Friday links and objects of interest – 5/12/23

We’ve been selling our house, and so I’m playing a few weeks of catch-up here. Friday links come first:

— Disease isn’t something that just happens instantaneously, it’s your body being unable to fight off whatever’s happening to it. Welcome to “Your Body’s Never Not Fighting Off Cancer

— I have no reason to share this except that I both enjoy popsicle sticks and mechanical things

— There’s a chapter for a book that I’ve been co-writing that talks about ships and boats. Here’s an amusing recent article that touches — more directly — on the same thing

— Will we abdicate responsibility for our actions by placing the responsibility on computers? Likely. We already do that with other complex systems. This could lead to very bad things.

6 November 2019; Sophia The Robot, Robot, Hanson Robotics, right, and David Hanson, Founder, Hanson Robotics Ltd.,
on Centre Stage during day two of Web Summit 2019 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Web Summit via Sportsfile

— I can’t help but wonder if tinkering with this volcanic microbe that eats CO2 could lead to dangerous and unforeseen consequences. It’s really not hard to anticipate them, even… what else is carbon in, what if it adapted, what if we cultured it to adapt?

— Learn “Enter the Sandman” on the first try

— To my estimation, this is the first AI application that could reach a broad population in a very significant way

— Next-level 3D printing. I’m keeping my eye on this.

— Same as the previous. I’m keeping my eye on affordable, and often open source concepts behind direct air carbon capture

— And this

— And this

— And this

— When WWW became –ours–. This is a read that documents a significant time in the Internet.

Language is fun.