Adam & Eve: citizens of the long now.
Read moreAuthor: m1k3y
Thailand’s military rulers say they are monitoring a new form of silent resistance to the coup – a three-fingered salute borrowed from science fiction blockbuster The Hunger Games – and will arrest those in large groups who ignore warnings to lower their arms.
The raised arm salute has become an unofficial symbol of opposition to Thailand’s 22 May coup, and a creative response to several bans the ruling junta has placed on freedom of expression.
Read moreMIT Robot on the Shoulder Control
via Techcrunch:
MIT researchers have created a pair of robotic arms that connect to your shoulders and give you another pair of pinchers to help you lift heavy objects, keep objects in place while you attach them overhead.
The arms “watch” what your real arms are doing and, using video analysis, try to pitch in when needed. The project is sponsored by Boeing and the company hopes to use the technology, called Supernumerary Robotic Limbs, to help its workforce in factories and loading docks.
The system weighs ten pounds and attaches to your upper or lower back. The creators, Baldin Llorens-Bonilla and H. Harry Asada, call the system “A Robot on the Shoulder” and hope to bring it to market soon. Another system would include arms that can move back and create a sort of pair of tripod-like legs to help support humans as they lift large objects. These tools are superior to exoskeletons in that they are much lighter and won’t trap the user if they break or run out of battery.
RIPLEY
I feel like a fifth wheel here. Is there anything I can do?
APONE
I don’t know. Is there anything you can do?
RIPLEY (pointing)
I can drive that loader. I’ve got a Class Two rating. My latest career move.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girls Charged in Stabbing
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According to the criminal complaint, one of the girls told an investigator they began planning to kill their friend in December. The other girl told police they decided to kill her so they could become proxies of Slender Man, who would accept them and let them live with him in his mansion in the Nicolet National Forest.
The other girl said she sees Slender Man in her dreams. She said he watches her and can read her mind and teleport.
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No word if they’ll be calling @catvincent as an expert witness.
12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girls Charged in Stabbing
Read more "12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girls Charged in Stabbing"The future of Congress has been on our minds. Recently, we considered how advances in technology and data analysis can and will change the way legislators do their work. There are places that are pushing the envelope in this arena. In Brazil official state hackers are building apps, games and data visualizations to help Brazilians […]
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Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets
Despite the staggering distances to other planetary systems, in recent years researchers have begun to develop techniques for collecting spectra of exoplanets.
When one of these worlds transits, or passes in front of its host star as seen from Earth, some of the star’s light travels through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, where it is changed in subtle, but measurable, ways.
This process imprints information about the planet that can be collected by telescopes. The resulting spectra enable scientists to tease out details about the temperature, composition and structure of exoplanets’ atmospheres.
Robinson and his colleagues exploited a similarity between exoplanet transits and sunsets witnessed by the Cassini spacecraft at Titan. Called solar occultations, these observations allowed the scientists to observe Titan as a transiting exoplanet without having to leave the solar system.
Many worlds in our solar system, including Titan, are blanketed by clouds and high-altitude hazes. Scientists expect that many exoplanets would be similarly obscured.
Clouds and hazes create a variety of complicated effects that must be disentangled from the signature of these alien atmospheres, and present a major obstacle for understanding transit observations. Due to the complexity and computing power required to address hazes, models used to understand exoplanet spectra usually simplify their effects.
“Previously, it was unclear exactly how hazes were affecting observations of transiting exoplanets,” said Robinson. “So we turned to Titan, a hazy world in our own solar system that has been extensively studied by Cassini.”
Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets
Read more "Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets"
Read moreMany of the astronauts that White interviews argue that the experience would be a powerful political tonic, if you could somehow impel it upon the rulers of the planet. As Joseph Allen, a veteran of several Space-Shuttle flights, said:
A steady stream of world leaders should go into orbit. It would have a profound affect on their wisdom …. It is similar to the time of Copernicus; we have a broadened view of our place in the universe, and more educated view.
In his book Moondust, the author Andrew Smith argues that the moon landing was in some respects an art project, as gesture “as primitive as song”. We went there not so much to see the moon as to gaze back at Earth. It was “a unique opportunity to look at ourselves,” he writes, an accomplishment less of technology than of aesthetics, culture, and spirituality. “How madly, perfectly human.” Many of the astronauts White interviews in The Overview Effect lament the difficulty they have in putting their new perspective into words, of communicating its sheerly alien quality to other people. Gemini X astronaut Michael Collins concluded that that the ideal crew for an Apollo mission would have been a “philosopher, a priest, and a poet.” (“Unfortunately,” he added, “they would kill themselves trying to fly the spacecraft.”)
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 