The guy that made the incredible marble machine is back at it with two new instruments and a new composition.
He uses a punch-card driven music box (can you say computers in the 1970’s!) and plays a newly written tune on his Modulin – a theremin-like device. Not sure I like it as much as his old tune, but it’s an interesting contraption of Legos, wood, and a creativity combination of old tech.
Have trouble parallel parking or getting in/out of really tight places? Try these!
“Setup on this car has an incredible 24,000 pounds of torque directly on the tires. Speed can be adjusted for target application.”
It is not just that AI’s are doing complex tasks, it’s that they increasingly doing complex evaluative tasks better than the best humans in the whole world. These AI’s can be written by a few (or just one) persons using off-the-shelf compute. This makes it available to almost anyone – at prices far below the price of an average yearly employee salary.
‘A pilot A.I. developed by a doctoral graduate from the University of Cincinnati has shown that it can not only beat other A.I.s, but also a professional fighter pilot with decades of experience. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully evaded retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene “Geno” Lee, and shot him down every time. In a statement, Lee called it “the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible A.I. I’ve seen to date.”‘
There’s a lot going on here. A computer should be able to defeat a human pilot due to its lack of concern about excessive G forces and other ‘wet-ware’/human factors. It can take advantage of the full capabilities of our modern strike craft (such as sustained dozen+ G turns) without an concerns of blacking out or loss of cognitive powers.
But there are other serious considerations.
Ease of Creating Systems better than the Best
We see that a single doctoral graduate at a public university was able to create something from commercially available hardware using well published/studied fuzzy logic algorithms that is able to beat some of the world’s best pilots. Consistently. With a little work, in theory, this could be plugged into a real jet and it could take out a good portion of the US, or any other, Air Force. It’s not science fiction – it’s doable by anyone in the world today with the desire and a jet. That puts this easily in the realm of all the superpowers, and even into the hand of a number of 2nd world dictatorships. The compute power, the algorithms, and everything except for the jet are available to you and I today.
The logical response is to then develop AI’s that can fight the other AI’s. This leads to an arms race where humans are not even a part of outside of the tricky work of training and writing the statistical training for the AI’s. Now we have autonomous weapons of war, armed for combat, fighting each other in which people would no longer be able to compete against. The ramifications of this are somewhat staggering – all the way up to a SkyNet style apocalypse. I would recommend the book “Killing without Heart” by Shane Riza for more on this topic.
Social impact
In just the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of IBM’s Deep Blue ravage Jeopardy and defeat chess grand masters. Google AI defeated the Go world champion numerous times. On the commercial front, the rise of Siri/Google voice and other systems that use AI techniques to recognize speech and context get better and better each day. Self driving cars are already becoming a reality and may replace all taxi systems. The US Postal system already uses machines that operate on 30,000 letters per hour (8 letters/second) and have eliminated rooms full of people. What’s surprising is that a lot of these feats are done with machines that only cost about the salary of a single employee for a year.
The ever increasing pace shows us this is becoming widespread and is rapidly being adopted by wide sections of industry. Cloud companies are already in place selling the compute for pennies (Google I/O just announced it is releasing it’s AI systems for super-low prices of just $10/mo). As it replaces big pieces of our day to day lives, it is going to be a profound impact on our society – much like the industrial revolution. It’s not that we can (or should?) stop this development, but these technologies are going to have an even bigger impact than the internet. With that, there are a lot of things to considered with each new development if we wish to avoid to social disasters that plagued the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. It would really be good for us to start thinking about these issues before they become serious problems.
Machine Morals
To that end, we see people already working on imbuing machine learning with morals. We got our first view of how wrong things can go when Microsoft had to shut down it’s Twitter AI Tay after just 24 hours when it started spouting racism, denied the Holocaust, and worse. We also saw a AI controlled robot mysterious escape from a lab – twice. We cannot ignore that these systems will do unpredictable and unexpected things.
So, in the end, we have massively trans-formative technology entering our society. It’s probably a good idea to realize these things are not ‘if’, but ‘when’ realities that will come in our lifetimes. Maybe we should start talking about how we want to live with them in the new world it will create.
The Blackbird is the world’s first fully adjustable car rig that cannot only alter its chassis to match the precise length and width of almost any car, but its looks as well. Using CGI, the car rig can be re-skinned to look like any car, and its electric motor can be programmed to emulate the driving characteristics of the subject car, too. Automotive content producers no longer need the physical vehicle for a shoot as the Blackbird is a do-it-all-rig.
Great article on the something they are calling ‘Scientism’.
Pythagorean would often invoke the great master Aristotle in order to end a debate. Today we call this logical fallacy the “appeal to authority,” yet we continue to indulge it. Only now, our master is science or, more often, what appears to be science.
The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century was driven by testing and rejecting such appeals to authority. Whether scripture, tradition, or Aristotle, authority could not be allowed to substitute for logic and evidence. Yet the provisional conclusions of research frequently are announced as definitive before the scientific community has adequately vetted them. But the prestige of science and its scholarly institutions can often obscure just how tentative the claims of much research are. The anti-vaccination movement is an example of the dangers caused by bad or fraudulent scientific research.
