This is a major eye-opener. The punchline: looks like about 2/3rd of the ancestors of the current human race were female, because a lot of men died without ever reproducing. Impacts for our understanding of our own genetic heritage? Huge.
Read more →At a certain point, the weight of the batteries required to provide the energy to operate the arm for a reasonable period becomes a problem. It was the poor power-to-weight ratio of the batteries that drove Goldfarb to look for alternatives in 2000 while he was working on a previous exoskeleton project for DARPA. He [...]
Read more →Saving the Internet with hate. It’s a riff on protocol, reputation, process, people and code. And it works, I think, on levels that nothing else I’ve seen might. A++ – I hope it’s bigger than bittorrent.
Read more →Same system described in the previous entry but you HAVE TO WATCH THE VIDEO TO GET IT. Smooth integration of on-network, off-network and paper-based transactions in a single system. OMG.
Read more →When fishermen from the Indian state of Kerala are done fishing each day, they have to decide which of an array of ports they should sail for in order to sell their catch. Traditionally, the fishermen have made the decision at random–or, to put it more charitably, by instinct. Then they got mobile phones. That [...]
Read more →In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials warned more than 13,000 families living in FEMA trailers since Hurricane Katrina nearly two years ago that they must evacuate if Dean hits the area. Barbour said people should think about where they will go if an evacuation is ordered and how they’ll travel. [...]
Read more →TV. Round-the-clock, first-episode-to-current-date marathons of: * Friends * Battlestar Galactica * Star Trek * Grey’s Anatomy * Buffy the Vampire Slayer * Firefly and so on. I guess daytime soaps etc. may have a role, but I don’t know what they are called. I think on those channels participating in the national “vegathon” news ought [...]
Read more →Matthew suggests sending me to Peru. I replied on Treehugger: Oh, I’d be up for it but we need these tested – I mean **really** tested – before we start putting other people’s lives on the line. Give us a year or two of well-funded practice runs, then we’ll talk about *really* being able to [...]
Read more →Nasty story about guardianship and gay people. There are similar stories about immigration – couples separated with no way to marry and resolve visa issues. It’s time for this to stop. Either abolish the legal standing of marriage between men and women, leaving it as a religious institution, or institute it for others. I’m aware [...]
Read more →synchronized chaos == “planetary climate just has weird cycles.” In general, I tend to think that people on the same side as Freeman Dyson are usually less wrong than those on the other side. I’m still thinking maybe a 10% or a 20% chance that the current CO2 models are just *wrong* – but that [...]
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