Computer Model to Help Manage Hydropower in Kenya
The problem comes from people whose opinions are actually misconceptions. If you think vaccines cause autism you are expressing something factually wrong, not an opinion. The fact that you may still believe that vaccines cause autism does not move your misconception into the realm of valid opinion. Nor does the fact that many other share this opinion give it any more validity… You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What’s that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that’s not what actually happened. No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.
Yes, Your Opinion Can Be Wrong | Houston Press
This whole article.
Education does not exist to persecute you.
(via witch-boots)
Autonomous mobility. A future market, everyone is targeting: Google, Uber, Tesla, Apple, Baidu and a bunch of old-econmoy automotive players. Everybody wishes to triumph with its technology. But have you heard of :DeNA?
The Japanese tech company (originally a mobile gaming company with a net worth of over $1 billion) wants to develop the best smartphone-driven orchestration software for a fleet of robocars. :DeNA just started a new company called “Robot Taxi”, with - not surprisingly - a lucrative future robo-taxi market in mind. The nice thing is, however, that they initially don’t aim for the young urban metropolitan-elite, but rather focus on rural areas and senior citizens. Gizmodo has the story:
Today, it was announced that road tests will begin next year in Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo. Fifty people will travel in trips of two miles from their homes to grocery stores, with a Robot Taxi employee on board as a safety precaution, the Wall Street Journal reports. And the demographics the company is targeting? Senior citizens, and people with no access to public transportation.
Certainly, Japan has a demographic problem and the societal views on robots differ immensely to the rest of the world. But it’s refreshing to see, that (profit oriented) companies exist, which are working on future services with people in mind.
[Robot Taxi] [via gizmodo] [read more about DeNA]
Ifixit produce open repair guides for everything imaginable, in a variety of languages, and help sustain a global community of independent repairers who divert electronics from e-waste dumps and keep poor and marginalized people connected to their work, school and families.
The Ifixit repair kits are thoughtful, high-specification, low-cost toolkits designed to work on all modern gadgets, as well as traditional ones (for example, Ifixit manufacture their own drivers for Apple’s bizarre “pentalobe” screws, which Apple had instructed its Genius Bar staff to quietly swap in during routine repairs).
The big daddy of Ifixit kits is the $130 128-bit Universal Bit Kit, which comes in a handsome wooden case and is covered by Ifixit’s lifetime warranty.
But Ifixit makes smaller, more specialized kits, including theSmartphone Repair Kit, priced at $25, specifically aimed at the budgets of enterprising high-school students who want to start their own smartphone repair businesses, using Ifixit’s manuals.
http://boingboing.net/2015/12/02/ifixit-repair-kits-everything.html
Both were filled at the same time with the same water, only one had oysters.
To Fight Inequality, Turn On Clean Energy Everywhere
Much of the world is still held captive by last century’s dirty-energy system that has a long history of locking inequality into place, economically and politically. Look across the world and you will find the vast majority of people subject to the whims of a very few…
Check out the rest of my piece here.
Fly to Mars without leaving home!
A couple people asked me about this little clip from my “Why Do We Go To Space” video (<- requisite plug for my YouTube show). What you’re seeing on my iPhone screen there is a 360-degree panorama of the Martian surface as captured by the Curiosity rover.
You can view it here. It works great on your computer, but the real magic is when you view it on your phone or tablet.
Congratulations. You’re a space traveler!
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
Read it here.
“Desperate migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia are enslaved on fishing boats to strip the oceans of fish… in Brazil, young men are trapped by debt in work illegally logging the Amazon forest… Brick kilns in India, operated by bonded labourers, are fuelled with old tyres and used motor oil, spewing carcinogens into the air.”
REBLOG to educate your community about the impact of our everyday consumption.
From the air, the coast of Greenland appears vast and tranquil. Hundreds of fjords, their surfaces a mirror of blue sky and cloud bottoms, divide the territory. In the gaps between them, the terrain folds over itself, hill over hill, descending into obsidian lakes. The turf is covered in the waxy pastels of alpine dwarf willows and the dull white of age-bleached lichen.
Though an immense ice sheet sits in its interior, Greenland’s ice-free coast encompasses almost 159,000 square miles and and houses 57,000 people. In other words, it is larger than Germany with a population half the size of Topeka, Peoria, or New Haven. It is possible to stand on a hill outside the coastal town of Ilulissat and hear only the grass quaking, the harbor ice dully grinding against itself.
I visited Greenland because, lately, the land here has gone soft, and disquieting things threaten to wake in it.
Continue Reading.