Author: Mathew Ingram

A fusion energy start-up claims to have solved the millennia-old challenge of how to turn other metals into gold. Chrysopoeia, commonly known as alchemy, has been pursued by civilisations as far back as ancient Egypt. Now San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion, a start-up focused on using nuclear fusion to generate power, has said the same process could be used to produce gold from mercury. In an academic paper published last week, Marathon proposes that neutrons released in fusion reactions could be used to produce gold through a process known as nuclear transmutation. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed but has had a positive reception from some experts in the field. “On paper it looks great and everyone so far that I talk to remains intrigued and excited,” Dr Ahmed Diallo, a plasma physicist at the US Department of Energy’s national laboratory at Princeton who has read the study, told the Financial Times. (via FT)

A raccon broke into a liquor store and was found passed out face down in the bathroom

A drunken raccoon was found asleep amid its work at the ABC liquor store in Ashland, Virginia, a trail of broken bottles and spilled booze leading to its resting place by the staff toilet. “Officer Martin safely secured our masked bandit and transported him back to the shelter to sober up before questioning,” Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter posted to social media. “After a few hours of sleep and zero signs of injury (other than maybe a hangover and poor life choices), he was safely released back to the wild, hopefully having learned that breaking and entering is not the answer. … Just another day in the life at Hanover Animal Protection!” The Associated Press talked to the animal control officer who responded to the call and found the plastered procyonid. “I personally like raccoons,” she told them, “He fell through one of the ceiling tiles and went on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything.” (via Boing Boing)

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Before we get started, let’s agree that Elon Musk’s promises about full self-driving on the Tesla have been figments of his ketamine-addled imagination, if not an outright fraud. Musk first promised FSD in 2016, almost a full decade ago, and it is barely any closer now. His then-Twitter account almost 10 years ago was full of hype about features like “Summon,” where a Tesla owner across the city could click a button in the app and their car would autonomously leave the garage and drive across town, something that still hasn’t arrived. Is it because Musk refuses to use LiDAR, which literally every other self-driving car maker uses, and has stuck to trying to get cameras and algorithms to do it alone? Possibly. Regardless, the fact is that a Tesla still has problems making it onto highway exits or detecting when lanes are closed, and it routinely cuts other drivers off. In other words, Tesla self-driving is a pale imitation of what Musk has been promising for years, to the point where there are multiple class-action lawsuits about it.

That said, however, I think there’s ample evidence that self-driving cars — even the somewhat flawed ones we have now — are an unambiguous social good. They are so much better than cars driven by human beings that it doesn’t seem fair to even compare them. It’s like arguing that toasters are better than jamming a piece of bread on a stick and holding it over a fire, or that anaesthesia is better than telling someone to bite a bullet before you operate. If it were possible to flick a switch and make all cars self-driving, it would be incumbent on us to flick that switch as quickly as possible. To get a sense of why I believe this is the case, Waymo — Google’s self-driving car startup — recently released statistics on the accident rate of its cars, of which there are more than 2,500 in five cities. As of June this year, Waymo cars had driven almost 100 million miles and had 90 percent fewer crashes causing serious injury, and 90 percent fewer incidents involving pedestrians (Tesla also reports accidents but with much less detail).

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In the late 1990s, when most people just about had an email address and the smartphone with even one G, never mind five of them, was just a twinkle in a mad inventor’s eye, the internet was still regarded by many as the preserve of the nerd. Most of the record industry either treated it as an irrelevance or, with the advent of Napster and other streaming services a few years later, a threat. But Jagger was an early adopter, or at least he was someone who spotted the internet’s potential while others retained suspicion. Jagger is also a cricket nut. So when he discovered that nobody was planning to broadcast the Akai-Singer Champions Trophy — a relatively minor one-day tournament in December 1997, featuring England, Pakistan, India and West Indies — these two interests converged. So he formed a company and broadcast it himself. (via the NYT)

Some scholars believe the Wizard of Oz is an allegory for the move to a gold standard in 1873

In a 1964 article, educator and historian Henry Littlefield outlined an allegory in the book of the late-19th-century debate regarding monetary policy. According to this view, for instance, the Yellow Brick Road represents the gold standard, and the Silver Shoes (Ruby slippers in the 1939 film version) represent the Silverites’ wish to maintain convertibility under a sixteen to one ratio. Hugh Rockoff suggested in 1990 that the novel was an allegory about the demonetization of silver in 1873, and that the City of Oz earns its name from the abbreviation of ounces “Oz” in which gold and silver are measured. The cyclone that carried Dorothy to the Land of Oz represents the economic and political upheaval, the yellow brick road stands for the gold standard, and the silver shoes Dorothy inherits from the Wicked Witch of the East represents the pro-silver movement. When Dorothy is taken to the Emerald Palace before her audience with the Wizard she is led through seven passages and up three flights of stairs, a subtle reference to the Coinage Act of 1873. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “Mick Jagger was a pioneer in streaming video on the internet”

The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. What might account for the abrupt rise and equally abrupt fall, between the nineteen-sixties and the turn of the century, of the “golden age” of serial killing? And why were so many of these brutes cradled in a crescent of psychopathy around Seattle’s Puget Sound? Fraser thinks the master key is to be found in the fact that the area south and southwest of Seattle was home to massive ore-processing facilities, and her subjects were reared in their murky shadows. “Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes,” she writes of her crazy wall, “those insidious killers, shades of Hades.” The smelters caused a profusion of heavy metals in the air and water, and toxins such as lead and arsenic were found in staggering concentrations in the blood of Tacoma’s children. Some were merely dulled, or delinquent; a few became tabloid monsters. (via the New Yorker)

Spotify changed its randomness algorithm to make it less random but it feels more random

Spotify’s first iteration of its shuffle feature was dictated by a decades-old algorithm that generated unbiased randomness from a finite sequence of elements. Breathtakingly efficient, the Fisher-Yates shuffle was employed by Spotify to dismantle user playlists and reassemble them into new, unpredictable orders. From the developers’ perspective, the task of creating this feature was masterfully accomplished with just a few lines of code. From early users’ perspective, shuffle was a travesty. This discrepancy was bewildering for both parties, but mainly for developers, who had delivered a mathematically perfect version of randomness. Perfection turned out to be the problem. The algorithm captured a Platonic ideal of randomness instead of one compatible with the human mind. We presume that randomness must always be chaotic. However, as randomness is unpredictable, it will at times give the impression of order. (via the FT)

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Continue reading “Lead poisoning may have led to a generation of serial killers”

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century. Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, and even doused the thing in acid. Unable to open the rock, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification. A scientist there said that after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, only two of the offerings had ever turned out to be real meteorites, and Hole’s rock was one of those two. He published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which he called Maryborough. (via ScienceAlert)

In the 16th century cadavers were embalmed with honey and then turned into medicine

A mellified man, also known as a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. The concoction is detailed in Chinese medical sources of the 16th century, which reports that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection. The mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, the donor’s feces and even sweat would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor’s body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey. After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs, which would then be sold in street markets at a hefty price. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “He thought he found gold but it was a 5 billion-year-old meteor”