opening in the hope of achieving an early advantage over their opponents.  Magnus’s preparation, in contrast, is directed at achieving an early disadvantage in the game, perhaps willing to tolerate as much as -0.5 or -0.6 by the standards of the computer (a significant but not decisive disadvantage, with -2 signifying a lost position).  Nonetheless these are positions “out of book” where Magnus nonetheless feels he can outplay his opponent, and this is mostly opponents from the world top ten or fifteen.

So far it is working.  One commentator wrote: “Magnus is turning into a crushing monster just like Garry. He isn’t the strangler anymore”

And it is hard to counter someone looking for a disadvantage!

Nuking The Moon

"Why the Air Force Almost Blasted the Moon with an H-Bomb"

Autonomous Aircraft Landing

"German Scientists Pull Off Truly Autonomous Aircraft Landing in Stunning Video". (Via H.R.)