I've been terribly swamped with work the last week, and when I wasn't working, I was loudly defending gun rights. Subsequently, the lack of actual content on this site has been lacking. Here's some links to make it up to you, dear readers.This is a great technology.Telemedicine is the future, especially when the phone in your pocket is a fully-functional computer.Google's Ingress game would be a lot more fun with this.A great read about bionics and neural interfaces.I know I promised a statistical comparison of engineering unemployment rates and...
Monday, 24 December 2012
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
I started digging up statistics. For the following graph, I used data from the FBI and CDC's Vital Statistics Report. All numbers represent 2011. 2012 data is not yet fully available obviously.Figure 1. Number of Americans Killed in 2011 By Major CauseYou'll notice that cigarettes cause 44,300 deaths for every one person killed by an assault weapon. Will the President announce a "cigarette control task force"?And then this:Figure 2. Gun-related deaths...
Monday, 17 December 2012
For $10, these and many other deaths from guns could be completely prevented. It's called a "gun lock" and it completely neutralizes a gun. Many guns come with them for free.People are talking about guns with RFID, guns with biometrics, gun bans, gun regulations...and on and on but I haven't heard one person mention that if Adam Lanza's mom had put a gun lock on her AR...not one of those kids would be dea...
Since the finger-pointing is in full effect, here's why I think this issue is a teensy bit complicated.So back in 1996 then-nobody Barack Obama urged a statewide ban on assault weapons in Illinois. Then, in 2004 while debating Alan Keyes he argued President Bush erred to not renew the assault weapons ban. Then in 2008 while running for President he suggested that reinstating the assault weapons ban was extremely important.Then he got elected. And when actually could reinstate the assault weapons ban...he deferred. I don't care whether you are pro-ban...
Friday, 14 December 2012
I read with some mirth this article by Dan Lyons reporting on the retraction of Series A financing in Silicon Valley to software and app startups:PandoDaily is reporting on the “Series A crunch” in which companies that have raised seed funding now are discovering (presumably to their utter amazement) that actual venture capitalists aren’t as stupid as the angels who gave them their first bag of cash, and, given the opportunity to invest in their pointless companies, the VCs have decided to politely decline. Thus, now we are facing a “nuclear winter"...
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
So a "small British company" claims to have built a jet engine that is going to make jet engines look like propellor engines [relevant]. All they need is $400 million to build a bigger prototype.Once in a while, we hear about these sorts of scenarios. A good example was Bussard's Polywell Fusion Reactor, which promises unlimited, clean, terrorist-proof, electrical power generation at low cost. They had a small prototype and just needed one Godzillion dollars to build a bigger prototype and move towards commercialization.Yours truly is a big fan...
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
So it's a tragedy if African Lions are being massively depopulated, and "there has to be a political commitment to protect wildlife," but trust me, no one in Kansas is super eager to return roving packs of wolves and a sizable population of cougars to our area. Lions are an apex predator. So are humans. One per area is a pretty safe bet."But there should be lions in Africa - for tourism," one might counter-argue. Fine. Then (for tourism) there should be wild packs of wolves on the Plains, widespread black bears east of the Mississippi, Grizzlies...
Monday, 3 December 2012
Jason Whitlock suggests that guns are to blame for Jevon Belcher's murder/suicide Saturday morning: Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What...
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
By now the general consensus is that the third Iron Man movie, due out May 2013 (is it too early to camp out for the midnight showing?) will cover, in some form, the Extremis storyline from the Iron Man comic book circa 2005. What was Extremis? Carbon nanotubes. An injection of special carbon nanotubes "rewrote" the brain's internal map of the human body. The person injected then went into a coma, formed a cocoon of scar tissue, and emerged 2 or...
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
While the media slobbers violently all over the Patraeus/Allen scandal, here's three questions to take into your Wednesday:1) Why were the names Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley ever made public in the first place? These women are not guilty of a crime. The Grand Jury system exists (partially) to protect the anonymity of those loosely involved with a potential crime but should they be cleared of wrong-doing, their anonymity is supposed to remain intact. There are media vans parked 24/7 outside Paula Broadwell's house for no reason whatsoever.2)...
Monday, 12 November 2012
I have to ask it: what would Robin Hanson tell a 25-year-old kid, who "had a vague inkling about how to make a difference but didn't know how to do it." Would he have empowered that young man to achieve every inch of his possibility, to embrace every chance for greatness, to throw his energy and intelligence at idealist causes?If that 25-year-old came into Hanson's office and said "I want to 'attach myself' to causes like helping kids get an education and helping people who are living in poverty to get decent jobs and work. I want to make sure...
Friday, 9 November 2012
First, watch this video. It's only 3 minutes long. Back? Okay let's get started.First, that thing looks awesome. Independently articulating fingers, carbon fiber shell, neat whirring noise as it articulates, battery integrated into design and not externally worn...everything about it looks sweet. Even the carbon black color gives it an almost sinister, technological appearance.But.I watched that video and waited for the magic moment when I'd be impressed....
Thursday, 1 November 2012
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile." -Chuck PalahnuikHanson gratiously responds. And now that I know he is listening I just want to say I find him an incredible person and am a devoted and long-time reader. His article on Unfriendly AI led me to read Singularity Rising, which I enjoyed. Nevertheless (and probably because I am a fan and subsequently hold him to a high standard), I stand by what I wrote regarding his post. I appreciate...
Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson writes:Humans have long lives. We are unusually dependent on our parents when young, and we then slowly gain competence over a lifetime, usually reaching peak productivity in our forties and fifties. Most of the time we are aware of this. For example, we count on our peak earning years by taking out loans as young students, and later saving for retirement. And we prefer leaders at those peak ages. But when people get idealistic, they tend to forget this.Young idealists often ask me and others what they can...
