[I really love this guy’s work. -egg]

Jeremy Mann (previously here and here) paints cityscapes set during the low-lit moments of the early morning or evening, just when natural light has begun to creep in or fade from a city’s car-lined streets. Using oil paints, Mann applies and wipes away areas of the canvas to recreate these hazy environments, adding layers of paint back on top of the slightly smeared works with more detailed strokes. This layered effects makes the works appear like double exposed images, two scenes gently blurring into one.

Source: New Oil-Based Cityscapes Set at Dawn and Dusk by Jeremy Mann

[The author makes the common mistake of believing that Deep Learning Is Magic (flavor of the day: regret-based learning is magic), but it’s still a very interesting post. -egg]

Swarms of real life, human trolls have already been able to achieve some remarkable things.

For example, there’s the well-known incident where Time’s Man Of The Year Poll met 4chan. Twice.

But real-life trolls have to sleep. They have to eat. Whilst it might not look like it, they get tired, and angry, and dispirited.

Chatbots don’t.

And the only limit to the number of trollbots you can control is the amount of processing power they require. That might initially look like a pretty major limiter, given that machine-learning applications tend to require at least a single graphics card of some power each. But a), thanks to cloud computing that’s actually pretty affordable – an Amazon GPU instance on Spot Pricing will cost you $0.13 an hour or a little over 2 dollars a day – and b) there’s no reason that one instance of the trollbot software can’t control hundreds of social media accounts all posting frantically.

So what does this mean?

Source: Rise Of The Trollbot – Charlie’s Diary

[Very cool! -egg]

Experts have long talked about using multiple rotors on electric helicopters as an alternative method of personal transport. And today, the company responsible for creating an 18-rotor electric helicopter just managed to successfully complete its first manned test flight—which means our dream of using multicopters just moved one step forward.

The Volocopter VC200 is the world’s first certified multicopter, and while may not be the most impressive or ambitious demonstration of the technology, it show remarkable stability and ease of use. The device doesn’t require constant monitoring of controls, which makes it ideal for users new to the technology.

Check out this video of of its maiden flight in the video below.

Watch The UFO-Like, 18 Rotor Volocopter Take its First Manned Flight

“Today, we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos,” Stephen Hawking said today in New York. “Because we are human, and our nature is to fly.”

The famed physicist was speaking at a press conference to launch Breakthrough Starshot, a new space initiative that promises to apply Silicon Valley thinking to space exploration. Hawking, billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are the organization’s board of directors. Hawking says the $100 million program will send small “nanocraft” to explore Earth’s nearest solar system, Alpha Centauri.

Former NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden is directing the project, supported by a committee of leading scientists and engineers.

“Imagine hundreds of spacecraft the size of a butterfly, propelled by light beams at record-shattering speeds and journeying to distant stars 4.37 light years away — far deeper into space than human-built probes have ever ventured,” CNN reported of what may be the most ambitious space exploration project in history–one that may not be completed in our lifetimes.

The piece to read on today’s big space news is Dennis Overbye’s, at theNew York Times. He asks, “Can you fly an iPhone to the stars?”

Source: Steven Hawking wants to send tiny ‘nanocraft’ space probes to Alpha Centauri / Boing Boing

It’s unnerving to discover a wasp’s nest dangling outside your house, but perhaps it would be a tad less so with the help of biology student Mattia Menchetti who cleverly realized he could give colored construction paper to a colony of European paper wasps. By gradually providing different paper shades, the wasps turned their homes into a functional rainbow of different colors. This isn’t the first time scientists have encountered insects producing colorful materials with the aid of artificial coloring. In 2012, residue from an M&M plant caused local bees to make blue and green honey, and a similar—though admittedly more tragic—incident involving bees and the dye used inMaraschino cherries occured recently in New York. You can see more of Menchetti’s experiment on his website. (via Booooooom)

Source: When Given Colored Construction Paper, Wasps Build Rainbow Colored Nests

“I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” Billy Preston, who died in 2006, once said. “She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”

Source: Aretha Franklin’s American Soul

[…]

Here’s my theory: Apple see their long term future as including a global secure payments infrastructure that takes over the role of Visa and Mastercard’s networks—and ultimately of spawning a retail banking subsidiary to provide financial services directly, backed by some of their cash stockpile.

The FBI thought they were asking for a way to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is myopically focussed on past criminal investigations, not the future of the technology industry, and the FBI did not understand that they were actually asking for a way to tracelessly unlock and mess with every ATM and credit card on the planet circa 2030 (if not via Apple, then via the other phone OSs, once the festering security fleapit that is Android wakes up and smells the money).

If the FBI get what they want, then the back door will be installed and the next-generation payments infrastructure will be just as prone to fraud as the last-generation card infrastructure, with its card skimmers and identity theft.

And this is why Tim Cook is willing to go to the mattresses with the US department of justice over iOS security: if nobody trusts their iPhone, nobody will be willing to trust the next-generation Apple Bank, and Apple is going to lose their best option for securing their cash pile as it climbs towards the stratosphere.

Source: Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI – Charlie’s Diary

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, “There’s been a lot of talk about computer-assisted medicine, but in most cases these are tools to help you talk to a doctor. For a year, I’ve been tracking a remarkable new service that actually dispenses medical advice about toxicology and poisoning using software algorithms.

Poison control centers are the 55 centers around the country you call on an 800 number when your 2-year old eats all the birth control pills or you eat 24 aspirin instead of 2-4. Board-certified toxicologists at these centers supervise specially trained pharmacists and nurses, who consult detailed reference books and tell you if you should just sleep it off or if you need to haul ass into the hospital. One of the biggest users of poison control hotlines are Emergency Room doctors, since they don’t have toxicologists on staff.

The webPOISONCONTROL system is a radical change from that practice. You can use an iPhone, Android, or the web service and answer a series of questions about what you took and when, and the system uses algorithms that have been peer-reviewed by doctors to give you medical advice. It’s a triage site, which means it uses the algorithms to decide if you’re fine, don’t worry, or if you need to call in or get to medical help.

The site was 3 years in development, and for the last year, it has answered over 10,000 cases. There’s a demo mode if you want to try it out. There’s a great little pill identifier service that lets you use the color, shape, or markings to figure out what you have. The phone apps are particularly impressive with a barcode scanner so you can just scan the package to identify that thing you just swallowed.

The system works on medicine now, but the same algorithms can be extended to include things like household goods (“I just drank a quart of dish soap. Will I die?”). There is also detailed background on the system here. There are even some cool jingles.

Peer-reviewed online expert system will help you if you’ve been poisoned / Boing Boing

Matthew Simmonds (previously) sculpts miniature architectural structures from raw stone. Part of his interest in producing these pieces is centered around the contrast between the carved precision of his hand against the rough nature of the natural material he chooses for each work. The pieces&#

Source: New Miniature Architectural Structures Carved Into Raw Stone by Matthew Simmonds | Colossal

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

[…]

Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.

[…]

If domestication of biotechnology is the wave of the future, five important questions need to be answered. First, can it be stopped? Second, ought it to be stopped? Third, if stopping it is either impossible or undesirable, what are the appropriate limits that our society must impose on it? Fourth, how should the limits be decided? Fifth, how should the limits be enforced, nationally and internationally? I do not attempt to answer these questions here. I leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers.

Source: Our Biotech Future by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books