"Automation is an addiction. Stay in music school kids, play your instruments. Don’t do AI." - Quote from the new generative music album from Dadabots.
"Automation is an addiction. Stay in music school kids, play your instruments. Don’t do AI." - Quote from the new generative music album from Dadabots.
Ganoderma lingzhi, also known as reishi, and in Japanese as mannentake ("10,000-year mushroom"), is a polypore fungus belonging to the genus Ganoderma.
Nixie system uses drones for more efficient water sampling
Municipalities regularly have to check for pollution in local waterways, often utilizing crews of workers in boats. The new Nixie system is intended to make things much quicker, simpler and ultimately cheaper, using a water-sampling drone instead.
War on Drugs, Health and Culture: A Raving Success!
The made-up African mountains: A historic case highlighting the dangers of abstraction
In 1798, the English cartographer James Rennell invented a high mountain range thousands of kilometers long and drew it on a new map of Africa: the Kong Mountains. The story is completely absurd, but you can also learn something from phantom mountains.
Rennell was considered a great geographical authority of the British Age of Discovery. When he drew maps for the travelogue of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1796) and located a large new mountain range on them, no one had any reason to doubt their existence.
So one cartographer after the other took over the knowledge of the new mountains. They appear in at least 40 maps between 1798 and 1892, and they got bigger and bigger (above: 1805, here: 1839). All on the basis of a remark by Park that he had seen 2 or 3 peaks.
From 1830 the course of the Niger was known and it was known that the mountains could not exist like this. Nevertheless, it took L.-G. Binger in 1889 (he didn't even find a range of hills) until the Kong Mountains finally began to disappear from the maps.
And even then they continued to lead a shadowy existence as a cartographic phantom for quite a while: The Kong Mountains can be found in the index of the Oxford Advanced Atlas from 1928 and even in an edition of Goode's Atlas from 1995.
The anecdote nicely illustrates how it can work with the transmission of knowledge in science: belief in authority plus "facts" assumption without own examination and a dose of ignorance. That is definitely not the rule, but one is not sure about it today either.
Found in: Simon Garfield, On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does, 2012, Chapter 11.
Also of interest: Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, 2012.
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"A holistic approach to computing & sustainability inspired from permaculture"
Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster - by Drew DeVault (2021)
"Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency."
Cardinal among 10 indicted by Vatican for financial crimes (Reuters)
A prominent Italian cardinal was among 10 people sent to trial in the Vatican on Saturday charged with financial crimes including embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, extortion and abuse of office. Cardinal Angelo Becciu, formerly a senior official in the Vatican administration, as well as two top officials at the Vatican's Financial Intelligence Unit will go on trial on July 27 over a multi-million euro scandal involving the Vatican's purchase of a building in one of London's smartest districts.
The geological formation of the Chocolate Hills, in the Bohol province of the Philippines.
New Frontiers in Alife: What was old is new again - Keynote by Luis Zaman
Visual Effects from the Movie " 47 Ronin"
Wadi Al-Hitan (وادي الحيتان, "Valley of the Whales")