Sunday, March 12, 2023

12: News Bulletin

Dendra and its ‘forest-patrolling drones’ close $10m Series A from Airbus, others (2020)
The importance of blue carbon mangroves
The benefits of mangrove restoration from blue carbon to biodiversity
7 important agreements reached at COP15
The Wildfire-Climate Change Cycle and how to Tame it

This Geothermal Startup Showed Its Wells Can Be Used Like a Giant Underground Battery
Detection Stays One Step Ahead of Deepfakes—For Now
GPT-4 Might Just Be a Bloated, Pointless Mess
Microsoft Unveils AI Model That Understands Image Content, Solves Visual Puzzles
Figure Promises First General-Purpose Humanoid Robot

Ethereum Moved to Proof of Stake. Why Can’t Bitcoin?
Face Recognition Software Led to His Arrest. It Was Dead Wrong
As AI Booms, Lawmakers Struggle to Understand the Technology
Key Steps in Evolution on Earth Tell Us How Likely Intelligent Life Is Anywhere Else
Stability AI, Hugging Face and Canva Back New AI Research Nonprofit

I Made an AI Clone of Myself
California Company Sets Launch Date for World’s First 3D-Printed Rocket
ChatGPT-Style Search Represents a 10x Cost Increase for Google, Microsoft
Ingenious Technique Could Make Moon Farming Possible
The US Copyright Office Says You Can’t Copyright Midjourney AI-Generated Images

AI Is Dreaming Up Drugs That No One Has Ever Seen. Now We’ve Got to See if They Work.
MIT Team Makes a Case for Direct Carbon Capture From Seawater, Not Air
This Startup Can 3D Print a Battery Into Any Shape You Want
Confusion Spirals in Crypto as the US Cracks Down
For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a US Forest



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Saturday, March 11, 2023

11: News Bulletin

Blue Origin Says It Can Make Solar Panels Out of Moon Dust
This Box Wing eVTOL Will Run on Hydrogen and Have a Range of 620 Miles
This 3D Printed Community Is Printing One House per Week for a Year
Cutting Out Just a Muffin a Day Can Make You Age More Slowly, Study Finds
Robots Could Be Doing Almost Half of Our Household Chores Within a Decade



Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the World Is Made Of the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece .... reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously. ......... mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world. ....... Bees in hives produce hexagonal honeycomb. Why? ..... bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax. ........ There are two subspecies of North American periodical cicadas that live most of their lives in the ground. Then, every 13 or 17 years (depending on the subspecies), the cicadas emerge in great swarms for a period of around two weeks. ...... Why is it 13 and 17 years? Why not 12 and 14? Or 16 and 18? ....... 13 and 17 are prime numbers. ......... cicadas have a range of predators that also spend most of their lives in the ground. The cicadas need to come out of the ground when their predators are lying dormant. ........ Suppose there are predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years. What is the best way to avoid them all? ......... Once we start looking, it is easy to find other examples. From the shape of soap films, to gear design in engines, to the location and size of the gaps in the rings of Saturn, mathematics is everywhere. ......... mathematical facts are discovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines, and planets. ........ Plato also maintained that mathematical objects exist outside of space and time. But such a view only deepens the mystery of how mathematics explains anything.......... physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms. ....... the idea that reality is a simulation. A simulation is a computer program, which is a kind of mathematical object. ....... reality is made of mathematical objects and minds. Mathematics is how the universe, which is conscious, comes to know itself. ........ Mathematics gives matter its form, and matter gives mathematics its substance. ........ As the boundary between physics and mathematics blurs, it becomes harder to say which parts of the world are physical and which are mathematical. ..... The time has arrived for a Pythagorean revolution, one that promises to radically alter our understanding of reality.

