MetaFilter posts tagged with Technology

Based on your history, we know you are interested in cephalopods.

Horace Rumpole — Fri, 17 May 2013 06:49:31 -0800

I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses. “Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said.

'So don't look."

roomthreeseventeen — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:56:35 -0800

You're at a Broadway or off-Broadway show. Suddenly, a cell phone goes off, or the person next to you starts texting. If you're on stage, you could do what Patti LuPone did at Gypsy. You could write an open letter to the offender. Or, you could do what Kevin Williamson did last night.

Exoplanet Hunter

Chinese Jet Pilot — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:28:43 -0800

"It was one of those things that was a gift to humanity... We’re all going to lose for sure." Kepler's career is over, but not before answering one of mankind's most profound questions.

"The 1980s have been the trailblazing years for ... high-definition"

RobotHero — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:14:09 -0800

A half-hour episode of Innovation about this exciting new video technology. Bonus: Cowbell

The teen who's keeping you safe from TV spoilers, one tweet at a time.

shiu mai baby — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:19:36 -0800

Meet the 17-year-old kid who won a Boston hackathon by creating a killer hack for Twitter, blocking out TV show spoilers. Also, she's a girl, and the only solo entrant.

Crowd funding, One Year Later

Artw — Sun, 05 May 2013 06:37:29 -0800

What does the crowdfunding landscape look like for game developers one year after Kickstarter exploded onto the scene?

"Millions make me lose interest. It should have a 'B' in front of it."

four panels — Sat, 04 May 2013 09:24:12 -0800

How can a company that earns no money be worth a billion dollars? How you answer that question will determine whether you believe that what is now occurring in the office parks and strip-mall coffee shops of the San Francisco Peninsula is the last gasp of another speculative financial bubble or the early articulations of a new world order.

She could put her lips together for the first time. “It was beautiful."

Fizz — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:16:54 -0800

Groundbreaking Surgery for Girl Born Without Windpipe: [New York Times] — Using plastic fibers and human cells, doctors have built and implanted a windpipe in a 2 ½-year-old girl — the youngest person ever to receive a bioengineered organ.

Still far from that digital democracy any utopian could hope for.

iamkimiam — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:01:52 -0800

7 (well, technically 6) myths of the digital divide.

Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt

palbo — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:38:54 -0800

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.

Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Susan Rice at the US State Department and current Communications Director of the International Crisis Group, and Lisa Shields, Vice President of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for "The New Digital World", their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.

Time to feel old!

The Whelk — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:21:57 -0800

Youtube user Thepeterson puts together collections of the major radio hits, movies, video games, and technology of a given year. So why not take a time machine trip to the media landscape of : 1997, 1999, and 2002

Real world touchscreen interface for interactive documents and books

KokuRyu — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:58:07 -0800

Touchscreen interface for seamless data transfer between the real and virtual worlds - Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real world.

1993 -> 2013

zarq — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:28:18 -0800

For WIRED magazine's 20th anniversary, they've "gathered stories for, by, and about the people who have shaped the planet's past 20 years—and will continue driving the next."

belters expanse trajectory: working up the Epstein Drive

kliuless — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:11:41 -0800

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 "moon rocket" engine back to life - "The story of young engineers who resurrected an engine nearly twice their age."

The question, though, is whether or not the practical side of the equation can balance the romantic. The Advanced Booster competition will run through 2015, at which point a winner will be chosen, solid or liquid. The F-1B could be the engine sending astronauts to Mars—or it could wind up as one more Wikipedia footnote.

also btw... -NASA's Space Launch System -NASA's Space Launch System Advanced Booster -Comparison of orbital rocket engines -Comparison of orbital launch systems oh and How NASA's Nuclear Rockets Will Take Us Way Beyond Mars &c. Almost 40,000 People Have Signed up to Go to Mars—One Way

Mars Eats Probes

Artw — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:42:48 -0800

Russian amateurs may have found the lost Mars 3 Lander.

Why Etsy Doesn't Have a Gallery in New York

Xurando — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:04:40 -0800

Does anyone here speak art and tech? "Indeed, for a certain sort of hoodie-wearing entrepreneur more keen on trips to Tahoe than the Tate, the rules of the art world can seem especially opaque." No, they are two different cultures. "The traditional art world appears to be recognizing that it is going to need to collect some of this money to continue operating in the manner it has grown accustomed to. What it doesn’t seem to recognize is that it may be selling the wrong thing, a brand of social status that the technology culture is not interested in buying."

Your dog did not eat your homework

reenum — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:04:56 -0800

CourseSmart software enables professors and teachers to track how much of the assigned reading students have completed.

Tell 'em Big Bertha sent ya!

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:41:15 -0800

Meet Bertha, the world's largest underground tunnel boring machine that will soon begin digging a controversial roadway underneath downtown Seattle, similar to Boston's Big Dig

The Meme Hustler

box — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:25:25 -0800

"The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly." (Evgeny Morozov, for The Baffler)

Central Station

homunculus — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:34:26 -0800

The Smell of Orange Groves. This short story by Lavie Tidhar (author of Osama: A Novel) is part of his Central Station story cycle, taking place in or around Tel Aviv’s Central Station neighborhood sometime in the future. Here are a few more free Central Station stories: Crabapple The Lord of Discarded Things Strigoi

We're Going To Have To Find Out How To Deal With Lots Of Idle Hands

The Whelk — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:53:03 -0800

The Forces Of The Next 30 Years - SF author and Mefi's Own Charles Stross talks to students at Olin College about sci-fi, fiction, speculation, the limits of computation, thermodynamics, Moore's Law, the history of travel, employment, automation, free trade, demographics, the developing world, privacy, and climate change in trying to answer the question What Does The World Of 2043 Look Like? (Youtube 56:43)

