sent2null space

The last few years as the layman media has cottoned on to the previously silent revolution happening in self driving car technology since 2003 and DARPA's "grand challenges", we've seen lots of introduction of arguments expressing the necessity of ethics and philosophy to help deal with supposedly dangerous ramifications of a cars that drive themselves. Namely issues like what is known as the trolly problem . I'll be blunt, there is no need to address any moral dilemma at all. Self Driving cars don't need to be that intelligent, all they need to do is know and relentlessly follow the law. The laws work to define what is legal *action* given possible scenarios with other cars and pedestrians...acting within those laws 100% means one is not subject to violating them....so knowing the laws and behaving to their letter ....*even if that means killing people* will get you free of at least the litigation. See China. In China a...

It's pretty clear at this point that Uber's surge pricing model has been met with mixed reactions and in many cases outright derision by the customer base. The pricing model instituted in some large cities at the end of 2015 allows customers to pay more for the luxury of having an Uber driver arrive in a timely fashion when demand is high . At first this sounds like a very  good idea, Uber simply keys up the price of the fair percentage doled out to the driver until drivers swarm an area where demand is high, this gets the drivers a larger payout per fair but also ensures that the customers in high demand areas also get picked up faster ...so what's the problem? The problem is that surge pricing can't be accurately given a price estimate like non surge pricing calculations are given and often people being picked up in high demand areas are simply focused on one factor, getting picked up ....often under inebriated circumstances , when they sober up after the revelry...

New tantalizing reports of gravitational waves being detected hit the web recently. So if it does detect them I'd imagine it would detect distal waves with high periodicity rates. The proximal waves are going to have very long wave length and I don't know how they'd disambiguate those without making very long observation windows. Proximal sources of such waves are: a)  the Sun itself ...very very tiny micro shedding as it gives up mass to energy. These are likely to be super super weak and likely not capturable by current generation technology. b) the Sun - Mercury transit , though Mercury is tiny compared to the sun both do distort space time and sit in mutual wells...which should create a very tiny wake (a GW) that has periodicity matched to the rotation rate of Mercury around the Sun. This being a longer wavelength it would require a long observation window and it is also abysmally tiny. So again ...unlikely to be captured with current tech. c) the Sun - V...

"Uber has been investing heavily in China, and the service is growing there like crazy. Uber’s service is taking off in China much faster than it did in the United States. Nine months after launching in Chengdu, Uber had 479 times the trips it had in New York after the same amount of time. Uber is also putting a lot of money into its Chinese growth. Uber's China branch has closed a funding round that values it at $7 billion.  In total, Uber has raised more than $6 billion in several funding rounds, including a $600 million investment from Chinese search engine company Baidu." --- And yet , combined we are still talking about 4 major markets. US, Europe, China and India. South America , Africa , South East Asia are also all ripe for entry. This quote comes from this article. He with the most funding has the best chance of radically innovating fast enough in the space to grab market share from the others, so far on a global basis Uber has executed brilliantly. ...

The year is 2560, A colonization star ship is on its way to a planet in the Trapezium open cluster in the Orion Nebula...discovered over a hundred years earlier. It was characterized to detail a few years later via autonomous systems. The planet was found to be not quite human 1.0 habitable...but we weren't going to be sending human 1.0's there. See in 2560, gene editing has been a routine and common practice in human populations going back 540 years. Humans have been thus able to radically conform themselves and their flora and fauna to the environs often far more inhospitable to human 1.0 life than Mars. Evaluation of a trip to Orion Trapezium planet beta3 had been a 10 year affair once it was stamped as worthy of exploration. 10 years ago in 2350, most people hadn't heard of the system ...by this point in time there are several billion recorded and characterized exo planets and humans have only gotten to a few dozen of them with our advanced but sub...

When I first started blogging at sent2null space one of the main reasons for doing so was to record sketchy thoughts into a public medium where there would be a record of the act of having presented the idea. This would serve as a proof of record of sorts to the origination of a given concept. The idea being that in the future when the question comes up of "who wrote about x or y first?" the answer can be found definitively by searching several sources with such proofs of record. A few hours ago I posted an idea for a new company name to a thread. After joking about the fact that some one may be stealing the idea to attempt implementing something similar I realized that some aspects of that post would be ideally protected via Facebook itself. If any service will likely be with us for decades if not centuries to come I'd pin it on Facebook, the main reasons I've posted about before. 1) network connection effects. Facility to build social conn...

With recent news that yet another new method for performing in vivo gene editing has been discovered the landscape of possibilities looms beyond just the superficial. "Asian flush" is the term used to describe a condition that effects a large population of people of Asian descent which is a genetic mutation that prevents proper processing of one of the caustic by products of alcohol ingestion. This leads to an inflammatory response in the system which leads to dilated blood vessels and the "flushed" appearance. Aside from this superficial result it also means that generally Asians with this mutation need to be very careful with the amount of alcohol they are ingesting as they don't process it as efficiently as those without the mutation. Enter gene editing: The gene mutation is well known so this would be an ideal 'low hanging fruit' target for an edit. A targeted Asian Flush cure could be effected with a germ line edit or a temporary one co...