Hood Canal Cabin by Castanes Architects PS and Ray C. Freeman III
This is the kind of cabin I’d love to own. I love how it’s raised a good 10’+ from the ground so break ins/critter annoyances are greatly minimized when you’re not there, and it allows you to safely leave windows open when you are there.
“The square floor plan rotated so that the living room corner with the tall windows faces the water view. This simple strategy makes the cabin seem larger than its 800 ft2(74.3 m2). People’s eyes are naturally drawn to the windows, so they end up looking towards a corner that is further away than the closest wall. The 16′ high ceiling also contributes significantly to the sense of spaciousness. Vertical elements such as the window mullions and the built-in shelf unit lead the eye upward.”
FiveThirtyEight’s solicited users for the ultimate wedding playlist, based on the most popular songs among the reception set lists people sent in:
| 1 | Hey Ya! | ||
| 2 | I Wanna Dance With Somebody | 57 | |
| 3 | Uptown Funk | 55 | |
| 4 | Shout | 54 | |
| 5 | Crazy In Love | 50 | |
| 6 | Don’t Stop Believin’ | 45 | |
| 7 | Billie Jean | 44 | |
| 7 | Get Lucky | 44 | |
| 7 | Twist and Shout | 44 | |
| 10 | Shut Up and Dance | 43 | |
| 11 | September | 41 | |
| 11 | Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough | 41 | |
| 13 | Yeah! | 40 | |
| 14 | I Want You Back | 39 | |
| 14 | You Make My Dreams | 39 | |
| 16 | Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours) | 38 | |
| 17 | Sweet Caroline | 36 | |
| 18 | Happy | 34 | |
| 18 | We Found Love | 34 | |
| 20 | Call Me Maybe | 33 | |
| 20 | Ignition (Remix) | 33 |
Here’s the top artists:
| ARTIST | SET LIST APPEARANCES | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michael Jackson | 202 | |
| 2 | Beyoncé | 130 | |
| 3 | The Beatles | 120 | |
| 4 | Stevie Wonder | 108 | |
| 5 | Outkast | 94 | |
| 6 | Queen | 88 | |
| 7 | Rihanna | 85 | |
| 8 | Van Morrison | 74 | |
| 9 | The Jackson 5 | 73 | |
| 10 | Justin Timberlake | 71 | |
| 10 | Whitney Houston | 71 | |
| 12 | Daft Punk | 69 | |
| 13 | Prince | 64 | |
| 14 | Pitbull | 63 | |
| 15 | Lady Gaga | 59 | |
| 15 | Mark Ronson | 59 | |
| 15 | Usher | 59 | |
| 18 | Journey | 58 | |
| 19 | The Isley Brothers | 57 | |
| 20 | Elvis Presley | 52 | |
| 21 | Earth, Wind & Fire | 50 | |
| 21 | Frank Sinatra | 50 | |
| 21 | Kanye West | 50 | |
| 21 | The Temptations | 50 |
Romanian photographer Mihaela Noroc quits her job and travels around the world taking photos of women to create the ‘Atlas of Beauty’. Far from being a beauty contest, she tries to show how we are one large family. I hold out hope we can heal and find a way to live that vision someday.
Despite all our efforts, each of us experiences difficult and tragic moments in life. We will all experience the death of loved ones or life altering illnesses or accidents to ourselves or others. Modern society has relegated death largely to hospitals (instead of the home where 90% of deaths occurred even as recently as 100 years ago) and the dissolution of nuclear family support systems have left many of us poorly equipped to emotionally deal with these events. Yet, I think most of us know of a relative, friend, religious leader who seems to know what to say and is a gentle pillar in our times of need. They make the journey through these dark valleys much easier in a way that seems almost natural. The truth is that this isn’t something that comes naturally to most. Instead, it is sometimes called learning how to ‘holding space’ or ‘holding sacred space’ for someone.
Holding space means that we are willing to walk with another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome. When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgement and control. It creates an environment where people can feel what they need to feel with someone they trust and in doing so, learn how to listen to and trust themselves and their abilities to do the right things. This space allows them to acknowledge and process the often dramatic, illogical, and out of control feelings and thoughts that are common during these moments instead of burying or having them judged and discounted. In my experience, it’s how we become conduits of Christ for others.
Anyway, here’s the 8 points that this article covers about how to hold space for others. I recommend it as a read.
1. Give people permission to trust their own intuition and wisdom.
2. Give people only as much information as they can handle.
3. Don’t take their power away.
4. Keep your own ego out of it.
5. Make them feel safe enough to fail.
6. Give guidance and help with humility and thoughtfulness.
7. Create a container for complex emotions, fear, trauma, etc.
8. Allow them to make different decisions and to have different experiences than you would.
If the government owes you money and you do not collect it, then it’s unclaimed. This also applies to defunct banks, credit unions, pensions, mortgages, and other sources. The following site gives you all the links on how to look for unclaimed money and avoid scams related to unclaimed funds.