Rise of the Earths

Artw — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 07:02:04 -0800

How Artists Once Imagined the Earth Would Look from Space

Incommensurable values

kliuless — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:42:30 -0800

Economists and the theory of politics - "why unions were often well worth any deadweight cost" abstract:

The standard approach to policymaking and advice in economics implicitly or explicitly ignores politics and political economy, and maintains that if possible, any market failure should be rapidly removed. This essay explains why this conclusion may be incorrect; because it ignores politics, this approach is oblivious to the impact of the removal of market failures on future political equilibria and economic efficiency, which can be deleterious. We outline a simple framework for the study of the impact of current economic policies on future political equilibria — and indirectly on future economic outcomes. We then illustrate the mechanisms through which such impacts might operate using a series of examples. The main message is that sound economic policy should be based on a careful analysis of political economy and should factor in its influence on future political equilibria.

viz. What kind of mass movement with truly powerful institutional support can take the place of unions? - "I agree with just about everything they say about the value of unions, but I also feel forced to acknowledge that it doesn't matter. As a truly powerful mass movement, unions are dead and they aren't coming back. This has left a gaping hole in American politics: Corporations and the rich continue to have enormous institutional power, while the working and middle classes have almost no one to speak for them. I figure that filling this hole is the most important problem the left has to address over the next decade or so. Unfortunately, I don't know how." cf. The Tyranny of Political Economy - "In reality, our contemporary frameworks for political economy are replete with unstated assumptions about the system of ideas underlying the operation of political systems. Make those assumptions explicit, and the decisive role of vested interests evaporates. Policy design, political leadership, and human agency come back to life... Expand the range of feasible strategies (which is what good policy design and leadership do), and you radically change behavior and outcomes." also btw...

Markets in almost nothing - "One of the first things I noticed when I started studying economics was that goods that can't be bought and sold are basically ignored."
Wealth and Motivations for Saving - "teach the public more about how wealth builds over time"
The Supply and Demand for Safe Assets - "Where do safe assets come from? Empirical evidence suggests that the private sector creates more near riskless assets when the supply of government debt is low and reduces privately-created near riskless assets when the supply of government debt is high."
The safe asset shortage - "Safe debts – or what is often called information insensitive assets, as they do not suffer from the types of financial frictions that are characteristic to other financial assets – play a major role in facilitating transactions for institutional investors. And, as we have learned in the recent years, they also play a major role in triggering financial crises when they lose their safety status and turn into information sensitive assets."
GDP, welfare and the rise of data-driven activities - "The worry today is not that investment in technology might not be as productive as we thought (the so-called computer paradox), but the fact that the economic value of the fast growing consumption and production of online data may not be adequately captured in official statistics."
Uncle Sam, venture capitalist - "AMERICA, like much of the world, is facing a crisis of innovation. Its roots rest in several significant challenges: an awareness that rapid technological progress and growth will be crucial in weathering demographic headwinds and the threat of climate change among them. But there is very little consensus in Washington on just what the government ought to be doing to help."
What Google Reader tells us about banking and nationalisation - "Which is why the government taking charge of a service like RSS for the benefit of the public good — or for that matter providing the country with universal internet or high quality media — should not necessarily be treated with suspicion or mistrust. In the civilized world there is a perfectly reasonable way to ensure arm's length detachment and to protect such institutions from the political meddling of government."
If You Can't Fix It, You Don't Own It - "Who owns our stuff? The answer used to be obvious. Now, with electronics integrated into just about everything we buy, the answer has changed. We live in a digital age, and even the physical goods we buy are complex. Copyright is impacting more people than ever before because the line between hardware and software, physical and digital has blurred. The issue goes beyond cellphone unlocking, because once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. We should be able to lift the hood, unlock it, modify it, repair it... without asking for permission from the manufacturer. But we really don't own our stuff anymore (at least not fully); the manufacturers do. Because modifying modern objects requires access to information: code, service manuals, error codes, and diagnostic tools."

like think about sovereign debt -- that is safe assets -- more as a national equity: [1,2,3,4,5]

The US national debt is in truth - like all national debts - a complete and surreal fiction: it is a national equity, the greater part of which is interest-bearing either as claims over public or private revenues. At least two-thirds of the quasi tax credits created by banks came into existence as mortgage loans, and are therefore backed by claims over the productive value of the US land and buildings which they fund. Much of the rest consists of claims over the value of US assets which fund the productive capacity of US corporations. The remainder - which provides the credit necessary to finance the circulation of goods and services in the US - is based upon the magnificent productive capacity of the US people. Only by liquidating US Incorporated could this National Equity ever be redeemed... There is no shortage of dollars because every dollar's worth of productive capacity - public or private; productive people or productive assets - in the US is the capacity to issue a dollar credit, which reflects the increase in the US national wealth which underpins the US national equity. President Barack Obama and his government should get busy creating national equity by instructing the Fed to create and issue the necessary finance for the creation of a new generation of US infrastructure; the transition to a low carbon future which the US can, and should, be leading; and in increasing the capacity of the US people to do so.

(or how the government budget constraint is different than a household's or corporation's -- namely that they can tax and can't be liquidated, unless extraordinarily mismanaged or conquered, I guess...)

Better, stronger, faster kidneys.

cthuljew — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:08:36 -0800

What do 3D printing, jelly, liver transplants, chainmail, dental fillings, ferrofluids, and the Six Million Dollar man have to tell us about our future? Materials scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik lets us know in this Royal Institution lecture.

This looks like a job for...

Artw — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:28:54 -0800

SUPERHERO.JS - Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic.