New Wheeled Robot from Boston Dynamics
February 1st, 2017Via: The Verge:
Boston Dynamics is best known for its bipedal and quadrupedal robots, but it turns out the company has also been experimenting with some radical new tech: the wheel.
The company’s new wheeled, upright robot is named Handle (“because it’s supposed to handle objects”) and looks like a cross between a Segway and the two-legged Atlas bot. Handle hasn’t been officially unveiled, but was shown off by company founder Marc Raibert in a presentation to investors. Footage of the presentation was uploaded to YouTube by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson.
Trump Picks Neil Gorsuch as Nominee for Supreme Court
February 1st, 2017Via: Reuters:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated Neil Gorsuch for a lifetime job on the U.S. Supreme Court, picking the 49-year-old federal appeals court judge to restore the court’s conservative majority and help shape rulings on divisive issues such as abortion, gun control, the death penalty and religious rights.
The Colorado native faces a potentially contentious confirmation battle in the U.S. Senate after Republicans last year refused to consider Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy caused by the February 2016 death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, indicated his party would mount a procedural hurdle requiring 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate rather than a simple majority to approve Gorsuch, and expressed “very serious doubts” about the nominee. Liberal groups called for an all-out fight to reject Gorsuch while conservative groups and Republican senators heaped praise on him like “outstanding,” “impressive” and a “home run.”
Gorsuch, the son of a former Reagan administration official, is the youngest nominee to the nation’s highest court in more than a quarter century, and he could influence the direction of the court for decades. He is a judge on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and was appointed to that post by Republican President George W. Bush in 2006.
California Adding Massive Battery Systems to Grid
January 31st, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Via: Bloomberg:
Tesla Motors Inc. is making a huge bet that millions of small batteries can be strung together to help kick fossil fuels off the grid. The idea is a powerful one—one that’s been used to help justify the company’s $5 billion factory near Reno, Nev.—but batteries have so far only appeared in a handful of true, grid-scale pilot projects.
That changes this week.
Three massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.
Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that’s just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. “It’s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at,” he said. “Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.”
AI Beats Professional Poker Players
January 31st, 2017Via: BBC:
A poker-playing AI has beaten four human players in a marathon match lasting 20 days.
Libratus, an artificial intelligence program developed at Carnegie Mellon University, was trained to play a variant of the game known as no-limit heads-up Texas hold ’em.
In a similar tournament in 2015, the humans won.
The victory has been hailed as a significant milestone for AI, by the team responsible for building it.
…
One of the professional poker players, Jimmy Chou, admitted at the halfway point that the AI was proving a tough opponent.
“The bot gets better and better every day. It’s like a tougher version of us,” he said.
“The first couple of days, we had high hopes,” Mr Chou said.
“But every time we find a weakness, it learns from us and the weakness disappears the next day.”
He added that the professionals had been sharing notes and tips in an effort to find weaknesses in the AI’s game-play.
But they were not the only ones doing homework.
Each night after the play ended, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre added computations to sharpen the AI’s strategy.
The FBI’s Secret Rules
January 31st, 2017Via: The Intercept:
For example, the bureau’s agents can decide that a campus organization is not “legitimate” and therefore not entitled to robust protections for free speech; dig for derogatory information on potential informants without any basis for believing they are implicated in unlawful activity; use a person’s immigration status to pressure them to collaborate and then help deport them when they are no longer useful; conduct invasive “assessments” without any reason for suspecting the targets of wrongdoing; demand that companies provide the bureau with personal data about their users in broadly worded national security letters without actual legal authority to do so; fan out across the internet along with a vast army of informants, infiltrating countless online chat rooms; peer through the walls of private homes; and more. The FBI offered various justifications of these tactics to our reporters. But the documents and our reporting on them ultimately reveal a bureaucracy in dire need of greater transparency and accountability.
LibreTaxi: Free and Open Source Alternative to Uber/Lyft
January 31st, 2017Via: LibreTaxi:
LibreTaxi makes taxi affordable by getting rid of the third party between passengers and drivers. Negotiate the price before the ride is confirmed, pay cash upon arrival. 1-minute hiring for all drivers.
Cafe X, Bringing Robots to the Coffee Shop
January 30th, 2017Via: TechCrunch:
The world’s first coffee shop opened in Constantinople in 1555. Four hundred and some years later, Cafe X is putting a twist on that old barista model. Opening in San Francisco today, the startup is opting instead to have a large robotic arm craft your caffeinated potions.
Trump Signs Executive Order to Slash Regulations
January 30th, 2017Via Reuters:
President Donald Trump signed an order on Monday that will seek to dramatically pare back federal regulations by requiring agencies to cut two existing regulations for every new rule introduced.
“This will be the biggest such act that our country has ever seen. There will be regulation, there will be control, but it will be normalized control,” Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office, surrounded by a group of small business owners.
Bag of Chips Can Sense If You’ve Been Drinking and Call You an Uber
January 30th, 2017
Via: Mashable:
Tostitos’ new bag wants to chaperone your Super Bowl party.
In honor of the big game, the chip maker is launching a special-edition version of its packaging with a built-in sensor that can detect trace levels of alcohol in your breath.
If it decides you’ve been drinking — regardless of how much — an image of a red steering wheel appears on the otherwise stark black bag along with a reminder not to drive and a code for a $10 Uber discount (valid only on Super Bowl Sunday).
And if you’ve had so much to drink that the mere act of hailing an Uber becomes a difficult chore, the bag will even do that for you. The package is equipped with near-field communication technology that will automatically order a ride when tapped with a smartphone.
Chinese Fishery with a Giant Integrated Solar Array
January 29th, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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It’s huge. Must see photos.
Via: Electrek:
The images were released by Xinhau in December and the People’s Daily in January. The 200MW project will produce greater than 220GWh/year of electricity. The project cost 1.8B RMB (US$260M) and covers an area of 300 hectares. The power generated by the station will be connected to the state grid, yielding an annual income of 240 million RMB (US$34M). In addition, another 13 million RMB (US$2M) will be earned through the fishery. Roughly, the system will pay for itself in seven to eight years.
