Month: December 2020

I wonder why no news outlet removes read news from the front page to somewhere down? Has anyone experimented with this already?

A bit of futurology. It will be interesting to come back to this post sometime in the future.

I believe that the next monumental breakthrough in the next 15-20 years will involve the use of living “external” muscles, specially grown for specific tasks. The technology for cultivating muscles for any purpose will take longer to develop, but growing such “technical” laboratory animals from a test tube, essentially “for parts,” seems not so impossible a task. Of course, everything is complicated from an ethical point of view: nobody wants to think about a horse with a microprocessor on its back whose will is essentially disabled, but it’s hard to predict where ethical principles will stand in 20 years if we are still unsure about the ethics of IVF, for example. But the principle is just so: a reference organism is taken, and its development is controlled in such a way as to give it the desired properties at the output.

As soon as the artificial muscle is obtained, and the issue of “energy supply” to keep it in “form” for the necessary time is resolved, humans will obtain mechanization of a completely different kind. And from there, artificial wings are not far off 🙂

Technically, growing animals or even individual organs (including muscles) for technical needs is already possible now. Also, myostimulation has long been used to make the necessary muscles contract. It remains to combine this with electronics.

Sources:

–https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NkAlNQd50

– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9ZY4DeIdW4 – from U.S. Army CCDC Research Lab Dec 17, 2020

–https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5127204

– https://www.technologynetworks.com/cell-science/news/engineers-grow-functioning-human-muscle-from-skin-cells-296111

– https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.201404062

– https://www.pnas.org/content/111/15/5508

My projector burned out. Decided to buy a new one. Not quite ready to shell out for a brand-new 3LCD, so I’m looking for a used one. Found one option. Suggested meeting up – but it’s already 10 PM. The guy agrees, gives the address. I check the address – it’s a normal townhouse in a decent area. Heading there. It’s about a half-hour drive to Maryland.

On the way, I receive a message from him. “Basically, you pay, and I’ll leave the projector in the garage, you come in and take it. To maintain social distancing.”

I write back saying, buddy, I’m definitely not paying for a pig in a poke. He replies, no problem, I’ll show you via video right now that it works. And he sends a video. Everything looks good in the video.

I say, what’s the deal, come out to the garage, connect it there, I’ll stand way back from the street. It’s a projector, I can see it working. Then you disconnect it, bring it out, I verify that it’s in good shape (even though it’s already off by that point), and I transfer money on PayPal, and take the box.

No, he says, I’m really worried about the virus, and my wife is too. Can’t come out. So, I can show it to you through the window that it works and shine it on the driveway in front of the house.

He did. It works.

Doesn’t want to bring it out, says that he has had bad experiences, and he wants the money upfront.

Had to tell him goodbye and leave.

I can’t figure out if this is a scam or if the guy is really that paranoid about COVID? Technically, he couldn’t trick and not hand over the device—I would just immediately call the police to his house, show the chat, the money transfer, and the house of the owner refusing to bring out a projector. The police might not be much help, but the prospect of dealing with the police is clearly unwanted—if he wanted to deceive, he wouldn’t have met at his own home. He could bring out a different device that doesn’t work but looks exactly the same—yes, that’s possible. Actually, I couldn’t dismiss this thought, so I left. On the other hand, this guy has an open Facebook account with family photos, which he has maintained for a long time.

First time facing this in the States. Usually, sales through platforms like Facebook Marketplace, Offerup, Craigslist operate quite smoothly here.

Interestingly, imagine N identical computers with empty disks and a clean OS installation, all connected to a single keyboard and mouse. There is one user sitting at the keyboard and mouse, doing their usual work, looking at one of the screens. How quickly will they lose synchronization and why? This question resonates with the theory of determinism.

North Atlantic by Yann Tiersen. A beautiful and very simple song in the typical Tiersen style. P.S. The boxes in the background – we are getting ready to move somewhere nearby in January, though the exact location is still unclear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PekLR02fa9o

FYI @[100000569108009:2048:Ivan Shapovalov]

The reality of COVID-era series: I ended up watching the new episodes of “Euphoria” – with Zendaya and the young drug-addled America. There were no subtitles, which, coupled with “street” slang and often unfamiliar African American English, made it challenging, but — for almost the entire hour-long episode, the characters just sit in a restaurant and talk. Nothing else happens. Not almost nothing, but literally nothing. They converse intelligently and beautifully, but only between two of them (Rue and Ali, with a third joining sporadically, but just episodically)

Such are the series in the times of COVID

https://www.metacritic.com/tv/euphoria-special-episode-part-1-rue/season-1

Interesting analysis

Reading about sugar production. The process of purifying sugar juice from impurities in sugar production is called defecation.

Live with that now.

Winter has begun here as well. Just a couple of days ago, it was plus 15.

There is something wrong with the fact that a stalemate in chess due to “I can’t move anything” is not considered a loss for the one who can’t make a move.