Coredemia. CAUSALITY, 2nd Edition, 2009. Planning Algorithms / Motion Planning. When did America become too afraid to explore a frontier? America's idea of itself is inextricably tied to the opening of the American West. In the 19th century America embraced the entrepreneurs, and rugged individuals who sought to reinvent themselves by going west. Joe Manchin seems to have forgotten who we are. He seems to have forgotten that it was not the bankers or the boy scouts who opened the West, it was the entrepreneurs, and yes, the hucksters, and the speculators, and all manner of flawed characters looking for a place where they could enjoy the relative freedom of the frontier, away from the tentacles of an overreaching government.
He seems to have forgotten that, more than anything else, it was the frenzied speculation of the Gold Rush that led to California becoming a state, the building of roads, churches, and schools throughout California and the development of the transcontinental railroad that bound California to the rest of the United States. The Mammoth Cometh. Photo The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees and remained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13, Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, he saw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and “fell in love.” Continue reading the main story. Out in the Great Alone. I landed in Anchorage in the middle of the night. The next morning, I drove an hour north to Wolf Lake Airport, a private airfield near Wasilla. You know those old photo-backdrop screens that little kids in department stores used to have their portraits taken in front of?
It was like driving into one of those. National-monument mountains framing a sky that was chemical blue. Highway as straight as a rifle sight. Until you actually get to Alaska, it’s hard to prepare yourself for the scale of it, the sheer felt immensity. The majority of this extreme vastness can’t be reached by road. Jay Baldwin met me at the hangar. His best friend was a musher, Linwood Fiedler, who’d been the Iditarod’s runner-up in 2001. Enlarge Clippings of crash reports hang on the wall of the ACTS hangar. “You’re not a pilot in Alaska,” Jay said, fixing me with a blue-eyed and somehow vaguely piratical stare, “until you’ve crashed an airplane. Choosing an airplane — that was the first step. They were so small. Language agnostic - What are the lesser known but useful data structures. Hugh C. Howey - Best selling author of WOOL and the Molly Fyde series.
Top Science Longreads of 2013. I’m really optimistic about the future for long, deep, rich science reporting. There are more places that a publishing it, more ways of finding it, and a seemingly huge cadre of people who are writing it well. So without further ado, here’s a list of my top pieces of the year. It has blossomed to 15 from last year’s 12 because I was gripped by indecision and they’re all so good. In no particular order: 1) Bones of Contention, by Paige Williams for the New Yorker. The curious case of USA v. “He sold sloth claws, elephant jaws, wolf molars, dinosaur ribs—a wide range of anatomical fragments that went, mostly, for between ten and fifty dollars. 2) Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future, by Maryn McKenna for Medium. ““Many treatments require suppressing the immune system, to help destroy cancer or to keep a transplanted organ viable. 3) Uprooted, by Virginia Hughes for Matter. 4) The Social Life of Genes, by David Dobbs for Pacific Standard. 10) Omens, by Ross Andersen for Aeon.
And finally… Jeff Erickson's Algorithms. Contributions Appearing in the Book. [1308.6731] Average expansion rate and light propagation in a cosmological Tardis spacetime.
Elliptic Curves as Algebraic Structures. Last time we looked at the elementary formulation of an elliptic curve as the solutions to the equation where are such that the discriminant is nonzero: We have yet to explain why we want our equation in this form, and we will get to that, but first we want to take our idea of intersecting lines as far as possible. Fair warning: this post will start out at the same level as the previous post, but we intend to gradually introduce some mathematical maturity. If you don’t study mathematics, you’ll probably see terminology and notation somewhere between mysterious and incomprehensible. To denote real numbers. Skimming difficult parts, asking questions in the comments, and pushing through to the end are all encouraged. The Algorithm to Add Points The deep idea, and the necessary insight for cryptography, is that the points on an elliptic curve have an algebraic structure. So say we have two points on an elliptic curve defined by. . , we do the following geometric algorithm: .
