[This is pretty much my perspective. “Since there simply won’t be enough job slots for the entire population, we’re going to have to account for the shortfall, and recognize that work, as we currently conceive it, will no longer be the average person’s principal contribution to society. If we’re intent on maintaining a capitalist economy, there’s going to have to be a basic allowance allotted to citizens that’s untethered to the labor market—because pretty soon, the numbers just won’t add up. There won’t be any realistic route to full employment when robots become cheap, efficient, and flexible enough.” -egg]
“The world is fundamentally changing; the economic…:

“The world is fundamentally changing; the economic assumptions that currently gird our society will be meaningless in as soon as a few decades. And we’d better get ready to prepare for that shift—if we don’t adjust the current socio-economic structure, we’re going to have mass joblessness, and society-wide chaos. We’re going to need to fundamentally reform not just our policies but our attitudes towards work. We’re going to need to re-engineer the social safety net from the ground up to account for the fact that robots are taking over on the labor front.”
Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon Are Worth $1 Trillion, but Only Create 150,000 Jobs. It’s Time to Reassess the Future of Work | Motherboard

Kids should learn programming as well as reading and writing:

Here’s Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (whence the kids’ programming language Scratch comes) doing a TedX talk about the role of programming in education, arguing that kids should learn to code so that they can use code to learn:

Most people view computer coding as a narrow technical skill. Not Mitch Resnick. He argues that the ability to code, like the ability to read and write, is becoming essential for full participation in today’s society. And he demonstrates how Scratch programming software from the MIT Media Lab makes coding accessible and appealing to everyone — from elementary-school children to his 83-year-old mom.

As director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, Mitch Resnick designs new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and finger paint of kindergarten, engage people of all ages in creative learning experiences.

Reading, Writing, and Programming: Mitch Resnick at TEDxBeaconStreet

(Thanks, Mitch!)

3D printed house to emerge:

A Dutch architecture firm plans on using a D-Shape 3D printer to output a house in the shape of a Mobius strip, a project they estimate will take 18 months:

Dutch architecture studio Universe Architecture is planning to construct a house with a 3D printer for the first time.

The Landscape House will be printed in sections using the giant D-Shape printer, which can produce sections of up to 6 x 9 metres using a mixture of sand and a binding agent.

Architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture will collaborate with Italian inventor Enrico Dini, who developed the D-Shape printer, to build the house, which has a looping form based on a Möbius strip.

Dutch architects to use 3D printer to print a house

(via Beyond the Beyond)

[Hot damn. -egg]

TARDIS dress is bigger on the inside:

Jere7my sez, “This lovely young woman brought the house down at Arisia this year with her stunning “TARDIS Princess” dress. A “door” on the skirt opened to show the TARDIS control room, giving it the illusion of being “bigger on the inside”… I believe the creator/model is Sasha Trabane.”

TARDIS dress.

(Thanks, Jere7my!)

[GAAAAAAAAAH. -egg]
Parasitic wasp sanitizes its victims from the inside out: So, the downside is that you are being eaten alive, from the inside out, by a wasp larva. On the plus side, though, at least it has the courtesy to disinfect you as it goes along. At Nature News you can watch a baby cockroach wasp burrows around through the insides of an American cockroach, leaving a trail of clear, liquid anti-microbials in its wake.

Parrot drives robotic bird buggy:

University of Florida grad student Andrew Gray built the Bird Buggy for his parrot to drive around the house. “When it’s time to put the bird away, Bird Buggy is able to dock itself to a base station utilizing a web camera,” Gray says. (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

An epidemiology alphabet:

The only alphabet guaranteed to make you want to wash your hands. Made by one, Jennifer Gardy.

In related news, this video taught me that the parasite giardia is sometimes called “beaver fever”. Why? Because one of its major reservoirs — species that can comfortably host a parasite and pass it on to others — is, yes, the beaver.

Now here’s the part you probably don’t want to hear. Giardia is transmitted via what’s known as the “fecal-oral route”.

Now, nobody intentionally goes out and eats beaver shit. (One hopes. But this is the internet.) But beavers do shit in the woods. Near woodland streams. Which means that unwary hikers and backpackers can end up ingesting giardia when they drink from what appears to be crystal-clear waters.

Via the Worms and Germs blog

[Damn, this is so badass. -egg]

Augmented Reality Welding Mask:

This welding mask uses HDR video to ensure you see just how sloppy that weld was.

The creators of the MannVis augmented reality welding helmet have come up with a set of complex algorithms which allow real-time processing of HDR videos at 120 frames per second — in stereoscopic 3D, no less. The process creates an effective contrast ratio of 100,000,000:1 which is far beyond natural human capability. This incredible contrast ratio is used in an augmented reality view to show the welder inhuman detail as they weld.

The MannVis Augmented Reality Welding Helmet

(Thanks, John Courte!)