Being Against Technological Progress if Futile

Ron complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights. What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of hu¬ man knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don't work with our hands anymore! There are still plenty of places in the world where p...

 Shannon and Thorp Hack the Roulette Wheel

It was in this tinkerer’s laboratory that they set out to understand how roulette could be gamed, ordering “a regulation roulette wheel from Reno for $1,500,” a strobe light, and a clock whose hand revolved once per second. Thorp was given inside access to Shannon in all his tinkering glory: Gadgets . . . were everywhere. He had a mechanical coin tosser which could be set to flip the coin through a set number of revolutions, producing a head or tail according to the setting. As a joke...

 Use of an Umpire to Hide Troop Movements in a War Game

Three maps should be provided, either in separate rooms or separated from each other by screens: one for each player, and one in the centre for the Umpire.* Each Commander and his subordinates will be allowed access only to their own map, the Umpire and his assistants moving from one side to the other. [...] Whenever any portion of OIK; of the opposing forces comes within the view of the other, the corresponding blocks of the former must be placed on the map of the latter and rice ver...

 Human Females Menstruate to Eliminate Unviable Fetuses

From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn't worth it. That's where the endometrium comes in. You've probably read about how the endometriu...

 The Web Enslaves Us With Convenience

In The Matrix, Neo learns that humanity is enslaved by machines. The populace “lives” in a virtual world, unaware that their body heat is being used as an energy source. I see a sort of low-fi parallel of this in our relationship with Facebook. Every member operates in that “free” forum, largely unaware that they’re powering the thing by relinquishing their user data. This scenario is in stark contrast to what we once hoped the web to be. We imagined it as a means of liberating peo...

 Government Internet Shutdown Mobilized the Masses

The government could have been smarter. The best way to divert our youth from politics would have been to give them free, unlimited internet access a few days before the protests, and drop the price of beer and condoms – all the while playing “Be safe, live long” songs on the radios. The youngies would have been watching porn, WhatsApping and YouTubing, and would have been too distracted to think about politics. Shutting down the internet achieved the opposite. Far from limiting youth ...

 The Role of the Educator In Regards to the Future

The world is changing -- it is getting both smaller and bigger at the same time. Our world shrinks as technologies now allow us to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously with peers around the world. Conversely, the explosion of information now available to us expands our view of the world. As a result of the ability to communicate globally and the information explosion, education must change. Most educators might not want to change, but the change is coming -- it is a matter of whe...

 pplapi.com

pplapi.com (pronounced “people API”) is a web-based data service that provides access to a synthetic world population, n = 7, 171, 922, 938. Researchers can submit queries to pplapi.com using its Application Programming Interface (API) to obtain samples consisting of synthetic agents drawn from this population. Because researchers do not need to host the synthetic population themselves, pplapi.com reduces start-up costs associated with using synthetic agents in research. pplapi.com provid...

 Why use Openly Licensed Educational Resources?

Resources that are openly licensed benefit schools in a number of ways, but most notably they help to: Increase Equity – All students have access to high quality learning materials that have the most up-to-date and relevant content because openly licensed educational resources can be freely distributed to anyone. Save Money – Switching to educational materials that are openly licensed enables schools to repurpose funding spent on static textbooks for other pressing needs, such as invest...

 Time is the Most Precious Commodity

Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry. ... In your world, people are used to fighting for resources, like oil, minerals, or land. When you have access to the vastness of space, you realize that there's only one resource worth fighting over--even killing for--more time. Time is the singlemost precious commodity in the Universe.