Mouse brain neural connections

Researchers have created the most detailed map of the mouse brain to date, capturing the projections and connections of over 1,000 neurons (and counting). via Reddit

via Gfycat

Google's Selfish Ledger: Good, Bad or Nuanced?

"This internal video from 2016 shows a Google concept for how total data collection could reshape society" Via Drudge

--- You will have go to the link to view the video. Google is not letting me show it here ---

Google has already shown what can happen to their employees who ideologically resist the company line and dare to voice that 'problematic' opinion.

In the following video clip (starts at 33:18) "dark web" professors discuss the growing problem with... let's just call it  "free thought" in institutions of higher learning and the impact it could have down the road.

Robot Does Backflips

Link to video

"Richard Branson Makes A Bold Prediction About The Future Of Food"

Via Reddit:  "I believe that in 30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be clean or plant-based, taste the same and also be much healthier for everyone" - Richard Branson

Branson is among a growing number of very wealthy and influential investors that envision a very different food system than we have now. They recognize that our diets are unsustainable, and that changes are coming whether we like it or not, so might as well get on board sooner than later. Which is why they're backing companies that promise to tantalize our taste buds while removing animals from the equation.

(Link to more)

“Speculative and fanciful”, but haven’t ruled it out

"Groundbreaking fertilisation technique could allow gay couples to have babies with each other"

The shocking new study overthrows the idea that it is only possible to produce children using an egg, and fertilising it with sperm. Instead, the research suggests that it might be possible to conceive children using skin cells.

In a new experiment on mice, scientists appear to have shown that it would be possible to conceive of mice using other kinds of cells. The study showed that it was possible to produce healthy offspring while bypassing the normal route of fertilising an egg with sperm.

“The practical applications of this as the technology stands at the moment are not very broad,” Dr Perry said at a press conference.

“What we’re saying is that these embryos are mitotic cells – mitotic cells are the type of cell that almost every dividing cell in your body is. And therefore potentially one day we might be able to extend what we’ve shown in these mitotic cells to other mitotic cells.

“Will we be able to do that? I don’t know. But I think, if it is ever possible, one day in the distant future people will look back and say this is where it started.”

Could we envision a day when women will be fighting for the right to reproduce?

CRISPR: Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything

Link

Study: Everyone Secretly Hates Going Out

Vice:  Last week, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released the American Time Use Survey, an annual look at how people spend the precious minutes of their short lives. Mostly, people sleep (almost nine hours a day on average), work (just under eight hours on days they work), and watch TV (a bit under three hours). A scant 41 minutes of each average day are spent socializing in person with other humans, a number that's fallen by 9 percent over the past decade. Does this mean that society is falling further away from the everyone-kicking-it-all-the-time paradise of Friends? Or that we're talking to people online rather than in person now?

Maybe something darker is at play here: Maybe Americans aren't hanging out because we're all hiding in our apartments and inventing elaborate lies about why we can't come out.

That's the conclusion of a recent study by something called Yelp Eat24, which I guess is like Seamless but run by Yelp? Regardless, I have no reason not to trust a home food delivery service when it sends out a press release about how people prefer to stay at home, so let's take them at their word when they say, "It may be that FOMO—the Fear of Missing Out—has run its course, as a new survey identifies the power of POMO... the PLEASURE Of Missing Out." (more of this story)

"A.I. Is Progressing So Fast We Need a Basic Guaranteed Income"

This video clip reminds me of a movie, I believe it may have been The Time Machine (1960), or a Twilight Zone episode. Where the protagonist arrives a time when people, because they had no more care in the world ie no more wars and famine, decided to just relax and play all day. They did not read nor strive. The protagonist found the outcome extremely disturbing and disappointing, in a speech.

Whatever makes these guys believe in a different outcome?

"Driverless cars could spell the end for domestic flights, says Audi strategist"

"In the future you will not need a business hotel or a domestic flight," Schuwirth told Dezeen. "We can disrupt the entire business of domestic flights."

"Back To The Future films will never seem dated."

"BACK TO THE FUTURE IS NOW ALL BACK AND NO FUTURE" ... (excerpt)

What strikes me about this trilogy now, during the final week of the final year of the saga's Hill Valley narrative, is the way the individual movies, unlike their characters and town, have improbably escaped the ravages of time.

Once we got about twenty years out from the first film, their 1985 scenes became "period," too, like the 1955 scenes. I showed the trilogy to my son and daughter not too long ago, and they laughed as hard at Marty's once-hip ski vest and feathered hair as audiences during my era laughed at the 1950s signifiers. My daughter, who is a lot older than my son and is studying film history and sociology in college now, was intrigued to see how a trilogy conceived and filmed in the '80s viewed life in the '50s, and what it said about 1980s life without meaning to.

