Viewing profile — fricken4

The rumor is that they intend to scale up a silicon photonic chip fab, which is very ambitious, and expensive. It will either be a spectacular failure, or a bold step into the futu…

If we all lived in huts, subsisted on rice and beans, and travelled by bicycle, humanity wouldn't be threatening the stability of the biosphere; but of course, we're wired to crave…

Ooh, better than nothing. Sounds enticing.

I'm in Canada and a friend of mine was working in a government call centre; her job description could be summarized as 'deny people benefits in 9 minutes or less'. Her role as enfo…

Surfing is plenty exclusionary. whether or not this is a bad thing, there are a finite number of decent breaks in the world. You can go to the ends of the earth, paddle out an hour…

This documentary does the best ELI5 of the double slit experiment and how it has confounded physicists that I've seen: https://vimeo.com/126833477

Back in the 90s when the print industry was still a thing my canned statement for whenever I passed a magazine rack was that Playboy should really start covering up the nipples so …

Less Space taken up by parked cars may mean more space for people to live. Though SF real estate will likely be insane for the foreseeable future any way you look at it.

Mobility should be a right, driving shouldn't be a right. If someone is too old, too young, too poor, disabled, or otherwise unable to drive, and unfortunate enough to live in a ca…

While the regulations were at one time created to keep shady players out of the industry, Taxi services nowdays are most certainly regulated for the sake of limiting competition. C…

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot... This is interesting because of the time. The Darpa grand robotics challenge is 1 week: http://www.defense.gov/news/n…

The central characters in Robocop were treated empathetically, the scathing social satire and black comedy were not central to the main storyline of heroes and villians, so there w…

They have not done serious work yet with driving in snow and other inclement weather conditions, this is the phase they're entering into as we speak. They've suggested their cars w…

The number of longshoremen needed to run a modern port has decreased by a factor of 10 over the last 30 or 40 years. Because of their strong unions, the one's who remain get paid v…

It's not 50 years away, it's closer to 5 years away. In 15 years they will dominate the roads. Google's cars have already demonstrated that they are safer than human drivers with 9…