Monday, 29 October 2012
Finally, an excuse to explain this word!! Syzygy (pronounced sis-zeh-gee) is when the Sun, Earth, and Moon all form a line. This happens twice a lunar cycle, once during full moon and once during new moon. During Syzygy, the tides are stronger. Much stronger.This is relevant because Hurricane Sandy's storm surge should be crushing Long Island Sound right about the time the Syzygy-induced high tide rolls i...
Saturday, 27 October 2012
Friday, 26 October 2012
Andrew Sullivan, with his usual bravado, provides three reasons why morally he thinks the right thing to do is to vote against Mitt Romney. TL;DR: On the universality of access to healthcare, on torture, and on pre-emptive war, my conscience therefore requires me to withhold support for the Republican candidate. I disagree with him on many prudential policy grounds - but none reach the level of moral seriousness of the above.Of course, on these three things I agree with Sullivan. Absolutely I believe that health care is a peculiar institution...
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Hillel Fuld:This kind of cheap and inaccurate marketing on Apple’s part is to me a clear indication that it knows its tablet dominance is for the first time, being threatened. It knows the iPad Mini cannot compete with the competition if you take all factors that matter including performance, graphics, and price into account, and it planned this launch accordingly...I hate to say it again and state the obvious but this kind of product launch and cheap marketing tactic would never have happened if a certain someone was still running this company....
Friday, 19 October 2012
January 18, 2016. My device works. Building on the brain-machine interface work done by Parviz, Hanson, and others, I developed a coding language that could translate neural signals to digital 1's and 0's, and translate the other direction as well. The oversimplified description is a biological AC/DC converter. I didn't have any research money to do a clinical study yet, so I implanted it in myself. In my right arm. I hijacked the signal to and from my index and middle fingers, then wrote script in the ADC to "right click" and "left click". Double...
Monday, 15 October 2012
A quietly unadvertised truth is that there are resources on this planet that are being exhausted that don't involve your car or your wallet. We hear all the time about "peak oil" or "peak coal" or the depopulation of various fish species.Less often we hear about the increasing rarity of "rare earth metals" specifically neodymium.One resource we are rapidly depleting but you never hear about is helium. It turns out that there's not a lot of helium...
Thursday, 11 October 2012
Here's a video out by Thomas Peterffy.Here's a link to the wikipedia article that explains what "socialism" in Hungary was like during Thomas Peterffy's childhood.An excerpt:The name [goulash communism] is a semi-humorous metaphor derived from "goulash", a popular Hungarian dish. As goulash is made with an assortment of unlike ingredients, it represents how Hungarian communism was a mixed ideology and no longer strictly adhering to Stalinist interpretations as in the past. Sometimes described as "the happiest barrack in the socialist camp," Hungary...
Friday, 5 October 2012
Monday, 1 October 2012
If President Obama is reelected I see a clear example of specialization-elimination in effect here.Let's say each of the GOP primary candidates represented a group of the same species of bird, all in a suddenly-secluded valley (isolated ecosystem for this example). They each compete with each other for food and mates. Because they are isolated, they begin to specialize. And so in order to win the most mates, each group employs strange tactics, either by evolving absurd plumage or by doing a dance/song/nest-building ritual. And let's assume...
Friday, 28 September 2012
An update on the Sarcos Exoskeleton I mentioned: "With a tethered power source, you could likely see [the exoskeleton deployed] within five years," says Fraser Smith, vice president of operations for Raytheon Sarcos, located in Salt Lake City. "For a suit that operates on its own power, it's probably more like a decade away."I've cross-referenced this XKCD comic, for your referenc...
Building an Iron Man suit is hard (of course). That's why Sarcos/Raytheon's suit disappeared into vaporware, why the HULC exoskeleton barely registers google searches, and why no one is pulling them out of suitcases out at grand prix race and defeating guys with plasma-powered whips.But if you're going to build it, you have to start somewhere. Here's something I find completely astounding, for two reasons. Reason Number One is that it is almost the exact design I proposed to my friend Josh a month ago and am pleased to see that I am good at...
Thursday, 27 September 2012
The Atlantic pays Alexis Madrigal a lot of money to basically outline what I outlined for free TWO YEARS ago.This isn't a knock on Madrigal. I think he's a great writer and I like many of his articles. But they should pay him to produce quality original content, not to regurgitate what thinkers in this field have been touting as obvious for year...
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Friday, 14 September 2012
Dear kids of America under 15:If you were 3 when it happened, I am more than happy to have you post something memorial about 9/11 on your Facebook wall.But please, please stop saying "Never Forget." You were probably still in diapers. You can't forget something if you weren't aware it happened.It'd be like me saying "Challenger explosion: never forget...
Monday, 10 September 2012
Out here at work, we've got a pop machine and a snack machine. The prices are outrageously high. It used to be just a pop machine, but then they added the snack machine, asking $0.90 for the smallest of items. This made me angry, both because of the slow roll of inflation but also because I could buy two of the same item at a grocery store for that price - was the convenience charge really 100%?So I fashioned a hilarious meme to put on the vending machine. I was going to print it and tape it to the machine...I figured the rest of the folks out...
Thursday, 6 September 2012
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
"It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest." - Buckminster Fuller, 1970 Two disclosures. First, I'm an egotist. I've worked really hard to get where I am and that has helped me, but my character is a proud one and I feel like I matter in the sense that my actions have far-reaching consequences, good or bad. I like to think I am a growing influence in the world of engineering, in Kansas City, and in the world. Second, my first engineering job after grad school was laying...
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