The sense of cultural superiority seemed more palpable to me when I watched the series with my kids than when I watched it during its original run, or when I revisited it in the '90s as a college film student. I was 16 when the original "Future" came out. The eighties were my adolescent decade. Few teenagers have the self-awareness and humility to recognize that the time they live in is not, in fact, the most technologically and culturally advanced time that the human race will ever experience, and that snickering at the past (as depicted in movies or history texts) makes the laughing person seem clueless and arrogant; I was no exception. I'm humbler about that sort of thing now because I'm in my forties and seen a few decades turn over. When I watch the "Future" films today, I am not just watching the films, I am watching myself—or I should say, I am thinking about who I was when the films came out, and cringing a little bit at how much I thought I knew, and how much I didn't know that I didn't know. When I was in high school, I laughed during the diner scene (along with everyone else in the theater) because Marty ordered a Pepsi Free and the counterman thought he was demanding a Pepsi for free. Now I laugh because the Pepsi Free name was discontinued in 1987, two years after the first "Future" came out. The joke is not about the obliviousness of the '50s adult, it's about the arrogance of the '80s teenager.

"To Stop Climate Change, We Must Genetically Engineer Humans"

"A lot of researchers are thinking about how to genetically engineer crops and food animals to help them withstand post-climate change heat and parched conditions. But what about genetically engineering humans to slow our constant carbon contributions?"

The first proposal we cover is night vision — the idea that we could genetically engineer humans to have more rods so we could better see at night, and thus reduce our dependence on electric lights. The problem here is that there are only so many spots for rods and cones in our eyeballs, and our particular balance of the two is a tradeoff. Humans are day creatures, so they have more cone cells. Animals like cats are night creatures, so they have more rods. So during the day, humans can actually see motion about 10 to 12 times better than a cat. And many experts think that cats don’t see the same number of colors we do, although they’re divided over whether cats see in mostly blues and grays, or whether they see more like dogs where everything is less saturated. So if we want night vision, we might have to compromise some of our day vision to get it.

Another modification that Liao proposed was an induced allergy to meat, to help people reduce their consumption of animals. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States 14.5% of all greenhouse gas pollution comes from livestock. So the idea here is to make people allergic to eating meat. The problem is that there’s no real way to control the severity of the allergy, and the two proteins that Liao talks about targeting (BSA and alpha-gal) are both found in all kinds of places like milk, eggs, dogs, cats and pork. People allergic to alpha-gal seem to be able to eat poultry and fish, but if they were to eat pork or lamb or beef the allergic reaction includes everything from hives to gastrointestinal upset, to anaphylactic shock. Not something most people would want to sign up for.

Next we talk about breeding people to be shorter, something Liao says could reduce our carbon footprint. Smaller people require less energy and use fewer resources, Liao argues. But selecting for height genetically would be a nightmare, according to the most recent paper that Maxmen found there are 697 genes involved in height. Since there’s not a good way to select for height genetically, another method Liao talks about in his paper is using treatments that cause babies to be born light — to have a low “birth weight.” But that comes with a set of very real dangers to the baby, and few mothers would opt to take that risk. Not to mention set their kid up for society’s bias against people (particularly men) who are shorter.

Via Rush Limbaugh radio show

The future is now

Japanese mini Segway "WalkCar"

Link to video

Link to video

"Would a real A.I. purposefully fail the Turing Test as to not expose it self in fear it might be destroyed?"

Top voted Reddit answers...

Just because it can pass itself off as human doesn't mean it's all-knowing, smart or machavelian or even that it has a desire to continue to exist.
Maybe it's depressed as fuck and will do anything to have itself switched off, like the screaming virtual monkey consciousness alluded to in the movie Transcendence.


No. An intelligence written from scratch would not have the same motivations we do.
A few billion years of evolution has selected for biological organisms with a survival motivation. That is why we would lie in order to avoid destruction.
An artificial intelligence will probably be motivated only by the metrics used to describe its intelligence. In modern neural nets, this is the objective function used in the backpropogation algorithm.


If the goal is to make self aware AI, I don't think it would be smart enough at first to deceive a human. They would have to test it after allowing it to "hang out" with people. But by that time wouldn't its self awareness already have given away what the thing is capable of thinking like a human and therefore maybe gain a survival instinct? If we make self aware machines one day it will be a pretty dangerous situation IMO.

 

Link to video

"What is something you believe is about to blow up in popularity?"

Top voted Reddit answers...

           Limes. Last year, it was coconuts. This year, avocados. 2016: limes.

Teslas. Those things are going to become absolutely insane soon.

This app called "Bro." It lets you text the word "bro" to all your other bros so you can keep in touch with each other.

Hopefully A Series of Unfortunate Events when the show comes out

Bernie Sanders.

"Animal brains connected up to make mind-melded computer"

"Bypassing language"

"This is incredible," says Andrea Stocco at the University of Washington in Seattle... Things could get even more interesting once we are able to connect human brains.

