[…]

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

[It’s particularly interesting to me that when a man said he was in love with them, their mother said, “Well, you can’t love them both.” That’s completely contrary to their own perception of their identity — for them, marrying separate men would be bigamy. -egg]

Identical twins Bridgette and Paula Powers think of themselves as a single person.

Frank Robson profiled them for the Sydney Morning Herald:

Before we meet, I phone identical twins Paula and Bridgette Powers at the Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue refuge on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The woman who answers doesn’t offer a name, so I ask if I’m speaking to Paula or Bridgette. “Yes,” says the woman, waiting for me to continue.

It’s only when we get together that the aptness of that response sinks in. Because although the twins – or “twinnies” as they prefer – are clearly two people, they give the eerie impression of being completely interchangeable.

Source: Identical twins say the same thing at the same time / Boing Boing

Thai artist Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew paints portraits on layers of fine netting or tulle, deftly producing an analog 3D effect with subjects who appear to be sitting in chairs or lying down on beds. When circling the paintings they morph and shift, changing form depending on the viewer’s distance and location to the piece. These subjects are often his family, a way for the artist to pause his loved ones’ aging process and preserve them in time.

Nimmalaikaew first discovered the technique while a student at Silpakorn University in Bangkok after a stray speck of paint landed on a mosquito net in his studio. Witnessing the dimensionality the surface afforded the paint, he began to explore new ways in which to paint on the utilitarian material.

For each piece Nimmalaikaew begins with a digital drawing which he then prints life-size to determine the subject’s form and texture. He then begins to paint the layers with oil paint in a style that he calls “tulle-painting style.” In an 2014 interview he explained, “Over time, I have learnt that the tulle demands a different way of creating realistic light and shadow for the material. The top layer gives details for the optical illusion. Then I connect each layer with clear copolymer line to make it all fit together and create depth in the image.”

Source: Ghostly Portraits Painted Onto Layers of Netting by Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew

Inspired by animalistic forms both living and extinct, artist Mylinh Nguyen welds alien creatures from brass, bronze, and silver. Using a variety of machining techniques each creature takes form over several weeks, originating first as haphazard sketches in a notebook before evolving into perman

Source: Otherworldly Metal Organisms Welded by Mylinh Nguyen

It was the next month that it happened. On August 19, just days before his twentieth birthday, Lilley tried to log in to So-Relatable but couldn’t. Greenfield checked the site, which redirected to an error page: “There’s nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesn’t currently exist at this address.” They’d been terminated, their blogs revoked by Tumblr for violating its terms of service.

Tumblr had just dissolved the sites of some of its most popular teenage users, an estimated 30 million follows gone. Including Pizza. Blogs that had brought relief from unremitting high school agony and then miraculously made their teen creators more money than they could have ever imagined, were erased from the internet, except for fragments reblogged on other sites. The day before, if they’d had a funny thought, they could share it with half a million people. And now, nothing.

Source: The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens | New Republic