To read later.

Originally shared by Luke Campbell

Why are most aquatic mammals about 500 kg in mass? Things to consider when designing alien ecosystems.

https://www.popsci.com/marine-mammal-body-size-evolution

https://www.popsci.com/marine-mammal-body-size-evolution

Hard pass.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

The Startup That Has to Kill You to Preserve Your Brain—Here’s the Science Behind the Buzz https://suhub.co/2GunrPr

The interesting part of this to me is that they’re looking at using this tiny, cheap computer for tracking items throughout the supply chain, with a unified view of all of the handoffs.

And the reason that interests me is that in my current WIP, there’s a primitive mechanical/magical computer called the Realm Ledger which does exactly that, among other things. The speculative element is “what if companies didn’t own their own computers, but it was all handled centrally’?

Which isn’t a very interesting question just by itself, so I have a bunch of people trying to break into the Realm Ledger and subvert it, and another bunch of people trying to stop them.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

IBM’s New Computer Is the Size of a Grain of Salt and Costs Less Than 10 Cents https://suhub.co/2Gui1Us

There’s a trend in these failed predictions: New technology doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of humanity, the nature of work, or how much work there is to do. Or rather, it does so only very slowly.

Of course, the rate of change is speeding up, and there’s often short-term disruption; but if you take a course of not believing either the most dire or the most rosy predictions, you’re unlikely to go far wrong.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180312-historys-unfounded-fears-over-the-future-of-work?ocid=ww.social.link.googleplus

Worth noting.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

CraftyHominid Are there even touch screens on the ISS?

Chris Hadfield Touch screens don’t work so well when you’re floating weightless.

Touch screens require accurate finger pointing, so your body needs to be stable – seated or standing solidly. On a spaceship you’re normally neither.

https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/977545261995184130

This article raises similar concerns to Yonatan Zunger’s recent Twitter thread (which was triggered by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower) about the need for explicit standards of ethics in computer science.

As an arts graduate who’s worked in IT for 20 years and has also studied health science, and as a science fiction writer who writes about how technology and culture shape each other, I’m all in favour of people in general having a broad rather than a narrow knowledge base, and being able to think about and discuss important human and technological questions. In a complex, interconnected world, deliberately cultivating ignorance is dangerous to yourself and others.

I’d love to see an entrepreneur or one of the existing education platforms come up with a set of courses that would introduce everyone to the basics of politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology (with an emphasis on self-understanding, self-efficacy and self-care as well as understanding and communicating with others), effective writing, reading comprehension, study and research skills, computer science, manufacturing and logistics, engineering, project management, accounting, advertising and marketing, popular culture, “high” culture, physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, history, geography – all in a way that showed how they’re interlinked, and how they all impact our everyday lives.

Via Adafruit Industries.

https://theconversation.com/steam-not-stem-why-scientists-need-arts-training-89788