Bionic Arm Update: Atom Limbs

BBC: "The 'mind-bending' bionic arm powered by AI". Click through to see some pretty cool video demostrations.

Storage Vs. Time

"Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time"

Hexagons And Board Games

"Hex Marks the Spot"

QC Reality Check

"Quantum Computing's Hard, Cold Reality Check"

1 Petabit Optical Disk

"Meet the Super DVD: Scientists Develop Massive 1 Petabit Optical Disk"

Superbug Killer

"Superbug killer: New synthetic molecule highly effective against drug-resistant bacteria"

Billionaire Survival Bunkers

"Billionaires' Survivalist Bunkers Go Absolutely Bonkers With Fiery Moats and Water Cannons".

Related: "Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound"

NSFW Aviation Art

"A Pilot Drew a Pen*s in the Sky and Wrote 'See Ya' During a 6-Hour Flight". (Via J.P.)

 

175 Millions Guesses Is Too Many For Police

"Police must return phones after 175 million passcode guesses, judge says"

Silicon Valley Vs. Harvard

Time: "Silicon Valley Has a Harvard Problem"

Closing iPhone Apps Myth

"Closing your iPhone apps is a mythical waste of time"

EU And AI

"What the EU's tough AI law means for research and ChatGPT"

RNA Editing

"Move over, CRISPR: RNA-editing therapies pick up steam"

AI Nukes

"AI Deployed Nukes 'to Have Peace in the World' in Tense War Simulation"

Scam Psychology

"The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam."

How very clever scam psychology can take in even wary and educated people. 

Moving Electrons

"Scientists report first look at electrons moving in real-time in liquid water"

About robots.txt

"The text file that runs the internet"

Deep Space Medicine

"Solving astronauts' health challenges in deep space could have payoffs on Earth"

Light Posting

Admin note: Posting will be light for a few days due to external obligations.

Professional Bridesmaids

"The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid"

Responsible AI (Satire)

Video: "World's Most Responsible AI Model" (Satire)

Facebook Security Vulnerability

"How a social engineering hack turned these Facebook pages into a dumping ground for spam". 

Short lesson from one of the scam victims: "At this moment in time, I don't recommend that anybody accepts Facebook Live interviews"

Mandelbrot Decoded

"The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math's Famed Fractal"

Fusion Update

"Fusion research facility's final tritium experiments yield new energy record"

Urban On Vision Pro

Tim Urban: "All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro"

No More Google Page Caches

"Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead"

Art And BS

"A journalist goes undercover to reveal the absurdity of the art scene"

Modern Fake IDs

"Inside the Underground Site Where 'Neural Networks' Churn Out Fake IDs"

Unseen Innovation

Donald Boudreaux: "Unseen Innovation"

NBA Chess

"Inside the NBA's Chess Club"

Dot AI Domains

"The Tiny Caribbean Island That's Making A Fortune From AI"

Back in the 1980s, when the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority was dishing out the geographic two-letter domains, Anguilla had the good fortune to be awarded .ai. That good fortune has turned into an actual fortune, with a huge influx in domain registrations over the past couple of years that have massively boosted the island’s economy.

The boom in .ai domain sales was triggered by the arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022. “In the five months after that, our sales went up by almost a factor of four,” Vince Cate, who manages domain registrations for the Anguillan government, told IEEE Spectrum. “Then they sort of leveled off at this new, much higher level. It’s just wild—we’re already like a third of the government’s budget.”

VF On Apple Vision Pro

Vanity Fair: "Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro"

Functional 16-Bit CPU Built And Runs In Excel

"Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language"

Here's the video, "I built my own 16-Bit CPU in Excel": 

Feynman Reverse Sprinkler

"Mathematicians finally solved Feynman's 'reverse sprinkler' problem". (Via H.R.)

A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That's the essence of the "reverse sprinkler" problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they've cracked the conundrum, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters—and the answer challenges conventional wisdom on the matter...

One might intuit that a reverse sprinkler would work just like a regular sprinkler, merely played backward, so to speak. But the physics turns out to be more complicated. “The answer is perfectly clear at first sight,” Feynman wrote in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985). “The trouble was, some guy would think it was perfectly clear [that the rotation would be] one way, and another guy would think it was perfectly clear the other way.”

Bitcoin Electricity Use

Ars Technica: "Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to bitcoin"

Hsieh Forbes Column: How Much Basic Math And Health Statistics Should Legislators Know?

My latest Forbes is now out: "How Much Basic Math And Health Statistics Should Legislators Know?"

How much basic math do legislators know?

The Royal Statistical Society asked 101 members of the U.K. Parliament in 2021, “If you toss a fair coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?” The correct answer is, of course, 1/4 or 25%.

However, only 52% of the MPs got the answer correct. On the bright side, this is an improvement from 2011, when only 40% of the MPs got the answer correct.

My first thought when I learned about this study: I would love to know how U.S. congressmen would perform with the question...

 

2024 Robotaxis

"What's next for robotaxis in 2024"

Repeating Patterns In Conway's Game Of Life

"Math's 'Game of Life' Reveals Long-Sought Repeating Patterns"

Huemer On The Infinite

Michael Huemer: "Virtue and Vice Among the Infinite"