Tech Tuesday
It’s Tech Tuesday!
On a completely unrelated note, I saw LEGO Movie 2 with Bug this weekend. An excellent follow-up to the very entertaining LEGO Feature Length Commercial that was the first LEGO Movie. Seriously, I enjoyed both, obvious product placement aside.
[TT1] Seriously, this is why I love science. As much as I love the new tech, and interesting designs, and fun bits of analysis, in the end, it’s the potential of that bleeding edge to upend everything we think we know.
It’s as though physics has been turned inside out. It now appears that the answers already surround us. It’s the question we don’t know.
[TT2] Understanding the networks within the brain that define ‘consciousness’.
[TT3] More specifically, it was the death of a massive star that helped us out.
[TT4] One step closer to a cure for Type I diabetes, thanks to Stem Cells.
[TT5] IBM is looking into how to prepare the food supply chain for the future, with 5-in-5. Here’s a quick look at just some of the ideas they are kicking around.
[TT6] Now that is a cool looking skyscraper, and the kind of thing that makes one think, “I am living in the future!”. Although, innovative designs like that always worry me a bit. Not because the design is bad, or anything, but because of the ‘Black Aluminum’ problem I’ve talked about in aerospace, where the regulators and assemblers are so stymied by the new design or the techniques needed to realize it that they are unable to bring it into being. One of the reasons I find the idea of a Seastead, or of getting us into space, is that society should always have a real world sandbox to try things out in. We can sandbox a lot these days in the digital realm (and we do!), but in the end, it helps to have a place where things can safely be allowed to fail in whatever spectacular manner they will.
[TT7] Two new, non-toxic flame retardants have come about at the same time. EDA-DOPO, and this one from Texas A&M. The stories are similar enough I dug around a bit to try and verify that I wasn’t reading two different perspectives of the same development. It’s always interesting when you have these (nearly) simultaneous advances. This happens in science more often than people realize. For instance…
[TT8] We have found the dial that sets immune system response sensitivity! Now we just need to figure out how to turn it. Also, we know what is responsible for allergic reactions.
[TT9] Using the shockwaves of massive earthquakes to get a look at the mountains of the Underdark! Be warned, Lloth, we are mapping your domain!
[TT10] Airbus is killing the A380. Honestly, pretty much everyone saw this coming, even before the first one was delivered. Not enough airports were willing to commit to the runway and gate upgrades necessary to accommodate the beasts, and the routes that would have the passenger volume needed to make them profitable could be served just as well by the 747-8 or 777X. Which is a kind of sad, because they are magnificent feats of aerospace engineering, much better than something like the Spruce Goose. But in the end, Airbus was just asking too much of it’s customers.
[TT11] Speaking of air travel infrastructure, if we are going to have flying cars, we will need some kind of infrastructure for them. Likewise.
[TT12] A cure for…. something… it’s on the tip of my tongue…
[TT13] Getting artificial leaves ready for life outside the lab.
[TT14] Using Titanium nano-particles, a previously unweldable aluminum alloy, can now be welded. Actually, it could be welded before, but it had a problem. Typically, when two pieces of metal are welded together correctly, the weld itself is as strong as, if not stronger than, the rest of the material. Except AA7075, which refused to play ball, and resulted in weaker welded joints. So this is a pretty big deal, because AA7075 is as strong as steel, and one third the weight.
[TT15] The simplest wave power generator to date. It’s a balloon.
[TT16] Fireflies have helped LEDs become even more efficient. Score another one for mother nature.
[TT17] Why do human females go through menopause (very few animals do)? Because evolution thinks grandmothers rock, apparently.
[TT18] I love useful materials that defy expectations. A flexible ceramic that laterally contracts when compressed, and is an aerogel, and thus a fantastic insulator.
[TT19] Bees which make a habit of pushing the cart through the hive, shouting, “Bring out yer dead!” are better able to withstand CCD.
