Wednesday Worsification Woolsey

Lion cubs want in

Tiger enjoying the fountain

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Curt Schilling suspended by ESPN after tweet comparing Muslims to Nazis: “It’s said only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How’d that go?”

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 My cat has a very positive attitude and never seems to give up

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Sony Drone prototype can fly 106 MPH and stay in the air for two hours straight

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 Going Clear Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015) Filmmaker Alex Gibney interviews former members of the Church of Scientology and reveals abuses and strange practices within the controversial organization.

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 TIL in 1970 you could travel between DC and NYC by train in 2 hours and 30 minutes for $12.75. Today it takes Amtrak's high-speed Acela 3 hours and it costs $158.

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Welcome to Svalbard, a group of islands in the High Arctic, north of Norway; the one place on the planet where carrying a gun is a legal requirement, and for a very good reason.

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 Someone is setting us on fire!

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Cat reacts to newly installed cat door

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 New homeowner opens fallout shelter sealed since 1961

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 That's a smart way to escape.

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 Letter a friend of mine's daughter received from school today. Her Wonder Woman lunchbox features a violent super hero that does not comply with the school's dress code. Pictures of the lunchbox are also attached.

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Stop In The Name Of The Law!

  A police officer is directing traffic in the intersection when he sees a self-driving car barreling toward him and the occupant looking down at his smartphone. 

The officer gestures for the car to stop, and the self-driving vehicle rolls to a halt behind the crosswalk. This seems like a pretty plausible interaction. 

Human drivers are required to pull over when a police officer gestures for them to do so. It's reasonable to expect that self-driving cars would do the same. 

But Will Oremus writes that while it's clear that police officers should have some power over the movements of self-driving cars, what's less clear is where to draw the line. Should an officer be able to do the same if he suspects the passenger of a crime?

 And what if the passenger doesn't want the car to stop—can she override the command, or does the police officer have ultimate control?

According to a RAND Corp. report on the future of technology and law enforcement "the dark side to all of the emerging access and interconnectivity (PDF) is the risk to the public's civil rights, privacy rights, and security."

 It added, "One can readily imagine abuses that might occur if, for example, capabilities to control automated vehicles and the disclosure of detailed personal information about their occupants were not tightly controlled and secured."

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Droneapocalypse

California's Senate Bill 142 would prohibit drones from flying under 350 feet over any property without express permission from the property's owner.

 The bill passed the California Assembly easily. Tech advocates have been battling privacy advocates to influence the inevitable regulation of private and commercial drones. 

Industry groups say this restriction will kill drone delivery services before they even begin. The legislation would also drastically diminish the usefulness of camera-centric drones like the ones being rolled out by GoPro.

 If passed, the bill could influence how other states regulate drones. The article notes that 156 different drone-related bills have been considered in 46 different states this year alone, and the FAA will issue nationwide rules in September.

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Meaningless Nonesuch Nonsense

Physicist Stephen Hawking claims to have figured out a way for information to leave a black hole. He presented his theory today at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Scientists have struggled with the black hole information paradox for years, and Hawking thinks this new theory could be a solution. 

 He said, "I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon." 

Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia: 

You wouldn't technically lose any information if you kept all of the ashes in one place, but you'd have a hard time looking up the capital of Minnesota." 

Information can leave the black hole via Hawking radiation, though it will be functionally useless. Hawking worked with Cambridge's Malcolm Perry and Harvard's Andrew Stromberg on this theory.

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Crowd Funding is the wild-wild west of business financing, and it's not just the people starting campaigns that are playing without many rules.

 One of Kickstarter's sort algorithm triggers is the "Staff Pick." Research indicates being featured by Kickstarter staff is a huge predictor for success. 

But there is no published benchmark for how these are chosen. Oddly, Kickstarter only discourages users from falsely labeling their campaign as a Staff Pick. To protect backers and ensure the crowdfunding ecosystem isn't sullied by scammers, Kickstarter needs to boost their transparency starting with this Staff Pick conundrum.

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I don't know, we don't know, they don't know.

 
In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled "Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.

" Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. "Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer," said Witte, "without ever telling the student that we just don't know very much about it." 

Now Jamie Holmes writes in the NY Times that many scientific facts simply aren't solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations. 

According to Homes, presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist named Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. 

"This crucial element in science was being left out for the students," says Firestein."The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that "turns your crank," the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation."

 The time has come to "view ignorance as 'regular' rather than deviant," argue sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.

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Solar Oil Next Texas Energy Boom

The Wall Street Journal reports: "Solar power has gotten so cheap to produce—and so competitively priced in the electricity market—that it is taking hold even in a state that, unlike California, doesn't offer incentives to utilities to buy or build sun-powered generation." 

 Falling cost is one factor driving investment. "Another reason for the boom: Texas recently wrapped up construction of $6.9 billion worth of new transmission lines, many connecting West Texas to the state's large cities. 

These massive power lines enabled Texas to become, by far, the largest U.S. wind producer.

 Solar developers plan to move electricity on the same lines, taking advantage of a lull in wind generation during the heat of the day when solar output is at its highest."