Lifeboat Foundation

By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

When scientists looked at Mars through early telescopes, they saw a fuzzy, rust-colored globe scored by mysterious dark gashes some believed were alien canals. Later, armed with sharper images, we scoffed at such naiveté. Mars is obviously dry as a bone and uninhabited. Now, with a great deal more information from rovers and satellites, we believe Mars was once wet. As for life? The jury’s still out.

It shows how much we still have to learn (and are learning) about our solar system. Not too long ago, we only suspected one ocean of liquid water beyond Earth (on Europa). Now, thanks to robotic explorers, like NASA’s Dawn and Cassini missions, we’re finding evidence of oceans throughout the solar system. Read more

I have simple thinking in mind – like visualizing a rotating wheel suspended from its hub without friction so it can be pulled up and down easily.

You can trust that angular momentum remains constant (nature has a knack for that). But the wheel is also a clock. So if you lower it, it must go slower down there and become faster again when retrieved. It thus makes for a beautiful mental plaything (a “hot” one as the young people would say). Angular momentum can be called “L’hombre” (a macho word which is not quite right in Spanish). Can you feel L’hombre in your hand while moving up and down your toy in your mind?

The word “L’hombre” allows one to remember “L = ω mr^2 ” for angular momentum L in one’s mind forever. Omega (or ω) is the rotation rate, m the mass of the wheel’s rim (with a virtually weightless hub for simplicity), and r is the radius. So the wheel is now transparent to us like glass, right? What happens if ω is halved for simplicity as on a neutron star?

Either m must be doubled, or else r must be increased by square-root 2, or both m and r must have changed somehow in a compatible manner. How about m halved and r doubled?

Continue reading “Many people have ceased to claim that ‘thinking helps’ as Hewlett-Packard say” »

Brian Krassenstein | 3D Print

“Speaking with former MakerBot CEO, Jenny Lawton, at CES this year, she told me that 3D printing will become mainstream and really begin to explode as far as adoption rates go, when a full cycle of education has been exposed to the technology.” Read more

Robert Szczerba | The Next Web

“‘Seeking the truth is at once the most fundamental and the most difficult task of the criminal justice system.’” Read more

‘New Narratives: Innovation for Jobs’ is a series by i4j (Innovation for Jobs) and the GPA exploring perspectives on important topics that will impact the future of work, jobs and employment.

About i4j: (iiij.org/i4j) Innovation for Jobs conferences bring together individuals from the public and private sectors to discuss the changing economy. “We engage in initiatives creating structures for developing shared language across silos. The starting point for any innovation is the creation of shared language, enabling stakeholders and change agents to interact horizontally.”

This film was created at the Mountain View 2015 i4j Conference. What are your hopes and fears about the future of meaningful work?

Continue reading “Galactic Public Archives Presents: "New Narratives: Innovation for Jobs" the series” »

This new principle ( http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/view/814/876 ) is implicit in special relativity’s equivalence principle including gravitation.

Therefore, c is a global constant of nature again. Hence no Big Bang (I hear you laugh) and no Hawking radiation (silence) and no CERN safety (fear).

Ten thousand CERN physicists agree through their roaring muteness for 7 years.

Only a member of the young generation could help. But the young are no longer free to speak up since they are no longer protected by their advisors.

Mandela’s immortal smile is the last hope of the planet. It encourages us all to talk as brothers and sisters before it is too late.

Vivian Giang | Quartz

“‘Mars has been unanimously agreed upon by the world’s space agencies as the ‘horizon goal’ for human spaceflight,’ said Do, part of the MIT research group responsible for a widely read report debunking Mars One’s mission as unfeasible. ‘It is widely agreed that Mars is the most promising destination for near term colonization.’” Read more

Tyler Hayes | Fast Company

“The inherently robotic system begs to be humanized and explained. The first question Taylor had to ask himself was if what Tocchini was attempting was even possible. Could he translate design intention into an algorithm that was always producing new and relevant results—something that satisfied a broad range of needs and desires?” Read more

Steve Lohr | The New York Times

“Many data quants see marketing as a low-risk — and, yes, lucrative — petri dish in which to hone the tools of an emerging science. ‘What happens if my algorithm is wrong? Someone sees the wrong ad,’ said Claudia Perlich, a data scientist who works for an ad-targeting start-up. ‘What’s the harm? It’s not a false positive for breast cancer.’…These questions are spurring a branch of academic study known as algorithmic accountability.” Read more