Since it has to look like . Will the robot 'jobocalypse' make YOU obsolete? 2014 could be the year a droid takes your job, say experts. Scientists predict a 'jobocalypse' as robots take over manual jobsA huge 70% of occupations could become automated over next 30 yearsDrivers, teachers, babysitters and nurses could be replaced by robotsCould mean the end of the eight-hour, five-day working week By Mark Prigg Published: 17:04 GMT, 20 January 2014 | Updated: 21:32 GMT, 21 January 2014 Experts are predicting a 'jobocalypse' as robots take over manual jobs, while scientists at Cambridge warn that machines should have their intelligence limited to stop them outsmarting us.
A new version of the movie RoboCop (out February 12) shows us a future where technology revolutionises law enforcement, but that is just the tip of the iceberg for robotics. 'I believe we are the inflection point where robotics are going to change everything you know and do,' says Ben Way, author of Jobocalypse, a book about about the rise of the robots, told MailOnline. Joel Kinnaman, left. and Gary Oldman, right, star in the new RoboCop movie. Debunking the Myth of the 10,000-Hours Rule: What It Actually Takes to Reach Genius-Level Excellence. By Maria Popova How top-down attention, feedback loops, and daydreaming play into the science of success.
The question of what it takes to excel — to reach genius-level acumen at a chosen endeavor — has occupied psychologists for decades and philosophers for centuries. Groundbreaking research has pointed to “grit” as a better predictor of success than IQ, while psychologists have admonished against the dangers of slipping into autopilot in the quest for skill improvement. In recent years, one of the most persistent pop-psychology claims has been the myth of the “10,000-hour rule” — the idea that this is the amount of time one must invest in practice in order to reach meaningful success in any field.
But in Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (public library), celebrated psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, best-known for his influential 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, debunks the 10,000-hour mythology to reveal the more complex truth beneath the popular rule of thumb: What are the most inspirational blog posts you've ever read. The Writings of Leslie Lamport. Edge.org. Any first-hand experience of how scientific institutions actually operate drives home an excruciating realization: Science progresses more slowly by orders of magnitude than it could or should.
Our species could have science at the speed of thought—science at the speed of inference. But too often we run into Planck's demographic limit on the speed of science—funeral by funeral, with each tock of advancement clocked to the half-century tick of gatekeepers' professional lifespans. In contrast, the natural clock rate of science at the speed of thought is the flash rate at which individual minds, voluntarily woven into mutually invigorating communities by intense curiosity, can draw and share sequences of strong inferences from data.
Indeed, Planck was a giddy optimist, because scientists—like other humans—form coalitional group identities where adherence to group-celebrating beliefs (e.g., we have it basically right) are strongly moralized. Edge.org. Sometimes you make predictions. Sometimes you have wishful thinking. It is a pleasure to indulge in both, by discussing one and the same development which will change the world. Today's world, its economy, industry, environment, agriculture, energy, health, food, military power, communications, you name it, are all driven by knowledge. The only way to fight poverty, hunger, diseases, natural catastrophes, terrorism, war, and all other evil, is the creation and dissemination of knowledge, i.e. research and education. Of the six billion people on our planet, at least four billions are not participating in the knowledge revolution. Hundreds of millions are born to illiterate mothers, never drink clean water, have no medical care and never use a phone.
The "buzz words" of distant learning, individualized learning, and all other technology-driven changes in education, remain largely on paper, far from becoming a daily reality in the majority of the world's schools. Am I naive, stupid or both? Edge.org. Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University Computer Scientist; 1st Generation Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Stanford University World Peace I'm optimistic about the sustainability of materil progress, but since I'm known for that, I'll refrain. Instead I want to express optimism about world politics, especially about world peace. World peace is what we have. Contrast this with the time between 1914 and 1989, when there were serious attempts at world domination accompanied by at least three genocides. Admittedly something bad and surprising could happen. 100 years ago, in 1907, no-one predicted such troubles as happened.
"To us, to whom safety has become monotony, to whom the primeval savageries of nature are so remote as to become a mere pleasing condiment to our ordered routine, the world of dreams is very different from what it was amid the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline. Still, it's hard to predict 100 years ahead. New Prospects of Immortality What can one conclude from this? Edge.org.