Pythagoras’ revenge: humans didn’t invent mathematics, it’s what the world is made of
Mathematical Explanation: A Pythagorean Proposal
Who are Jehovah’s Witnesses? A religion scholar explains the history of the often misunderstood group 8 million members across 240 countries. ........ understood “Jehovah,” a version of the Hebrew “Yahweh,” to be the name of God the Father himself. ........ looked forward to Jesus Christ establishing a “millennium” or a thousand-year period of peace on Earth. This “Golden Age” would see the Earth transformed to its original purity, with a “righteous” social system that would not have poverty or inequality. ....... look forward to the Golden Age that Russell and his Bible students expected. ........ the group’s belief in a literal thousand-year earthly reign of Christ ....... they do not vote in elections, serve in the military or salute the flag. Such acts, they believe, compromise their primary loyalty to God...... Jehovah’s Witnesses have no political affiliations, and they renounce violence. However, they make an easy target for governments looking for internal enemies, as they refuse to bow down to government symbols. Many nationalists call them “enemies of the state.” ......... Jehovah’s Witnesses were jailed as draft evaders in the U.S. during both world wars. In a Supreme Court ruling in 1940, school districts were allowed to expel Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to salute the American flag. Through subsequent legal battles in the 1940s and 1950s, Jehovah’s Witnesses helped expand safeguards for religious liberty and freedom of conscience both in the United States and Europe. ......... In Nazi Germany, Jehovah’s Witnesses were killed in concentration camps; a purple triangle was used by the Nazis to mark them.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER ENZYME THAT CAN TURN AIR INTO ELECTRICITY
ECONOMISTS COMPARE CRYPTO TO "COCAINE" IN SCATHING TAKEDOWN
Company Raises $100M After Announcing Shift to AI, But Has No Discernible Product We're in the middle of an AI gold rush — but is there any gold?
CONGRESSMAN CLAIMS THE US GOVERNMENT HAS "REVERSE-ENGINEERED" ALIEN TECH FROM UFOS IT'S A PRETTY OUTLANDISH THEORY.
NOAM CHOMSKY: AI ISN'T COMING FOR US ALL, YOU IDIOTS "THAT DAY MAY COME, BUT ITS DAWN IS NOT YET BREAKING."
MICROSOFT SAYS OPENAI'S LATEST BLOCKBUSTER AI IS DROPPING "NEXT WEEK" WE HAVE QUESTIONS.
WE'RE TOTALLY OK WITH THIS 48,500 YEAR OLD "ZOMBIE" VIRUS BEING RESURRECTED WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
SCIENTISTS PLAY TINIEST GAME OF BASEBALL BY THROWING AND CATCHING INDIVIDUAL ATOMS EAT YOUR HEART OUT, ANTMAN.
Report: Elon Musk is Building His Own Town in Texas Musk wants his own company town where people live and work for him. ........ a "Texas Utopia" along the Colorado River where SpaceX, Boring Company, and Tesla employees can live, work, and play, and never have to leave. .



Iran-Saudi ties: China-brokered ‘win-win’ deal could bring Yemen war to a close, analysts say Tehran and Riyadh have agreed to restore diplomatic relations following the Beijing-led talks that experts dubbed as ‘a major development in the Middle Eastern diplomacy’....... Analysts say the easing of tensions between the rivals could also prompt Saudi and Iran to end hostilities in Yemen by agreeing to a ‘face-saving’ resolution .......... The Chinese-mediated agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to resume diplomatic relations after a seven-year hiatus is widely expected to de-escalate conflicts across the Middle East. Although details of the deal reached during five days of talks in Beijing have not been made public, many analysts believe they include an understanding on bringing the eight-year war in Yemen to a negotiated close. .



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Friday, March 10, 2023

Apple Producing In India Is A Big Deal

For a long time India has been a promising country that simply did not deliver. That is now changing. There are thousands of tech startups that prove the point. But the move by Apple to start iPhone production in India is a huge symbolic step. That is Apple saying India seems to have done its homework.

India needs a huge manufactuting base to create the large number of jobs it needs for its huge young population. The intractable labor and land laws mean most Indians end up in what gets called the "informal sector." There is a lot of entrepreneurship going on in that informal sector. People do so much with so little. It is heartwarming to see many of those street vendors take digital payments seamlessly.

Google getting an Indian CEO was a big symbolic step. Microsoft getting an Indian CEO was a big symbolic step. That CEO taking Microsoft from 200 billion to over a trillion was big. The recent ChatGPT move on the part of Satya Nadella has been huge and symbolic. And now this move by Apple adds to that momentum.

The two biggest democracies are attemtpting sync.



Apple begins making the iPhone 14 in India, marking a big shift in its manufacturing strategy

Rewriting the Rules of Audience Targeting The way people and tools are handling personal data is fundamentally out of sync with the new privacy-focused world. .......... what if we could personalise advertising without systematically collecting and exposing personal data? ....... The ad industry is fast approaching a crisis point. Cookies are disappearing, mobile IDs are vanishing, and consent rates are falling. This is an existential threat, not just to internet advertising but to the internet in general. If advertising fails, then business models supporting the open internet will fail, professional journalism will struggle, and the internet as we know it will be swallowed up by the walled gardens. ........ the pervasive surveillance of our every move online can no longer continue. ....... a high-level understanding of what publishers needed, a good grasp of privacy rules, very good knowledge of technology and tons of ideas. The canvas they were using to draw the building blocks of what would then become ID Ward (now Anonymised) was truly blank. ......... They spent months absorbing information from all corners of the advertising world, learning the jargon, diving into the tech, figuring out which tools were compliant and which were marketing a lie. They found that regulatory compliance isn’t sexy enough to sell, that companies were happy to break the law if it meant hitting revenue targets, and that leadership was hard to find. In short, they learnt that the industry was, well, a bit of a mess. Convincing a huge, chaotic, fragmented industry that they had to radically change the way they treated data was always going to be difficult, but the need for change was greater than they originally thought and time was on their side. .......... a mission to decouple personalised advertising from personal data. ........ make digital advertising fit for the future and protect advertising business models that support a free, independent internet. There is a direct connection between brands’ ability to speak to consumers online, the ability of journalists to report facts to the public and our right to be informed from a plurality of sources without breaking the bank. ......... without all of the snooping and systematic privacy invasions that are currently rife in the advertising industry ........ By replacing people’s personal data with anonymous datasets across the entire digital advertising ecosystem .



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