Hello internet friends,

it is a pretty fun idea to 3D-print the The Legend of Zelda map. It is even more fun to read that the person who did it used Minecraft as the 3D tool, because of course he did.

You know what’s creepy? This thing here. – it looks like a coffee maker but somehow it has a hologram of a half-naked anime lady in it. Maybe we should really start talking about the ethics of robotic companions.

It’s always pretty fun to explore a city with a healthy combination of planning and seredipity. So hey, why not do the same with Kabul?

Pebble was the first smartwatch company and somehow it managed to survive until a few weeks ago. Now that it is gone, Fitbit went ahead and bought their assets – and here is how the whole thing looked from the inside.

It’s a bit too simplified, but hey – why not read this article on how spice trade roughly 4000 years ago was the precursor to globalization? I did and enjoyed it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you do internet-stuff, why not go and have a look at this very good book. (Well, book-like website.) You’ll probably learn something.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

good news! We finally have tangible proof that dinosaurs were big ducks. I mean, we already knew deep in our hearts, but it’s nice to be able to point at some actual feathers and say: “See!”

So, by now we’ve all watched Westworld, right? (Right?)
I mean, whew, what a season finale – who’d have thought it’s all a dream and he was just taking a shower? Anyway. If you can’t wait for the next season or until we finally have proper real robots, why not travel to South Dakota and visit Cowboy Town?

Space! Ever since we humans decided that we want to go there, it’s littered with random space junk. (Like everywhere we go.) Now a bunch of Japanese scientists had a smart idea: make a big-ass net and collect that stuff. Sounds like a good plan to me.

We’re big fans of Lego here at the Irregularity HQ (wow, way to make it sound pretentious. There’s just me. There’s no HQ. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and so of course this article hits a nerve: Lego Is the Perfect Toy.

This orchid might not be an orchid. In fact it’s a mantis. Fascinating and slightly creepy.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

do you have what it takes to be an Instagram influencer? Well, if not, this article might have some ideas what you’ll need. #inspirational

This morning I learned about lights-out manufacturing which is pretty much what it sounds like – a process of running a factory without any humans – which would need light. So… lights out.
(Having learned Latin in high school I cringe at the idea of calling -facturing without manus manufacturing, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
I have learned this on a MetaFilter post which linked to this article on the future of what we used to call work.
idk, I guess if we can manage to get around that we can start to think more about The Unbusy Manifesto.

One of the things that increasingly get automated is driving – and one of the companies that put in a lot of work to make trucks self-driving is Otto, a subsidiary of Uber. Uber is already not all that well-known for being extremely ethical so it might be quite interesting to learn how Otto managed to “test” their trucks on public roads without proper paperwork.

Remember MakerBot? Somehow most people still don’t have a handy little 3D printer at home and if you want to know why, well – it’s your lucky day.

If there’s proper public transport and good ramen, I don’t think how anything would be wrong with this idea. (Honestly, those are two important factors for a high quality of life anyway.)

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

this weekend I didn’t do anything but watch a digger digging a hole. Thanks a lot.
(Well, not quite: for those of you who understand German and listen to podcasts – I did that again, after quite a while.)

Nothing sounds like a better idea like “Uber for Mental Health” – especially not when it’s from a bunch of dudes who
“intend to do a lot of neat things with the collected data.”

Meanwhile in the department of rich people being rich: Virgin’s Richard Branson Unveils a Plane That Travels from London to NYC in 3.5 Hours
As a big fan of the Concorde this is something I’ll keep watching – let’s see if they manage to get around the problems the Concorde had.

This is rather awesome: Two Teenage Girls Built Africa’s First-Ever Private Satellite
Go for it, young space girls!

If you have a bit of time – and you probably do, given that this email is a bit short – you might want to learn about Sima Qian, the first proper Chinese historian.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

apparently this is a commercial, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it is also great content.

Sometimes things that used to be there are suddenly not there anymore. These things usually are not sunk warships, though. Well – it might be time to learn about low-background steel to understand why these things are probably pretty valuable scrap material.
It still boggles my mind a bit how the market for stuff like that works.

We covered robot sex here before. (Which was disturbing, apparently. At least it wasn’t muppets.) Now we are watching Westworld and go :thinking_face: – how ethical is it really to do things to appliances?
And maybe, while we’re at it – what about VR?

Uh-oh, you’re old! And so is ICQ, which is still around. idk, somehow things were a lot better when that one was still the thing to use. After all we didn’t have that crap on there.

Oh man, I certainly did not miss the cold war. And at the moment it seems like the propaganda – or as we call it these days: post-truth – is winning on all fronts.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

this is probably my fourth or fifth attempt of writing that first paragraph and nothing really works. Just imagine a whole bunch of confused anger right here. You probably don’t have to – I’m almost sure you feel it too.
And if you don’t? Well, good for you.

And here are some new things for you to learn! Because learning new things is always a good thing. Broaden your horizon.

A bunch of archaeologists sent a submarine to the bottom of the Black Sea and what they found might surpr… Sorry.
What they found were the remains of more than 40 sunk ships from the last thousand years. That worked because apparently there’s not much oxygen down there, which helps to preserve the wrecks for such a long time. The more you know!

