Interesting Stuff You Saw on the I-net Today

[crp]

You'd think long ago they would have better checking of these sort of documents -

https://www.popsci.com/science/fake-galileo/

 

[abarbarian]

17 hours ago, crp said:

okay, what am i missing?

 

https://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.php?/topic/72885-interesting-stuff-you-saw-on-the-i-net-today/&do=findComment&comment=477919 

[abarbarian]

Click here if you believe

 

click here if you think you can be one

 

Edited August 26, 2022 by abarbarian

[crp]

7 hours ago, abarbarian said:

Click here if you believe

 

click here if you think you can be one

 

I don't believe and if i can be one I wouldn't want to .

[abarbarian]

Your Final Resting Place Could Be a Coffin Made of Mushrooms

 

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Loop wants to rebuild the world with ecological structures made of fungal mycelium. Its proof of concept? Living coffins.

 

[raymac46]

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-the-artificial-intelligence-program-alphazero-mastered-its-games

 

Scary.

[abarbarian]

12 minutes ago, raymac46 said:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-the-artificial-intelligence-program-alphazero-mastered-its-games

 

Scary.

 

Neat article. I especially like that an amateur  can develop a program with open source cooperation that  can be as good if not better than the big boys, even if it takes a little longer to do.

 

I found out that my method of dealing with computer gremlins is called the Monte Carlo method

 

[crp]

i was kindof doing this but without any sort of scientific backing, more just being impatient or not wanting to use that much water. I think it would be great if this became the norm, save a lot of energy use.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=259MXuK62gU

 

 

[abarbarian]

This Ultra-White Paint May Someday Replace Air Conditioning

 

Quote

“Air conditioners can cool your house, but they move the heat from inside the house to outside—the heat is still in the city, it’s still on the Earth, in our air,” Ruan says. “So even if you don’t care about the power bills you pay, it’s going to warm up the Earth anyway. Our paint does not use any power but, more importantly, it sends the heat to space. The heat doesn’t stay on the Earth, so that really helps the Earth to cool down and can stop the warming trend.”

 

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Umm... yeah.

[crp]

2 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

Umm... yeah.

very old news, unless there is something that is really super duper about being ultra-white in being super duper reflective. but come the first drizzly rain or snowfall , how ultra-white could it still be?

 

[abarbarian]

11 hours ago, crp said:

very old news, unless there is something that is really super duper about being ultra-white in being super duper reflective. but come the first drizzly rain or snowfall , how ultra-white could it still be?

 

 

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The potential benefits of the ultra-white paint are two-fold. By keeping surfaces cool and reducing the use of air conditioners, which are typically powered by electricity, the paint may help decrease the burning of fossil fuels. What’s more, air conditioners typically work by removing heat from indoor spaces and pushing it outdoors, a method known as convection. This heat transfer, along with other causes, can contribute to the urban heat island effect, a phenomenon that occurs when cities become hotter than the surrounding areas, thus requiring even more air conditioning. The ultra-white paint, on the other hand, uses radiation to transfer heat, sending out types of electromagnetic waves that can pass through the atmosphere and into deep space.

 

You do not generally need air conditioning in winter. Yes the paint may not be as effective in rain however there are plenty of sunny days and in some parts sun almost all day every day. As the paint does not need any power to make it work every hour the sun provides some cooling save you money. What is not to like about the idea.

 

While folk have been painting buildings white for centuries the idea is not new  but the paint has only been developed in the last few years so is pretty darn new so not so old news.

Edited September 10, 2022 by abarbarian

[crp]

18 hours ago, abarbarian said:

 

 

You do not generally need air conditioning in winter. Yes the paint may not be as effective in rain however there are plenty of sunny days and in some parts sun almost all day every day.

My point about the snow and rain is that it would dull the paint and if the "ultra" of the paint is its main point , well...

 

[crp]

https://www.insider.com/worlds-oldest-motorhome-for-auction-photos-2022-8

 

[abarbarian]

‘The West’ is, in fact, the world’s biggest gated community

 

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This world-wide fence is rarely presented to us in its totality; we catch glimpses of its various bits whenever they’re in the news. Those separate pieces don’t necessarily seem to belong to the same puzzle.

 

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For a brief window of time, opened 30 years ago next month, it seemed history would go the other way. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Its joyous demolition predicted the end of hard borders everywhere.

 

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At the end of the Cold War, there were just 15 walls separating countries from each other. Now there are at least 70 walled borders worldwide. Since the fall of the Wall, thousands of miles of steel and concrete walls have gone up on international borders.

 

Interesting stuff. I knew about several of those walls but there are some that I knew nothing about at all.

 

Elon Musk sells seats on SpaceX moon mission to Japanese billionaire

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If you’re an artist whose work catches the eye of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, you might soon receive an extraordinary invitation: a seat on a spacecraft headed for the moon.

Maezawa purchased all the open seats on the first-of-its-kind mission, though the amount he paid is unclear. The billionaire plans to invite up to eight artists to join him on the lunar adventure.

Musk seemed taken with the idea.

