A robot inspired by baby deer that can teach itself to walk; Brave Browser partners with TAP Network to connect BAT tokens directly to retailers; A fireside chat including the controversial and eccentric Craig Wright and economist George Gilder; Master's thesis finds that rocks from Earth and Moon are less similar than previously believed; and a Steem essay discussing the theoretical possibility of "bubbles of nothing" that could destroy the universe
Straight from my RSS feed | Whatever gets my attention |
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak*, StemGeeks.
- This robot taught itself to walk entirely on its own - A new study from Google describes their work building a robot that can teach itself to walk without needing to be picked up after falling by flailing around in a way that was inspired by baby deer - who learn to walk within hours after birth. This article contains a video of the robot as it learns to walk, and a synopsis of the work. The effort builds on previous work that taught robots to walk by modelling or by training in a real-world environment with the help of humans. According to the article, this work paves the way for future efforts where a robot must learn to navigate unfamiliar terrain without assistance from humans. -h/t Communications of the ACM
- Brave and TAP Network Partnership Connects Consumers and Brands via Blockchain - The blog for the Brave Browser announced on March 10 that desktop browser users in the United States can now redeem tokens that they receive as a share of advertising revenue. If users opt in to receiving advertising through Brave Browser notifications, they receive a 70% share of advertising revenue in the form of BAT tokens. Now, an agreement has been made with Tap Network so that Brave users can exchange BAT tokens for rewards points with a number of retailers including Starbucks, Nike, Netflix, Hulu, and others. Brendan Eich, Brave's CEO, is quoted as follows:
“The relationship between consumers and advertisers on the Web is broken. Consumers get tracked and exploited while advertisers follow them around the web with complete disregard for privacy,” said Brendan Eich, co-founder and CEO of Brave Software. “This partnership with TAP Network supports our mission of connecting consumers and brands in a respectful, mutually beneficial way, and contributes to the growth of our overall ecosystem by expanding the utility of BAT.”
- CoinGeek London 2020: Watch the fireside chat with Craig Wright and George Gilder - I'm not in the camp that thinks Craig Wright is Satoshi, and I'm not in the camp that thinks he isn't, but I am in the camp that thinks his ideas are worth listening to. Here's a youtube video of a discussion between the flamboyant and controversial figure behind Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) and George Gilder, a "noted economist, author, and investor". Gilder is in the camp who believes that Wright is Satoshi based on the word of several notable bitcoin insiders. My opinion on the matter has not changed since 2017, when I wrote Is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto? That's the wrong question. At this point, I'm more interested in observing the difference in perspective between scaling through block size vs. scaling through an off-chain solution (lightning network).
Anyway, of interest in this talk, Gilder says that he became interested in blockchain because it unlocks human potential, then goes on to add that "economies work because they maximize the creativity of individual human minds", and that blockchain is an unprecedented way to accomplish this. The great error of technology, he argues, is to usurp humans instead of enhancing them, and that is the fundamental flaw of Silicon Valley. Expanding on that, Wright and Gilder both discuss Wright's concept of the Metanet - which is Wright's idea that the entire Internet can run as a side chain on the BSV blockchain. He also argues that Wi-Fi 6 is a more important enhancement than the 5G cell phone bands, and answers Wright's question about where information economics will go in the future, and how people will learn about it. The pair then move on to answering a series of questions from Jimmy Nguyen, CEO of nChain
Here is the talk:
- Earth Rocks and Moon Rocks Are More Different Than We Thought - The Earth's Moon is believed to have formed when a large Mars-sized object, known as Theia, collided with the Earth. If so, rocks from the two objects should have had different compositions. However, previous study of the rocks that the Apollo program returned from the Moon found that the rocks were chemically identical to rocks on Earth. This led researchers to imagine two possibilities (i) The two colliding objects were comprised of identical materials; or (ii) The collision was so violent that it caused material from the Earth and Moon to mix, and the mixed material was left behind in both places. A March 9 study in Nature Geoscience has now exposed a third possibility. In this work, arising from the master thesis of Erick Cano, it was determined that the Earth Rocks and Moon Rocks are not all as similar as was previously believed. One possibility to explain the discrepancies between past analyses and the present study is that the Moon (and Earth?) was covered with a thick layer of molten material that was a combination of material from Earth and Theia, but the Moon's core retains some of the unique material from Theia. The end-result of this study is that it doesn't contradict previous models of the Moon's creation, but it loosens the boundaries, so that modelers can now explore a broader array of possible impact scenarios. h/t RealClear Science
- Steem @kralizec: Bubbles Of Nothing That Could Destroy The Universe - In this post, the author discusses a recent paper from arXIV. The post suggests that string theory suggests the existence of bubbles that contain nothing and that can grow at the speed of light until they destroy the universe. In the real world, since our universe is 14 billion years old, it follows that if these bubbles exist, they are extremely rare. In fact, if theory is limited to the four dimensions that we can observe, length, width, depth, and time, the possibility for them does not even arise. However, the concept remains a fascinating subject of research for string theorists and science fiction writers. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @kralizec.)
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