DeepMind learns to be aggressive as it gets smarter. Verizon reintroduces unlimited data. Leo reviews the Samsung Chromebook Plus. Amazon releases a Skype competitor called Chime. Space X will launch over 4,000 satellites to cover the world in broadband internet. Google Fiber is back. Bill Gates is the nicest man on Earth. Recorded February 15, 2017
Jeff's Number: 120 Million children's lives saved
Stacey's Thing: Pew report on Algorithms
Leo's Tool: Keybase Chat
The story about DeepMind learning to be aggressive as it gets smarter is quite interesting and could provide an interesting model of larger interconnected societies. Smaller groups require more civility while larger may not. The question is how to interconnect groups to help cut down on the aggressiveness. Perhaps some of the network ideas in the toy mathematical models from Stuart Kauffman could be useful here? This could be a very interesting problem to work on.
The quirkiest place I’ve ever voted. Glad they offered to be a polling place.
There’s only one thing on the ballot today: County Measure H – Los Angeles County Plan to Prevent and Combat Homelessness
I know who’s big into celebrating St. Patrick’s Day!
You have to love the way the interior decorator has highlighted the tchotchkes with the lovely floral print wall paper, the couch, and the throw pillows. The restraint in not doing a floral print on the couch was superb!
I voted.
Walking up to my new polling place, the American flag is blowing softly in the breeze.
Waiting for the library to open with central casting milling around the front door:
A poor actor talking about knowing Corey Feldman back in the day is wearing a brown poncho with black devil horns on his forehead while speaking in a preternaturally loud voice, as if he were giving a performance;
His sixty-ish female companion is trying to wrangle several children, though I’m not sure how many of the three or so orbiting her are actually hers;
One of the children, a 7 year old named Tommy Two Feathers, is commanded to look for a blue jacket as the group hovers around a very late model Toyota pickup parked in a no parking zone that appears to have all of the family’s belongings except for the several dozen or so which are sitting on the sidewalk for no apparent reason;
Then there are two tatted up 20 something thugs, one of whom is sparking up in the grass while the other twitchily watches;
There’s a granola mom with two home-schooled kids buzzing around on scooters;
A first generation Chinese woman with tattered plastic grocery bags full of books to return;
A Caucasian retiree in a hoodie;
An average mom with a bright, curly red-headed 2 year old; and
A few hipsters of the Eagle Rock persuasion.
I wish I could take more photos, but don’t think the menagerie would really appreciate it. I definitely wanted to videotape the devil’s performance, but I’m not sure if I would have remained one of the audience in the process.
I’m wondering how I came to be here…
The pastoral scene belies what is happening behind me
I couldn’t resist a shot from the car
Yes those are black horns!
I really didn’t know what I was walking into…
This planter is out of place in this all-too-quirky neighborhood.
Bobby Bonilla hasn’t played in a professional baseball game since 2001, yet on July 1 of this year, the New York Mets paid him $1.19 million. And they will every July 1 until 2035, as part of a def…
An endless world map: Viewing the world through "Authagraph"
"Mr. Narukawa is the inventor of Authagraph, a world map designed to fit the world into a rectangle while almost perfectly maintaining the continents' relative size. It is mathematically impossible to precisely project the earth's sphere onto a rectangle. As such, previous methods would succeed in either taking on a rectangular shape or being true to the size ratio and shape of each continent, but never in both. Authagraph is groundbreaking in that it takes on both of those qualities, making it applicable to various themes such as sea routes, geology, meteorology and world history in ways never thought possible.
Instead of abstracting the globe into a cylinder, then a plane, as the more common Mercator projection map does, the AuthaGraph turns the Earth into a tetrahedron, which then unfolds in any number of ways. The map can then be tessellated similar to the way that we can traverse the planet–without ever coming to an end.
Rather than having just one focal point—the North Atlantic in Mercator’s case—nearly any place around the Earth can be at the center. The effect also means that the relative sizes of countries and their locations are much more representative than prior maps.
Alas, this seemed like it was finally going to go somewhere, but it quickly ran out of runway to have a satisfying ending as a standalone novel. Admittedly it is part of a multi-part series (three perhaps?) but it could have had a more satisfying ending by itself.
Ruby’s motivations were all too self-centered and she didn’t take the logical steps at any point in the book even when they were given to her on a platter, which makes it seem a bit too stilted. This is sad because the author creates an interesting world, has some generally interesting characters, and a wonderful way with words.
I’m torn thinking about whether to continue on in the series or just stopping here. Perhaps if I can get e-book copies of the next two once the third is released in November later this year I may continue.
