Reagan Would-Be Assassin John Hinckley Jr To Be Released
July 27th, 2016The Hinckley-Bush-Reagan connection is one of the best coincidences of all time. I don’t know if I’ve dealt with it in the past on Cryptogon… so here it is, just in case.
AP 1981: Bush Son Had Dinner Plans With Hinckley Brother Before Shooting
Via: BBC:
John Hinckley Jr, the man who tried to assassinate US President Ronald Reagan, is to be released from a psychiatric hospital next month after 35 years.
Mr Reagan and three others were injured in the shooting outside a hotel in Washington in March 1981.
Mr Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity but was sent for treatment to a Washington hospital.
He has already been spending 17 days a month at his mother’s home in Virginia under strict conditions.
A judge ruled that Mr Hinckley, now 61, could reside full-time there on “convalescent leave” from 5 August.
Mercedes-Benz shows Off the First Fully Electric Heavy Urban Transport Truck
July 27th, 2016Production is still many years away.
Via: TechCrunch:
Daimler isn’t about to let Tesla own any more ‘firsts’ in electric transportation; the German company revealed the Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck today in Stuttgart, an all-electric truck with a total admissible weight capacity of 26 tonnes (29 U.S. tons), which makes it the first clean energy big rig of its kind.
As the name implies, it’s designed for use in urban environments, capping off the short-sprint end of the heavy transport shipping cycle. That’s in part due to its max range of 200 kilometres (about 124 miles). The prototype Urban eTruck is ready for its close-up, but Daimler notes that we’ll have to wait until a “conceivable” launch window of “the beginning of the next decade” for wide-scale production and real-world use.
Still, Daimler beat Tesla to the punch with this reveal, since Tesla CEO Elon Musk only last week that the company is working on an electric Tesla Semi transport truck, with a reveal planned for as early as next year.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos, Cass Sunstein Join Pentagon’s ‘Defense Innovation Board’
July 26th, 2016See: Cass “Cognitive Infiltration” Sunstein
Also, this sounds like the group described in Ernest Cline’s Armada, which I would only recommend to absolute diehard sci-fi and gaming nerds who are between the ages of about 40 and 50 years old.
My guess, however, is that Cline got the idea for the group in his book from the Jasons.
Via: DefenseNews:
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Amazon head Jeff Bezos and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein are among the newest names to join Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s new Defense Innovation Advisory Board.
Carter announced those names as part of a list of ten new members for the board, which he created in March to advise the Pentagon on technology innovation issues. The board is headed by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, the Google parent company.
French Priest Beheaded by Two ISIS Followers in Church
July 26th, 2016Via: Guardian:
The murder of a priest and the wounding of one of his parishioners in Normandy was an act of terrorism carried out by two followers of Islamic State, the French president, François Hollande, has said.
A witness to the attack has described how the two men forced the 86-year-old priest, Father Jacques Hamel, to his knees, slit his throat and filmed themselves appearing to preach in Arabic at the altar.
Clinton Cash
July 26th, 2016Via: YouTube:
Breast-Feeding the Microbiome
July 26th, 2016Via: The New Yorker:
Human milk is a particular marvel. Every mammal mother produces complex sugars called oligosaccharides, but human mothers, for some reason, churn out an exceptional variety: so far, scientists have identified more than two hundred human milk oligosaccharides, or H.M.O.s. They are the third-most plentiful ingredient in human milk, after lactose and fats, and their structure ought to make them a rich source of energy for growing babies—but babies cannot digest them. When German first learned this, he was gobsmacked. Why would a mother expend so much energy manufacturing these complicated chemicals if they were apparently useless to her child? Why hasn’t natural selection put its foot down on such a wasteful practice? Here’s a clue: H.M.O.s pass through the stomach and the small intestine unharmed, landing in the large intestine, where most of our bacteria live. What if they aren’t food for babies at all? What if they are food for microbes?
Who Gets Your Vote for U.S. President?
July 25th, 2016Let’s assume everyone reading this is eligible to vote in the upcoming election.
I'm voting for...
- Donald Trump (35%, 206 Votes)
- I'm not voting (29%, 168 Votes)
- Some other candidate (26%, 150 Votes)
- Hillary Clinton (10%, 57 Votes)
Total Voters: 581
Artificial Intelligence Swarms Silicon Valley on Wings and Wheels
July 24th, 2016See artificial intelligence winters and hype cycles.
Via: New York Times:
For more than a decade, Silicon Valley’s technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie.
Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a “Like” button.
The new era in Silicon Valley centers on artificial intelligence and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered in the world.
The shift was evident in a Lowe’s home improvement store here this month, when a prototype inventory checker developed by Bossa Nova Robotics silently glided through the aisles using computer vision to automatically perform a task that humans have done manually for centuries.
The robot, which was skilled enough to autonomously move out of the way of shoppers and avoid unexpected obstacles in the aisles, alerted people to its presence with soft birdsong chirps. Gliding down the middle of an aisle at a leisurely pace, it can recognize bar codes on shelves, and it uses a laser to detect which items are out of stock.
Silicon Valley’s financiers and entrepreneurs are digging into artificial intelligence with remarkable exuberance. The region now has at least 19 companies designing self-driving cars and trucks, up from a handful five years ago. There are also more than a half-dozen types of mobile robots, including robotic bellhops and aerial drones, being commercialized.
“We saw a slow trickle in investments in robotics, and suddenly, boom — there seem to be a dozen companies securing large investment rounds focusing on specific robotic niches,” said Martin Hitch, chief executive of Bossa Nova, which has a base in San Francisco.
Funding in A.I. start-ups has increased more than fourfold to $681 million in 2015, from $145 million in 2011, according to the market research firm CB Insights. The firm estimates that new investments will reach $1.2 billion this year, up 76 percent from last year.
Self Driving Car Company Asks People to Generate Data with Mobile Phones
July 24th, 2016But what I really thought was interesting was the inducement to get people to do this: Comma Points and a scoreboard.
In other words, Hotz turned this into a game. I wonder if he plans to use the Chffr app to offer bonus points to get people to drive on roads that present particularly difficult challenges to the AI? See: Pokemon Go/Soft Control.
Via: cnet:
You don’t have to be a billionaire investor to get involved with the development of self-driving cars. Thanks to George Hotz and his company, Comma.ai, all you need is a cell phone, a windshield mount and Hotz’s own Chffr app.
Chffr is available only for Android phones at the moment. After downloading it, mount your camera on the windshield and open the app. Chffr records your drive and watches along as you navigate around bicyclists, wait for cars at stop signs and other daily traffic-related occurrences. It uploads that data to Comma.ai’s servers, which compiles all the data it receives to help its autonomous-driving kit learn to mimic human behavior.
For using Chffr, you’ll earn something called “Comma Points.” Nobody’s really sure what the points are for, but for the time being, they’re reflected on a leaderboard on Comma.ai’s site, so you can see who’s doing the best job at contributing. Right now, friend of Roadshow Alex Roy is in second place, and George Hotz himself is down in ninth.
Super-Hard Metal ‘Four Times Tougher Than Titanium’
July 24th, 2016Via: BBC:
A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold.
The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists.
The material is four times harder than pure titanium and has applications in making longer-lasting medical implants, they say.
Conventional knee and hip implants have to be replaced after about 10 years due to wear and tear.
Details of the new metal – an alloy of gold and titanium – are revealed in the journal, Science Advances.
