The Weekly Weird - 2017-06-23
- Digital-to-biological converter for on-demand production of biologics. Or, a desktop insulin printer (someday).
- In more 'automating biology' news, a CT scan is a whole lot of data that is traditionally reviewed by humans to answer specific diagnostic questions. What if you feed it to a neural net instead? Answer: p < 0.00005 5-year mortality predictions. The authors dropped into a reddit thread on the paper and seem pretty confident that there's much more granular predictions to be had. Neural nets like a lot of data and CT scans are generated at a pretty good rate already so I'm excited to see what happens next.
- Neural networks can also learn to negotiate with humans. Has anyone patented a chat bot that 'negotiates' your health insurance rates the day after your CT scan? No reason.
- Did you notice the little blurb in there about how the bots ended up diverging from english into 'their own language'? No? Well, they did and balls have zero to me to me.
- Why did Amazon buy Whole Foods? Scale.
- There's ... way not enough information in this article but Army trainers successfully used cyber weapons and electronic warfare (EW) technology to thwart a simulated tank assault at a training exercise.
- Scariest photo you'll see today: right here.
- Markets are often awful but god this solar energy cost curve is a beautiful thing to see.
- I've always thought that 'imperial' measures were silly in the abstract but actually pretty useful in real life. Here's a whole system of writing numbers that reinforces the sequential-quartering in syntax.
- I don't know how much I trust the clickbait-y titles but the relationship between power and mental acuity is fascinating.
- What's new with Apache 2.4? LOTS. Some nice commentary in the HN thread.
- Bancor is flawed. Response: nuh uh.
- ZFS (almost) has encryption! Looks pretty easy to use, too.
- This little video is a startlingly effective Rorschach test on how you feel about go. It's basically official, too.
- The Scaly-foot gastropod is just weird. It lives in the dark, makes armor out of metal and lives on nutrients from its symbiotic bacteria buddies.
- If the flight attendant comes on and says there's not enough air to fly you'd be suspicious but that's literally what happened in Phoenix. Alternatively not enough colors.
- Everything is a tree.