Miscellaneous #26

Curated Links of the Visionary and the Vrot

A Giant Googly Eye on a Giant Robot

The “DIXIE Showgirl” who danced in front of an atomic bomb explosion

The Time that the US Army Deployed Pianos to the Battlefield

Does Earth Have a New Quasi-Moon?

Asteroid mining startup AstroForge readies first mission

Reality or Illusion? The Human Battle with Distinguishing Imagination from Reality

How scientists are decoding what the past smelled like

Cracking the case of mitochondrial repair and replacement in metabolic stress

GPT-4 Fails Economics

ChatGPT recently passed the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, but using it for a real-world medical diagnosis would quickly turn deadly.

Beware the Variable-Maximizers: Optimizing for a single metric is bad, whether it’s clicks, shareholder value, or paperclips

Nobody knows how many jobs will “be automated” Whatever that even means.

Can Space Agencies Boost Autonomous Shipping?

This is Ascento Pro (a mobile robot platform)

Universal Basic Income does not cause inflation

Project Next Gen: The United States Gets Serious for New Covid Vaccines

The Killer App: The History of VisiCalc

This is not a drill: Snakes can cartwheel

Peacock escapes from a zoo and attacks man grabbing his pants

Scientists create ‘slits in time’ in mind-bending physics experiment

“the mystery of the Second Law has never gone away”: Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

A Germany without coal would have been better

new light on ‘what Watson and Crick really took from Rosalind Franklin’

See where the location of your city was millions of years ago on this Ancient Earth web app

Are The Crystal Aztec Skulls Real? (Nope, they’re fake.)

Occluded Mastery of Hans Noë (Part Two)