All Ears

Children receive new ears grown from their own cells in world first
Feb 2018, The Independent

The new technique involves taking a scan of the child’s unaffected ear, reversing the dimensions and 3D-printing a biodegradable mould punctuated with tiny holes.

Cartilage cells taken from the recipient’s other, unaffected ear are then used to fill the holes while the new ear is still in the lab.

Over three months the cartilage cells begin to grow in the shape of the mould, and the mould itself begins to break down.

While this process is underway, the ear is grafted onto the recipient.
-BBC


Hearing this news, I can't help but to remember the documentary of kidnapping in Brazil, Manda Bala (Send A Bullet).

Specialty doctors, or plastic surgeons, were making a living solely by reattaching ears that had been forcibly removed from kidnapped victims with the intent to extort for ransom. The family who received the ear would send it to the doctor, who would hold on to it in his refrigerator until the ransom was paid, and the ear could then be safely reattached.

If you haven't seen the film, please do, and if you take NJ Transit, definitely watch the film, so you can feel better that you don't have to take a helicopter or a bulletproof car to work.

Fakeswap

Discord just shut down a chat group dedicated to sharing porn videos edited with AI to include celebrities
Jan 2018, Business Insider

First there was photoshop. The logical progression is video. And the logical progression of that is porno.

In this case, your face just got stamped onto Mia Khalifa, in action. The fake part is the face. And the implications go pretty far beyond pornography.

And really, how new is this? Not very - I've got a link here to a 2011 example of augmented reality faceswap. That means realtime. And that was 2011.

image source, same link

Pimp My HAL

The FDA Just Approved a Robotic Exoskeleton That Augments Your Strength
Jan 2018, futurism.com

Here's a lower body exoskeleton that senses your impulses to help you move better stronger faster. HAL stands for hybrid assisted limb.

And here's another one I found called SuitX, for $40k, and weighing 27lbs with an 8hr battery pack, and pictured above. You can walk 1 mph in it, which is about half speed. For reference, motorized wheelchairs are in the thousands of dollars, so we have a way to go before competing in that market, but the game is afoot.

And here's a bunch more mentioned, in case you're interested.

Back to HAL, this FDA-approved exoskeleton is for medical use, at least that's what they call it. This means it's for people with paralysis of their legs. Then, there's the non-medical version, and that's for anyone, and that's when we start to see people outfit their exoskeleton the way we do a car or a bicycle (or a wheelchair).

And on a more serious note, I remind readers of artist and former classmate of mine - Christina Symanski - who lost control of her lower body in her 20's and didn't make it to her 30's. Had she made it to her 40's, she might have been able to move her legs again.

In Honor of Christina Symanski

Earl of Sandwich

Is your sandwich bad for the environment?
Jan 2018, phys.org

According to the British Sandwich Association (BSA) more than 11.5 billion sandwiches are consumed each year in the UK alone.


British Sandwich Association

That's all.

And girls eating sandwiches is a thing, also.

Neuromorphs

NIST's superconducting synapse may be missing piece for 'artificial brains'
Jan 2018, phys.org

image source

Neuromorphic computers eh? Better than the real thing eh?

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a superconducting switch that "learns" like a biological system and could connect processors and store memories in future computers operating like the human brain. ...

Even better than the real thing, the NIST synapse can fire much faster than the human brain—1 billion times per second, compared to a brain cell's 50 times per second—using just a whiff of energy, about one ten-thousandth as much as a human synapse. -phys.org

Notes on Time

Facebook invents new unit of time called a flick
Jan 2018, BBC

It's not as cool as it sounds at first. But I thought it might be nice to start recording instances of this attempt, because I had no idea that Swatch tried to reinvent global time at the dawn of the internet. (It was a marketing campaign that didn't hold up, and it wasn't the first attempt to decimalize time, most important of which was the 1792 French Revolutionary Time, and the most obvious being Chinese decimal time - they had it forever...just about as long as they were using chopsticks while Europeans were still eating with their hands.)

And since we're talking about time, I should take a moment to mention that time zones were created as a result of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's. (I think about this every time my New Jersey Transit train is delayed.)

Prior that that time in history, there was no need to designate time zones, because we simply couldn't travel that fast, nor did we need to be so succinct about where and when we were.

Rail travel across such a large continetal landmass needed better coordination, or else trains coming from different places each using their own time standard would show up at different stations at different times. Very confusing. Things were finally standardized in 1883, and it was called "The Day of Two Noons" as each train station reset its local noon to the new standard noon.

Granted, Greenwich Mean Time has been around since the late 1600's and was needed for mariners. It can be seen as the first universal time, but the splitting of the globe into hour-long zones (4 minutes for every degree longitude) did not come until much later.

And a final note on time, there are two times we use here on Earth. The first is common, and it's the time as determined by the position of the Sun, or the Earth relative to the Sun. It's called solar time.

The second is less well known, and is determined by the position of our solar system relative to our galaxy. No, it's more specifically the position of the Earth relative to our galaxy. This is called sidereal time, or star time.

Sidereal time falls behind solar time by about four minutes per day, or one day per year. Who cares? Astronomers and astrologers, that's who. And no, they're not the same thing, although lots of people fail to recognize the difference.


Post Script
Astronomological
Network Address, 2015

Wiser Than You Think

The Crowd and The Life of Brian

Here at Network Address we've been interested in wisdom of the crowds for some time now. But as evidence like this starts to come out more, I wonder how much of this "wisdom of the crowds" thing has actually already been optimized by a kind of democratic voting system that we already have in place in a lot of developed countries? Like, have we known about Galton's ex-weighing trick for centuries and that's the reason why we vote the way we do? And we're just re-learning it again now because of an advance in technology?

And on the other hand, can we just translate all this to AI, because you know, they might do it better than us. (They?)

Crowds within crowd found to outperform 'wisdom of the crowd'
Jan 2018, phys.org


Post Script

The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki, 2004

Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds
Yahoo Finance, April 2016