The 7 Worlds ...

Ridley Scott still has what it takes ...

Uncanny Valley yet again ...

This person does not exist

A person who says they created the site popped up on Hacker News to explain what was going on. The website cycles through the results of a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which basically means that two AI systems duel each other to create a realistic imitation of something — whether it’s a caricature, a level of DOOM, or a person’s portrait.

In this case, the GAN was built by Intel researchers and trained on photos of people’s faces, according to research published to the preprint server ArXiv last week that the author shared in the Hacker News post. However, the same algorithm has also been trained on images of anime faces and paintings, resulting in terrifying animations.

It gets better.

IN 2015, CAR-AND-ROCKET man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public.

The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. It does that very well—scoring better on some reading-comprehension tests than any other automated system. But when OpenAI’s researchers configured the system to generate text, they began to think about their achievement differently.

“It looks pretty darn real,” says David Luan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI, of the text the system generates. He and his fellow researchers began to imagine how it might be used for unfriendly purposes. “It could be that someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news,” Luan says.

Beyond our control seems to apply here, does it not?

Options/Snooping 101

Running out of options ...

Snooping 101

NYC @ Nite Yet Again

Reflection 2Step

Flatiron +

LCT @ Nite

LC Front & Center

Shades of Blue

Toons yet again :)

On your feet ... I stand corrected :)

Supersize me

On the road to perdition

 Monkey see, Monkey do

Put me in coach ...

Mailing it in ...

Straight Cuts of a Different Kind :)

Straight cuts of a different kind starts by combining electricity with a brass wire (EDM) to mill metal with the kind of precision impossible to achieve by traditional means.

Traditional milling involves the mechanical shaping of a material—“applying a mechanical force against the workpiece to physically make a chip or remove material,” says Brian Pfluger, EDM product line manager at Makino, a machine tool maker. “Whereas with EDM we're not physically touching the part—we're machining with lightning bolts.”

First of all, that’s metal as hell. But more specifically, we’re talking lots and lots of little sparks. The “blade” in an EDM machine is actually a superfine brass wire through which electricity courses. Even though the machine is cutting through extremely tough materials, such as carbide (which is so tough that traditional milling techniques use it to drill through other materials), the blasts of electricity it uses are relatively weak. But the blasts come with extremely high frequency, something like 20,000 sparks per second along the length of the brass wire.

Some specifics ...

The wire itself never actually touches the material. The rapid-fire sparks vaporize teeny tiny bits of the metal being cut, on the order of 5 microns wide. (A micron is a millionth of a meter. For context, a red blood cell in your body is between 6 and 8 microns wide.) This is known as sublimation.

1 Wire. 2 Electrical discharge erosion (Electric arc). 3 Electrical potential. 4 Workpiece.

Cool without question. :)

Undercurrents

Reality is all about the transformation and transferral of energy from one place to another with as much continuity as possible as nature hates gradients and tries her best to eliminate them to the max. Winter is a great time to see how undercurrents work, in this case, at small scales. Enjoy.

Tax Rates et al ...

Now when you look at this graphic, check out how healthy the economy really was under Eisenhower and Kennedy as under Eisenhower, the government was in the black. Taxing the rich at the levels of Eisenhower and Kennedy really makes sense doesn't it given the enormous debt America faces in 2019. Thanks Alex for turning me onto this. 

Opportunity has died AFAWK ...

The Opportunity rover looks back on its tracks on Mars.NASA / JPL-CALTECH

For 15 years, Opportunity traveled on Mars, sending back pictures and data, something truly incredible as the original mission was designed to last 90 days, let alone 15 years. The only other mission comparable to this, IMHO, is Cassini, another explorer that delivered invaluable research about Saturn in a mission lasting 13 years instead of 4. Needless to say, the scientists and engineers shepherding these guys grew to love them as they became, in a very real way, family, not just hardware, a sentiment yours truly understands without question. 

The rovers moved like migratory birds.

Opportunity and Spirit arrived on Mars within days of each other, at different locations along the planet’s equator, in January 2004, equipped with instruments to study the rust-colored soil. During the Martian winter, engineers directed the rovers to north-facing slopes, so that their solar panels could soak up as much sunlight as possible each day. When one of Spirit’s wheels stopped working, it kept going by driving backwards, dragging the defunct wheel behind it.

But in 2009, the rover’s wheels broke through some crust and slipped into a sand pit. Engineers tried maneuvering the wheels this way and that, but the rover was stuck. For the first time, Spirit couldn’t make its way to a sunny slope.

“We saw it coming,” Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the NASA mission, told me. “I knew from day one, if Spirit has to spend a winter on flat ground, that was going to be Spirit’s last winter.”

Spirit entered hibernation mode and never woke up. The mission was declared over more than a year after the rover’s last message to Earth and months of attempts to restore contact.

Now it could be Opportunity’s turn. The rover hasn’t called home in 237 days.

Last June, an enormous storm swept across the planet, clogging the atmosphere with sunlight-blocking dust, and the rover, unable to charge its batteries in the darkness, slipped into a deep sleep.

“I haven’t given up yet,” Squyres said.

I really hope I'm wrong about this.

Ice Lines 2019