Nov 09

This is, no doubt, highly exaggerated and a lot more complex than it sounds.

This is, no doubt, highly exaggerated and a lot more complex than it sounds. Growing human nervous tissue inside rats is not the same as growing “mini-brains”.

But are you going to let that stop you using it in a story?

https://www.inverse.com/article/38240-mini-brains-organoids-rats

Nov 07

Food for thought if you, like me, have a setting in which alternate computing mechanisms are under development.

Food for thought if you, like me, have a setting in which alternate computing mechanisms are under development.

Originally shared by HACKADAY

As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. It may surprise you that the microchip that we all know and love today was far from an obvious idea. Some of the paths that were being explored back then to cram more components into a smaller area seem odd now. But…

http://hackaday.com/2017/11/07/how-the-integrated-circuit-came-to-be/

Nov 02

Oh, the possibilities.

Oh, the possibilities.

Social media that reads your mood and manipulates it – well, we already have that.

Real-time, subliminal polling on everything from media to politics, leading to adjustments to storylines and party lines.

On the upside, child-minding AIs who train kids to deal better with their emotions.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Tech Is Becoming Emotionally Intelligent, and It’s Big Business http://suhub.co/2h6mC4I

Nov 02

#throwbackthursday

Originally shared by Irina T.

#throwbackthursday

“Other states had Rosie the Riveters. New Hampshire had Lady Log Rollers.

In September 1938, a devastating hurricane killed more than 600 people in New England and caused property damage equal to $5.5 billion in today’s dollars. It also blew down 2.6 million board feet of timber — enough to frame more than 170,000 homes.

More logs ended up in Concord’s Turkey Pond than anywhere else after the U.S. Forest Service launched a massive salvage effort to harvest the tangled mess of timber and bring it to portable sawmills set up near storage ponds and fields. But by 1942, with men flocking to join the military during World War II, the sawmill at Turkey Pond couldn’t keep up.

Enter “the gals,” as the federal government called them.”

Read the rest of the story ( book review, “They Sawed up a Storm” by Sarah Shea Smith) at

http://bangordailynews.com/2011/04/09/news/book-details-nh%E2%80%99s-historic-female-sawmill-at-turkey-pond/

Image source ( unrestricted use)

Women Lumberjacks Carrying Logs at Turkey Pond, New Hampshire, as Part of an Experimental Project to Saw up Seven Million Feet of 1938 Hurricane Lumber

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6883309

Nov 01

I don’t know if you’ve seen the X-Ray feature in Kindle books.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the X-Ray feature in Kindle books. It can help orient the reader to characters, locations, and other details of your book (extra text comes up when they tap on the name).

They’ve opened it up to KDP authors – it’s only been available to certain publishers up until now.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202187230
Nov 01

tl;dr: Pointing out that white supremacists have their historical facts wrong (or their Latin or Greek wrong) isn’t…

tl;dr: Pointing out that white supremacists have their historical facts wrong (or their Latin or Greek wrong) isn’t enough; it’s necessary to challenge their ideology directly, including by the way you comport yourself within your field – despite the risks this carries.

Originally shared by Deborah Teramis Christian

This may be of interest to classisists, medievalists, and scholars dealing with white supremacy appropriation of bits and bobs from those fields. Apparently this is a current flap in the Classical community, of which I am just now becoming aware, but the author makes some interesting points about addressing supremacist ideology in academic fields.

Laura Gibbs – thought this might be up your alley, too.

https://eidolon.pub/learn-some-f-cking-history-94f9a02041d3
Oct 30

I have a story (which needs more work) that touches on some of this.

I have a story (which needs more work) that touches on some of this. The article paints a picture of a very different kind of agriculture from what we have today.

For one thing, migrant labourers, and indeed farm labour in general, are likely to be replaced by automation in the longer term, certainly for big commercial farms in the west.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

The Farms of the Future Will Be Automated From Seed to Harvest http://suhub.co/2yYtOqx

Oct 28

A cogent argument for space exploration.

A cogent argument for space exploration.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth.

Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation to Sister Jucunda, along with a copy of “Earthrise,” the iconic photograph of Earth taken in 1968 by astronaut William Anders, from the Moon

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html