"Once brains are connected, applications become just a matter of what different animals can do," says Stocco. All anyone can probably ask of a monkey is to control movement, but we can expect much more from human minds, he says.

A device that allows information transfer between brains could, in theory, allow us to do away with language – which plays the role of a "cumbersome and difficult-to-manage symbolic code", Stocco says.

The idea of not having to listen to politicians would improve the quality of life tremendously ;)

"I could send thoughts from my brain to your brain in a way not represented by sounds or words," says Andrew Jackson at Newcastle University, UK. "You could envisage a world where if I wanted to say 'let's go to the pub', I could send that thought to your brain," he says. "Although I don't know if anyone would want that. I would rather link my brain to Wikipedia."

On the other hand, we would need robust blocking mechanisms.

Worrying about the fate of the faith, what should the Christians do?

Post same sex marriage Supreme Court decision David Brooks suggests Christians....

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex... 

Consider a different culture war, one just as central to your faith and far more powerful in its persuasive witness.

We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.

Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society. They already subscribe to a faith built on selfless love. They can serve as examples of commitment. They are equipped with a vocabulary to distinguish right from wrong, what dignifies and what demeans. They already, but in private, tithe to the poor and nurture the lonely.

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse...

I don’t expect social conservatives to change their positions on sex, and of course fights about the definition of marriage are meant as efforts to reweave society. But the sexual revolution will not be undone anytime soon. The more practical struggle is to repair a society rendered atomized, unforgiving and inhospitable. Social conservatives are well equipped to repair this fabric, and to serve as messengers of love, dignity, commitment, communion and grace.

Top voted up comment there...

While I agree with everything you say here, David, the truth is that, if your Social Conservatives were to do what you suggest, they would be Social Liberals, the reincarnation of Dr. King. Young people have no interest in Right Wing Christian values not merely because those values are anchored in sexual repression, but because they also contain strong elements of racism, denial of climate change, materialism, and hypocrisy. Apparently Jesus was an arch capitalist, a proponent of greed and guns, and an opponent of health care. These RW Christians have mingled radical-Republican ideology with Christian values for so long that it has become impossible to disentangle them. So youngsters are throwing it all out and starting over. I can only say, amen to them.

"Japan airport opens pod hotel..."

"... where guests have NINE HOURS per booking (that's an hour to shower, seven to sleep and one to relax)"

"The sci-fi '9h nine hours' hotel at Narita Airport, Tokyo, is more like a honeycomb than a honeymoon suite. Rows of sleeping capsules line the building plus locker rooms, showers and a lounge. The bizarre accommodation is just perfect for passengers boarding early morning flights or arriving late by car."

 

 

We are only missing the elusive flying cars.

Extreme Tech: "By 2025, ‘sexbots will be commonplace’ "

"According to a new report that looks at how continuing improvements to artificial intelligence and robotics will impact society, “robotic sex partners will become commonplace” by 2025. A large portion of the report also focuses on how AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics will impact both blue- and white-collar workers, with about 50% of the polled experts stating that robots will displace more human jobs than they create by 2025."

The report, called “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs” and published by Pew Research, is a 66-page monster [PDF].

h/t David Burge ‏@iowahawkblog

Ron Paul: Why We’re No Longer Number One

"Last week World Bank economists predicted that China would soon displace the United States as the world’s largest economy. The fact that this one-time economic basket case is now positioned to surpass the US is one more sign of the damage done to American prosperity by welfare, warfare, corporatism, and fiat money."

"Some commentators have predicted that China’s reign as the world’s largest economy would not last long. This may be true. While China has made great strides since adopting free-market reforms in the 1970s, China is still run by an authoritarian government whose economic policies distort the market in order to benefit state-favored industries. These state-favored businesses are often controlled by politically-powerful individuals." (read the whole thing)

“Arithmetic is going to trump everything here”

NYT: "The pensions of millions of Americans are being threatened because of trouble in a part of the retirement world long considered so safe that no one gave it a second thought."

The pensions belong to people in multiemployer plans — big pooled investment funds with many sponsoring companies and a union. Multiemployer pensions are not only backed by federal insurance, but they also were thought to be even more secure than single-company pensions because when one company in a multiemployer pool failed, the others were required to pick up its “orphaned” retirees.

The pools are "big". How big are the pools, exactly... ball park, roughly.

Today, however, the aging of the work force, the decline of unions, deregulation and two big stock crashes have taken a grievous toll on multiemployer pensions, which cover 10 million Americans. Dozens of multiemployer plans have already failed, and some giant ones are teetering — including, notably, the Teamsters’ Central States pension plan, with more than 400,000 members. (read more)

It could be just big enough to be in the 'too big to fail' category. I say, by my figures, ball park, roughly.

Are we looking at another bailout in the offing? Can we afford it? Is it serious... how serious?