The Nebra Sky Disc is another artifact from a time long gone. (Or so we hope.) It was found by a bunch of looters and turned out to be not such a lucky thing for them. (Seriously, read this rather short article. It’s funny and almost as exciting as a fictional thriller.)

Evolution is a funny thing. We can all agree that it is a thing – I hope. But we still haven’t quite figured out how it works exactly. Turns out it might not be all in the genes.

There are a lot of interesting museums all around the world. One of the better ones might be the Museum of Rocks That Look Like Faces. I’m not too sure what we can learn from it but it does seem like something worth looking into.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

this comes a bit later than usual, but it took a long sleep, a lot of soup and a coffee to keep both a cold and the demon dogs at bay.
Let’s get to it, then.

Another clear sign we are in fact living in a cyberpunk future is that we now have people who can fly a drone around to take control of lightbulbs. This is both slightly terrifying and slightly amazing. (Unrelated sidenote: does anyone need some used Hue lights?)

If you aren’t watching Westworld, yet, you do miss out on some quality TV. (Which is something that can be said about so much these days. I say it about Westworld because that’s what I’m watching right now. I’m probably not watching so many other great series, but, you know… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Anyway, a good way to measure a series’ cultural impact is to look at the quality of fan fiction that appears around it.

First they came for our headphone jacks and I didn’t speak up, because meh. Then they came for our other ports and I only grumbled a bit, because first world problem. But what Apple is doing now is too much.

Warning! If you don’t like tentacled monsters from the deep, don’t follow the next link. If you do, have a look into the weird ways Humboldt squids communicate.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

at some point in August the internet – or at least the filter bubble I have created for myself – was happily sharing articles about a script that managed to predict depression in people based on the Instagram filters they like to use. (Strangely enough I did not mention it in these emails back then – maybe because it was too everywhere? Slightly overcado?)
Most of us just read these little nuggets of pop science, wonder how they fit into our view of the world (“I don’t use Inkwell, so that means I’m probably not depressed.”) and then forget about them. So it took quite a while until someone noticed something a bit off with the raw data – the depression rate of the people who “volunteered” for the study was much, much higher than the norm.

(I used to put these little lines here back in the days to let you know that one topic is over and the next one begins. Is that something you’d want back? Does it help? I always assumed you were all trained by the internet to jump from topic to topic anyway, but maybe not?)

Nowadays it is shockingly simple and inexpensive to get good high quality aerial photos. The hurdles are usually administrative and not technical – but that hasn’t always been the case: people used to put film cameras on pigeons.

If there is one thing that’s inevitable near airports, it is noise complaints. Turns out that these usually come from a very small number of very vocal people. (Turns out turns out: this is the case in the US, nobody really checked how it is globally. But hey, it is a better narrative and makes for easier headlines to just generalise it, right?)

While this article didn’t quite cause the “whiplash-inducing paradigm shift” it promised, it was very interesting indeed: many plants that we know today got their current shape back when megafauna roamed the earth. One of those big animals might even have been the “Higgs bison.”

Back in the 80s a flight crashed on a remote mountain in Bolivia – and there’s still no real explanation or background on what happened. Two dudes decided – more or less for fun – to climb that mountain and see for themselves what’s going on.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends!

Did you know that being rich is boring when nobody sees you? Yeah, well, me neither. It’s the slogan of a new app called Rich Kids which is exactly as terrible as it sounds.
I don’t know. For some reason I prefer our little gathering of Smart Kids right here.

I watched Being George Clooney this weekend, a documentary about dubbing movies and featuring a whole lot of people from all over the world who are the voice of George Clooney and his female co-stars. (They could have just called it “Being Julia Roberts” – wtf?) I have linked to this article about dubbing Seinfeld before but I did not know that the Italians are crazy about their dubbers.

At some point I want to visit Shenzen. You wonder why? Wonder no more.

Before I write these emails I really need a healthy amount of the healing power of crystals. Maybe that would help Rinna as well? If not, there’s always Molly.

This story somehow gets weirder and weirder. (Warning: it’s a podcast episode, so you’ll probably have to listen to it. They do have a full transcript, but I found that a bit hard to read.)

So, these daydreams – it’s not just me?
This poor lady in the interview sounds like she’s having these a lot more than I ever did, though.

The trolley problem used to be a pretty theoretical thing to ponder – how often are we in situations where we get to decide where a trolley will roll, anyway? But these days, designers and developers of self-driving cars will have to think about that. A lot. There’s this webpage where you do a couple of decisions and see for yourself. (I have my own kind of result…)
If you’re working at Mercedes Benz, the answer to these questions is a little bit easier.

Wow. This is already a long mail. Do you still have the energy for more? Weeeell, let’s do this, in a quickfire way:

This dude has a fascinating life.

This dude is fed up with startups.

This fictional dude is a blueprint for many modern real-life villains.

This dude seems alright.

This dude did not know when to stop.

These dudes need a good slapping.

See, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Enough content for the next week to enjoy.

Until then: toodles! Be safe and maybe do some yoga.