Beyond Meat

food science food-science fake-meat meat-substitute

Brown got into fake meat after working in the clean-energy business. He says he loves the taste of meat, but his childhood on a family farm convinced him to refrain from killing animals, and he’s been vegan for many years. In 2009, he met Fu-Hung Hsieh and Harold Huff, food scientists at the University of Missouri who’d been working to create a meat substitute for more than a decade. The three formed a company, and they’ve been working to build the perfect fake meat ever since.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/07/beyond_meat_fake_chicken_that_tastes_so_real_it_will_freak_you_out_.single.html

“The ENIAC itself, strangely, was a very personal computer,” remembers mathematician Harry Reed, who arrived at Aberdeen in…

“The ENIAC itself, strangely, was a very personal computer,” remembers mathematician Harry Reed, who arrived at Aberdeen in 1950. “Now we think of a personal computer as one which you carry around with you. The ENIAC was actually one that you kind of lived inside.”

– Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. (viacarvalhais)

Why Crunch Modes Doesn’t Work: Six Lessons

work, 40 hour week, 35 hour week, 60 hour week, crunch, productivity, ford, overtime, 4 hour

More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks. In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.

http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons

Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection

science climatechange climate-science projection climate

To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a–1981-temperature-projection/#bib_1

Science begins with something called a null hypothesis. Although statisticians mean something very specific about this (having…

“Science begins with something called a null hypothesis. Although statisticians mean something very specific about this (having to do with comparing different sets of data), I am using the term null hypothesis in its more general sense: the hypothesis under investigation is not true, or null, until proven otherwise.”

– Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011. (viacarvalhais)

Graphing Every* Idea In History

infoviz philosophy fiction writers graph gephi information-visualisation

It really is fascinating (to me at least) to start at one node and bounce along the connections to a distantly related someone else. People in philosophy influencing fantasy writers who influence comedians. It shows one thing above all: the evolution of ideas is a non-linear process. We too, are somewhere in this web, albeit at a smaller scale. We too, are the sum of many.

http://griffsgraphs.com/2012/07/03/graphing-every-idea-in-history/

In 1620, a staunch challenge to Aristotle’s deductive methodology was proffered by the English philosopher Francis Bacon in his…

“In 1620, a staunch challenge to Aristotle’s deductive methodology was proffered by the English philosopher Francis Bacon in his book Novum Organum. This “new instrument” was the empirical or observational method. Rejecting both the unempirical tradition of scholasticism and the Renaissance quest to recover and preserve ancient wisdom, Bacon sought a blend of sensory data and reasoned theory, with emphasis on data and caution about theory. Ideally, he proposed, one should begin with observations then formulate a general theory from which logical predictions could be made.”

– Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011. (viacarvalhais)

Expedition 32 Soyuz Rocket Blessing (201207130005HQ) by nasa hq photo on Flickr. An Orthodox priest blesses the Soyuz rocket at…

darklyeuphoric:

Expedition 32 Soyuz Rocket Blessing (201207130005HQ) by nasa hq photo on Flickr.

An Orthodox priest blesses the Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome Launch pad on Friday, July 13, 2012 in Kazakhstan. The launch of the Soyuz spacecraft with Expedition 32 Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko, NASA Flight Engineer Sunita Williams and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Flight Engineer Akihiko Hoshide is scheduled for the morning of Sunday, July 15, local time. Photo Credit: (NASA/Carla Cioffi)

The Dark Pool

finance ai hft trading

The Island-Renaissance fusion was a vision of the future in which high-speed AI-guided robots would operate on lightning-fast electronic pools, controlling the daily ebb and flow of the market. The AI Bots poured their valuable liquidity into Island, which, in turn, made it possible for the Bots to operate at high frequencies. They fed off one another, creating a virtuous cycle that would become unstoppable. Little-known outfits such as Timber Hill, Tradebot, RGM, and Getco would soon start trading on Island, forming the emergent ganglia of a new space-age trading organism driven by machines. Tricked-out artificial intelligence systems designed to scope out hidden pockets in the market where they could ply their trades powered many of these systems.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/dark-pool-truth-about-what-really-goes-stock-market-part–4

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic…

““The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.”

–

The ‘Busy’ Trap - NYTimes.com

i love this article.

(viawomanonfire)

The Soviet synthesizer that bridged occultism and electronic music

ANS, Theremin, coil, occult, synaesthesia, history, synthesizer, sound, music, russia, synth

The Russian avant garde was far ahead of the West in the development of electronic instruments. Leon Theremin, inventor of the first mass produced electronic instrument, is the best remembered experimenter of this period. The Theremin synthesizes motion and sound the same way the ANS sythesizes images and sound. But his eponymous instrument was hardly Theremin’s only experiment. “Theremin worked on countless projects, striving to bring music, light, movement, smell and touch together in a single technology,” Smirnov and Pchelkina wrote. Scriabin would have been proud.

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/27/synth.html

GPS Spoofing

attack, spoofing, anti-spoofing, security, technolgy, gps

Disruption created by intentional generation of fake GPS signals could have serious economic consequences. This article discusses how typical civil GPS receivers respond to an advanced civil GPS spoofing attack, and four techniques to counter such attacks: spread-spectrum security codes, navigation message authentication, dual-receiver correlation of military signals, and vestigial signal defense. Unfortunately, any kind of anti-spoofing, however necessary, is a tough sell.

http://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/signal-processing/straight-talk-anti-spoofing–12471

More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa…

“More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

–The ‘Busy’ Trap - NYTimes.com (viaphotographsonthebrain)

Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic)

perspective, reality tunnels, history, turing, technology, Bruce Sterling, Alan Turing

Rather than apologizing to Alan Turing after his death, I’d be happier if we had some working way to reach out to other Alan Turings, ways to find people like him and to convince them to put down the poisoned apple and find good, sensible reasons to cheer the hell up and enjoy life.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/06/turing-centenary-speech-new-aesthetic/