 

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“I did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself,” Maezawa said. “I want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.”

 

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“By the way, if you should hear from me please say yes and accept my invitation,” he said. “Please don’t say no.”

At the end of the event, Maezawa offered one of the seats to Musk.

“As far as me going, I’m not sure,” Musk said. “Maybe we’ll both be on it.”

 

Super neat guy. I'd love to go on the trip.

[crp]

Statue of Liberty available for interior viewing again.

 

 

https://www.nps.gov/stli/planyourvisit/visiting-the-pedestal.htm

 

[abarbarian]

I found this article very interesting.

 

DeepMind’s game-playing AI has beaten a 50-year-old record in computer science  The new version of AlphaZero discovered a faster way to do matrix multiplication, a core problem in computing that affects thousands of everyday computer tasks.

 

This led me to this article which I found fascinating.

 

What does GPT-3 “know” about me?  Large language models are trained on troves of personal data hoovered from the internet. So I wanted to know: What does it have on me?

 

Naturally I ah to go to,

 

https://blenderbot.ai

 

to see what it knew about me. I entered my real name and this is the result (not posting my real name as I like to be a tad private)

 

Quote

The Voice is an international reality television singing competition franchise. It premiered in the U.S. in 2011 and has aired in more than 40 countries worldwide

 

seems like it does not know anything about me as I have never even watched the program mentioned.

 

So I tried again,

 

 

 

[V.T. Eric Layton]

HAHAHA! That's hilarious. I've never even heard of "Snowpiercer".

[abarbarian]

On 10/17/2022 at 5:09 PM, V.T. Eric Layton said:

HAHAHA! That's hilarious. I've never even heard of "Snowpiercer".

 

It is also a pretty reasonable movie of it's type.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer

 

 

[abarbarian]

On 10/17/2022 at 5:09 PM, V.T. Eric Layton said:

HAHAHA! That's hilarious. I've never even heard of "Snowpiercer".

 

I gave it another go.

 

I think we have a blind mole here at scots as it has never seen sunrat. Or horror of horror's it is lying to me.

Quote

 

Hi there. How are you doing today?

whay do you know about sunrat at scotsnewletter forums

I've never heard of that before. I spend a lot of time on the scotsnewletter forums though.

what do you know about sunrat at scotsnewletter forums

Uh, no idea! Why don't you tell me more about it? The scotsnewletter forum is my favorite.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Now that I see the link above that you posted, I'm pretty sure I've seen that movie.

[crp]

Another way to fold a phone I suppose -

 

[abarbarian]

On 10/21/2022 at 2:58 PM, crp said:

Another way to fold a phone I suppose -

 

 

Neat idea. No doubt it will catch on if it is cheap enough. I personally would like a very very small flip phone that only did calls with a battery that lasted several weeks.

[sunrat]

Just what the capitalist corporations need, phones with more moving parts so you can break them and buy new ones sooner.

 

Speaking of moving parts, LG have just released the LG OLED FLEX 42" 42LX3QPUA motorised curvable monitor:

 

[abarbarian]

16 hours ago, sunrat said:

Speaking of moving parts, LG have just released the LG OLED FLEX 42" 42LX3QPUA motorised curvable monitor:

 

Fantastic ! Now which bank have I the best chance of robbing and getting away with it ?

[abarbarian]

Lost something? Search through 91.7 million files from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s

 

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Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.

 

The Rise of DISCMASTER

 

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A developer came to me a week ago with a project they’d been working on for over a year. The proposition of what they offered and the importance of what it would mean to historical software at Internet Archive was so compelling that within 48 hours, we’d announced it to the world.

 

Quote

The Final Piece

Therefore, sitting on the Archive, are tens of thousands of these CD-ROMs of the past. And for a very long time, it’s been possible to download a Disc image, analyze its contents, search for useful or potentially interesting items, and then find a way to make them work again.

That last piece, in fact, is the hardest – not just knowing where the files you’re looking for are located, but to be able to browse them without a massive host of helper applications scattered to the four winds. There are dozens of archive types, dozens and maybe hundreds of multimedia formats, and, even more frustrating, archives within archives – making everything that much harder to find.

DiscMaster has fixed this.

 

Sounds like a fascinating project but unfortunately the site was not available when I tried.

 

Edited October 25, 2022 by abarbarian

[sunrat]

Slow Roads - go for a nice drive in your browser. Autodrive is pretty fun but goes like a maniac.

https://slowroads.io/

[abarbarian]

16 minutes ago, sunrat said:

Slow Roads - go for a nice drive in your browser. Autodrive is pretty fun but goes like a maniac.

https://slowroads.io/

 

You can go of road. I tried on the bike setting. Also you can travel underwater but you never seem to get anywhere and have to switch on auto drive to get back to the road. It is cool as I can never get to 90 mph on me Royal but I can here.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

HAHA! Someone posted this site on Diaspora last week. I wasted a some of my life on it.

[crp]

On 10/25/2022 at 6:10 AM, abarbarian said:

Quote

Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.

 

75 million of those files are from AOL  cd's.