Random links
- Engineers plan to upload bee brains to flying robots
- "Engineers from the universities of Sheffield and Sussex are planning on scanning the brains of bees and uploading them into autonomous flying robots that will then fly and act like the real thing." They seem to be aiming for 2015 to build their robots bees by, but I'm not sure how long this'll actually take. As the article Mind reading is possible! notes with a number of examples, there's a lot that can be read from a person's brain. Just how much of this might actually be useable to construct an artificial neural network I'm unsure.
- Neighborhoods Seek to Banish Sex Offenders by Building Parks
- "local residents and city officials developed a plan to force convicted sex offenders to leave their neighborhood: open a tiny park. Parents here, where state law prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or a public park, are not the only ones seizing on this approach." Pair that with the following: "the pocket parks ... will probably leave more convicted sex offenders homeless. And research shows that once sex offenders lose stable housing, they become ... more likely to commit another crime" (emphasis mine)
- Aleksandra Duliba wins the 2013 L.A. Marathon
- At least the LA Times correctly identified this as a "gender bonus" as her marathon time wasn't even in the top 10 for the race despite her finishing time 5 minutes ahead of the second-fastest woman. Her run took more than 16 minutes more than the male winner. (He took 2:09:43; she took 2:26:08).
- Are There Any Europeans Left?
- Something to think about: "The history of Europe’s past half-century is usually depicted as step after step toward a common future. But maybe, to understand where we are now, the story should start earlier — not with the coalescing of France and Germany in the 1960s but with the model of Europe in the decade before the calamity of 1914. In important ways, the Europe of 1913 was more cosmopolitan and European than the Europe of today."