Lifeboat Foundation

By Josh Dzieza — The Verge

Earlier this week, during a disappointing Tesla earnings call, Elon Musk mentioned in passing that he’d be producing a stationary battery for powering the home in the next few months. It sounded like a throwaway side project from someone who’s never seen a side project he doesn’t like. But it’s a very smart move, and one that’s more central to Musk’s ambitions than it might seem.

To understand why, it helps to look not at Tesla, but at SolarCity, a company chaired by Musk and run by his cousin Lyndon Rive. SolarCity installs panels on people’s roofs, leases them for less than they’d be paying in energy bills, and sells surplus energy back to the local utility. It’s proven a tremendously successful model. Founded in 2006, the company now has 168,000 customers and controls 39 percent of the rapidly expanding residential solar market.

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By Faine Greenwood — Slate

By Gabriel Popkin — Nautilus

I’ve never seen the computer you’re reading this story on, but I can tell you a lot about it. It runs on electricity. It uses binary logic to carry out programmed instructions. It shuttles information using materials known as semiconductors. Its brains are built on integrated circuit chips packed with tiny switches known as transistors.

In the nearly 70 years since the first modern digital computer was built, the above specs have become all but synonymous with computing. But they need not be. A computer is defined not by a particular set of hardware, but by being able to take information as input; to change, or “process,” the information in some controllable way; and to deliver new information as output. This information and the hardware that processes it can take an almost endless variety of physical forms. Over nearly two centuries, scientists and engineers have experimented with designs that use mechanical gears, chemical reactions, fluid flows, light, DNA, living cells, and synthetic cells.

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Prague Post

An the open-source, 3D-printed robot is set to inspire innovation in classrooms

Meet Poppy, the first completely open-source, 3D printed, humanoid robot (@poppy_project). Poppy is a robot that anybody can build and program. That means it’s not just a tool for scientists and engineers: the team of developers aims to make it part of vocational training in schools, giving students the opportunity to experiment.

Poppy was developed in France by Inria’s Flowers team, which creates computer and robotic models as tools for understanding developmental processes in humans. Dr Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, who holds an ERC Starting Grant in Computer Science and Informatics, explains: “Very little has been done to explore the benefits of 3D printing and its interaction with computer science in classrooms. With our Poppy platform, we are now offering schools and teachers a way to cultivate the creativity of students studying in areas such as mechanics, computer science, electronics and 3D printing.”

by Darrell Etherington — TechCrunch

Apple is working on a car, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Mac maker kicked off a top-secret project to develop an electric car with a minivan aesthetic, per the WSJ’s sources, after CEO Tim Cook approved the project nearly a year ago. It includes “hundreds” of staffers and is led by Ford Motor vet and Apple VP Steve Zadesky. The project involves research into battery tech, robotics and metal production, according to the paper.

The report comes hot on the heels of a Financial Times story confirming Apple R&D efforts around car tech, and goes further than either that report or an earlier one from Business Insider wherein an Apple employee reportedly confirmed some kind of car-focused project. As I wrote earlier, it makes perfect logical sense that Apple would focus some effort on this area, given the direction in which the tech industry in general is headed.

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c-global means that the speed of light in the vacuum, c, can no longer be added-on to other speeds like a global expansion speed.

Hence three historical events have the same structure:

• The “phlogiston” theory of fire got superseded by Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen
• The “miasma” theory of infection got superseded by Semmelweis’ discovery of asepsis
• The “big-bang” theory of the cosmos got superseded by the discovery of c-global

A collateral consequence of c-global is the fact that the deliberate attempt to produce black holes down on earth, scheduled to re-start at doubled energies in two months’ time, cannot be allowed without a prior disproof of c-global. Otherwise the re-start becomes a crime.

I thank Stephen Hawking for his recent public acknowledgment of the danger.

Andrew Liszewski — Gizmodo

We haven’t seen much of Boston Dynamic’s four-legged self-balancing Big Dog robot since it was last spotted hurling cinder blocks in a lab. And that’s maybe because the company’s robotic geniuses have been hard at work building a smaller more agile version called Spot that weighs just 160 pounds so it can safely operate both indoors and out.

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By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

One of my old professors used to say calculus is the language of the universe. Now, every so often, I’ll watch trees in the wind, cars on the road, or clouds rolling by, and see equations made manifest.

Though the world appears incomprehensibly huge and endlessly varying, all that mind-boggling complexity emerges from a shared set of instructions. Instructions that, until relatively recently, we couldn’t see, let alone understand.

But of course, this is no longer the case. Each year we learn more about the laws governing how particles interact to form atoms, stars, and galaxies; the chemical axioms behind reactions and materials; and the molecular code directing the assembly and evolution of every living thing on the planet.

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