Whoah

Archstudio. Alley Teahouses- Qulang Hospital. Beijing. China. photos: Archstudio

A great visualization of where the stratosphere is thanks to Mt. Etna.

World’s Oldest Fossils Found in Greenland

Geologists recently found evidence of ancient life in Greenland which they think dates to 3.7 billion years ago. If their findings are confirmed, that would make the fossils the oldest evidence of life yet known. The great age of the fossils makes reconstructing the evolution of life from the chemicals naturally present on the early Earth more difficult. You see, the fossils are too old. It leaves little time for evolution to have occurred, and puts the process of life emerging and evolving close to a time when Earth was being bombarded by destructive asteroids.

Crosson Architects. Hut on Sleds. Whangapoua. New Zealand. photos: Jackie Meiring

De-automation is a thing | Robohub

We tend to assume that automation is a process that continues – that once some human activity has been automated there’s no going back. That automation sticks. But, as Paul Mason pointed out in a recent column that assumption is wrong.

Mason gives a startling example of the decline of car-wash robots, to be replaced by, as he puts it “five guys with rags”. Here’s the paragraph that really made me think:

“There are now 20,000 hand car washes in Britain, only a thousand of them regulated. By contrast, in the space of 10 years, the number of rollover car-wash machines has halved –from 9,000 to 4,200.”

The reasons, of course, are political and economic and you may or may not agree with Mason’s diagnosis and prescription (as it happens I do). But de-automation – and the ethical, societal and legal implications – is something that we, as roboticists, need to think about just as much as automation.

Several questions come to mind:

are there other examples of de-automation? is the car-wash robot example atypical, or part of a trend? is de-automation necessarily a sign of something going wrong? (would Mason be so concerned about the guys with rags if the hand car wash industry were a well-regulated industry paying decent wages to its workers, and generating tax revenues back to the economy?)

A striking example of the strength of the British Empire in the early 1900s: In 1911 Britain completed the “All Red Line,” a network of telegraphs that linked its possessions. The system was so redundant that an enemy would have had to cut 49 cables to isolate the United Kingdom, 15 to isolate Canada, or 5 to isolate South Africa. As a result, British communications remained uninterrupted throughout World War I.

It's only coming out in German this weekend, but wow this looks cool.

You are technically correct…the best kind of correct. Comic by www.facebook.com/pedromics