MechanizedIntelligence

Read more at Popular Mechanics.

Distinctive “tip toe” behavior of a spider about to launch

It’s long been known that spiders spiders can “balloon” themselves up into the air using extruded silk strands, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles. Recent work by Erica Morley and Daniel Robert at the University of Bristol demonstrates that the strands aren’t merely caught by the breeze.  The silk threads are negatively charged (like the earth), and are drawn up the positively charged electrical gradient in the atmosphere.  The result is an electrostatic elevator for the spiders.  No wind required (though a little breeze does help move the spider to a new location).

See Ed Yong’s excellent blog post at the Atlantic for more details, or check out the original paper by Morley and Robert at Current Biology.

Photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_(spider).

A glimpse into how they made the newest exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, “Unseen Oceans.”

This burger bot makes your lunch with no human help.

Upper right: The first image of Charon (as a small bump on Pluto), taken 40 years ago. Main image: Charon as seen from NASA’s New Horizons space craft.

Pluto’s moon Charon (technically a binary partner) was first discovered 40 years ago, on June 22, 1978, by U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer James Christy.  Like Pluto, it was known only as a blurry smudge until the New Horizons flyby in 2015.  Charon was then revealed to be an intriguing world of its own, with mountains, canyons, and signs of the one-time existence of an underground ocean.  Even more striking is the spray of reddish material located at the north pole, thought to be colored hydrocarbon deposits created by chemical reactions of outgassed methane catalyzed by UV light from the sun.

The recent blowout financial results from the FANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) reminded me of Marc Andreessen’s bold prediction about software companies.  Seems more and more relevant with every passing quarter:

1) Every product or service that can become software will become software.

2) Therefore, every company that makes those products or services has to, and will, become a software company.

3) Therefore, in any industry in the long run the winning company will be the best software company.

You can substitute “data analytics” for “software” and pretty much get a similar conclusion, even if the physical product itself is not software.

Marc Cuban, for what it’s worth, thinks artificial intelligence “will change everything” and the FANG stocks are ready to “crush it” on AI.  Buckle up.

Think about that for a moment.  Certainly fits with what most city downtowns are like — swarms of both tourists (rare visitors) and the people who work (or live) there.  Empirically the number of visitors scales inversely as the square of both the distance traveled and the frequency of visitation.  But geography is two-dimensional while time is one-dimensional, and the world is a big place with lots of people who travel.  So you end up with a lot of people from far away who don’t visit that often, and the folks who live there.  But not many people from middle distances, who visit often.

To learn more about the math and data behind that statement, read the blog post by Robin Hanson about Geoffrey West’s new book, Scale:  The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (link from Robin Hanson’s post).