Bezos and his enemies:
“Competition is super healthy … Great industries are never made by single companies. And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners … At Blue Origin, our biggest opponent is gravity. The physics of this problem are challenging enough … Gravity is not watching us and saying, ‘Uh-oh those Blue Origin guys are getting really good, I’m going to have increase my gravitational constant.’ Gravity doesn’t care about us at all.”
Octobot is “the first ever self-contained, completely soft robot”.
(It’s static, at this point, so more like a robot anemone.)
Bartholomäus Traubeck created equipment that would translate tree rings into music by playing them on a turntable. Rather than use a needle like a record, sensors gather information about the wood’s color and texture and use an algorithm that translates variations into piano notes. The breadth of variation between individual trees results in a individualized tune. The album, appropriately titled “Years,” features spruce, ash, oak, maple, alder, walnut, and beech trees.
Source, with audio, here.
A new experimental sound-source:
… in 1987, a totally unexpected revolution took place: a new family of superconductors based on copper and oxygen smashed all records, taking the highest known superconducting temperatures up to a balmy −150C. BCS theory, which worked so well for simple, elemental superconductors, couldn’t explain the behaviour of these new materials. […] A paper published last week brings us a step closer to understanding how these new superconductors work. Physicists, including my old officemate Paul, used some of the biggest magnetic fields on Earth to try to work out what’s happening inside these materials. In fact, the pulsed magnets used burn through enough energy to melt a tonne of steel every second. […] … the mechanism that underlies this advanced physics apparatus for measuring materials in massive magnets is almost identical to a theremin. …
Audio at the main link.
(Via.)
The master’s eyes darted around, and he continued in a low voice:
When we do our work poorly, we are replaced with our betters. When we do our work well, the thing we have built grows larger, faster, more powerful, more entrenched, more hungry. Sometimes I lie awake in a cold sweat, unable to decide if we are still building it, or if it has begun using us to build itself …
(Link received with gratitude from JF — a more precise attribution might be unwelcome.)
Expect more of this:
The man police say shot and killed six people in Kalamazoo, Mich., last month told officers that he was being controlled by the Uber app on his phone at the time of the rampage, according to authorities. […] … Dalton told detectives that he believed the Uber app controlled him, and said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination earlier in the interview to avoid coming across as a crazy person, Moorian wrote. The accused gunman went on to tell police that a symbol appeared — a devil-like image with horns — and said it would give him an assignment that he would follow while seeing himself from outside of his body, Moorian wrote. […] He went on to tell detectives “about the Masons and the Eastern Star symbol” that he said popped up on the phone, but what he said “didn’t make any sense,” Moorian added. In an interview with another detective, Dalton said when he saw the Uber app shift from a red color to black, that is when he would get taken over “like a puppet.”
Techno-pop vulgar qabbalism:
Top ten iPhone passcodes. Source: https://t.co/24kfbmslBK pic.twitter.com/wHwGYCk7xM
— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) March 13, 2016
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Mnemonics converge on zones of significance.
(Why ‘2580’?)
A synthetic approach to the Gödelian philosophy of religion.
Time Spiral Press 