Grail on Rand Tablet Demo (1968)
Alan Kay shows the Rand tablet
Unix Pipes - mechanism for inter-process communication using message passing
#Comment on Headspace founder Andy Puddicombe's "mind full" PR video
"These teachings have come from somewhere else, there are not mine, and all I'm doing is kind of sharing it with you" - Sure Andy, all you are doing is sharing it... while making an obscene amount of money with your company headspace, which successfully packaged the age old practice of meditation as yet another product for bored western consumers during late capitalism. Bravo, it's great comedy for sure! Extra brownie points for the choice of music in your PR videos (cause nothing says "mindfulness" quite like upbeat trendy electronic dance music...) and sneaking in your political opinions about Tibet (of course, "mindfully" presented as objective facts)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." - Edsger Dijkstra (via)
Paris Mayor: It's Time for a '15-Minute City'
In her re-election campaign, Mayor Anne Hidalgo says that every Paris resident should be able to meet their essential needs within a short walk or bike ride.
Do you want it locally grown, water-saving and pesticide-free? Urban agriculture might suit you, with a little help from gene editing. Zachary Lippman’s team has already succeeded with Solanaceae fruit crops, optimizing tomatoes and ground-cherries for indoor production (see their paper in Nature Biotechnology).
By targeting three genes (SlER, SPG5, and SP), they made the plants display compact growth habit and early yield. The tomatoes produced were slightly smaller than the wild type, but each plant bore more fruit, and they tasted good.
Commenting the paper in the news and views section, Cathryn O’ Sullivan and colleagues foresee a whole CRISPR menu coming from urban agriculture in the future. It is unlikely that wheat or rice will ever be grown indoors, but urban farms will be interested in producing any plant that has high value and is eaten fresh.First of all fruits and vegetables that grow on bushes or vines, such as tomato, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, cucumber, capsicum, grapes, kiwifruit. Specialist crops such as hops, vanilla, saffron, coffee, and also medicinal or cosmetic crops may come next.
They think that one day even small trees (chocolate, mango, almonds) may be grown indoors. However, “for indoor farming to be broadly adopted, the capital and operating costs of climate-controlled farms must be reduced, or they will benefit only the wealthiest communities.”
"That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge"
- Zhuang Zhou
Warning of agricultural 'digital arms race' in EU
Friends of the Earth has called on the EU Commission to regulate data generated in agriculture via new technologies to avoid a few global corporations consolidating their dominance in the farming and food chain. "Europe is on the verge of allowing centralisation and concentration of [farming] data at an unprecedented scale, with the absence of any regulation," a new report by the NGO warned.
China’s Foreign Ministry has accused the United States of being a “hacker empire”
The CIA has been using the Crypto AG’s encoding devices to spy on over 120 countries for decades. Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said facts have repeatedly shown that the US is the world’s largest monitor in cyberspace. He said its surveillance operations have no respect for international rules. The spokesman called on the US to give the international community an explanation."
"Jeff Bezos didn’t “donate” $10B to “fight climate change” he’s setting up a $10B venture called the “Bezos Earth Fund.” In other words, he’s founding a bank and using it to invest in “the green sector,” thereby profiting from & influencing how transition happens" - Chosun Chillbo
Blockly Developer Summit 2019: MakeCode Block Design - talk by Jacqueline Russell & Shannon Kao (2019)
Blockly: Using Block Based Coding in your App