[TT20] Turning the waste brine from desalination into a useful industrial product that the desal plant actually needs. Along the same vein, turning un-recyclable waste glass into a useful industrial product.
[TT21] Universal Moral Rules. Thoughts?
Photo by jfingas 
[TT21] People who read Starship Troopers and say “it’s about fascism!” get it wrong. People who read Starship Troopers and say “it’s about how to have a responsible government!” also get it wrong.
See, the whole thing about SF is that you say “what if (thing) were true?” and then you write a story about that world. “The Stars My Destination” is the story of Gully Foyle, but it’s about “what if people could teleport just by wanting it?”
And “Starship Troopers” is the story of Johnny Rico, but it’s about “what if we had an objective, quantifiable, and testable theory of morality?” How would the world look if this existed–if we could say “Joe is more moral than Jane” and have it be a statement of provable fact, like “Frank can lift more weight than Joe”? How would we test for “moral ability”, and what would we do with that knowledge?Report
That’s the best description of ST that I’ve read in a while.Report
TT17 Grandmothers
Though the Grandmother hypothesis makes intuitive sense to me, I would hypothesize a second factor. The relative high mortality of human females giving birth compared to other mammals.
Human births tend to be more dangerous for the mother than most other mammals. If you have survived 17 pregnancies, like Queen Anne, it makes sense to stop being fertile so you can focus on helping raising your (possibly dead at chilbirth) daughters’ children. Historically, most women that survived their childbearing years were able to live reasonably long lives afterwards.
The extremely abnormally long human infancy have to have required a lot of evolutionary adjustments. The Grandmother effect, like the Gay Uncle effect, might be one of thoseReport
TT6
Not anywhere as tall, but I think this is the coolest building in the Western hemisphere
https://www.flickr.com/photos/carsten_tb/27648282048
If you have 90 secs to kill, this drone view of the building and the surrounding skyline is pretty cool too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_e0ksKLansReport
That’s got the most boring tower base. If you were walking past on street level, you’d never know it was an interesting bit of architecture unless you looked up.Report
Agreed, but take my word for it – You can see it from most of the city at street levelReport
[TT21] – I take issue with “defer to Superiors” – while it may be a universal constant, I doubt its moral. For one thing who decides who a superior actually is? Sure, we all more or less live in hierarchies, but how many MORE times do we need to read stories about hierarchical superiors who commit some sort of actually in the flesh mortal sin and either get away with it or become an object lesson?Report
It makes sense in an evo-psych framework where “morality” is an evolved set of psychological traits that contribute to group cohesion and survival and, since the survival of the group contributes to individual survival and reproductive fitness, ultimately redounds to the benefit of the individual evolutionarily.
It’s crucial in such an analysis to avoid both the Naturalistic Fallacy of proclaiming that which is natural is morally correct and the twin Moralistic Fallacy of proclaiming that which is good is natural.
Now you could object that my first paragraph is just a blatant example of the Naturalistic Fallacy that I declaim in the second paragraph. Certainly a libertarian would question the moral worth of the value of “group cohesion” (as JoeSal would say, resolving the truth component of that particular social construct), but all that really means is that we have competing moral values existing in tension and the balance between those values can shift in response to the extant environment. We don’t live in tribes anymore so that kind of group cohesion is less relevant to survival and reproductive fitness.Report
TT20, second link: One of the most common ways that glass is recycled these days is as part of the drainage layer for landfills, and as the daily cover most landfills are required to put down, in place of gravel and sand that have to be mined and transported from somewhere.Report
Now that’s a cool – if smelly adaptive reuse.Report
As it turns out, recycling glass — beyond the landfill stuff — is only economic if there’s a source of clean glass and a quite local user for it. Where I live near Denver there are two bottle manufacturing concerns that consume quite a bit but it has to be sorted by color. There’s a new outfit on the north side of the metro area, between the two bottle makers, with a several-step cleaning process and computer-controlled color and size sorting. They’re currently ramping up to an eventual 50,000 tons of glass recycling per year.Report