I’m Abhimat and this is my personal tumblog.
Just one more day until EYU (and one last blatant ad…)! Tell your family and friends in the LA area about our annual, free, “K through Gray” science extravaganza right here on the UCLA campus! eyu.astro.ucla.edu
Also, the EYU design materials have been the largest single cohesive design project I’ve worked on. It’s been a very busy past few days (and weeks and months…) to pull all this off, but I’m super proud of the result and incredibly excited to see it all in the wild tomorrow!
Great piece by Matthew Honan at BuzzFeed about Google’s self driving cars and autonomous driving in general.
A key point about self driving and networked cars that is easy to forget is their ability to learn as a group.
It anticipated this because each and every one of Google robot cars has experienced the totality of everything all its siblings have experienced.
These cars learn as a giant entity, and the lessons learned from one car pass down to the others. And having fleets of these cars will have huge environmental impacts.
Cars are giant, inefficient, planet-and-people-killing death machines. Self-driving cars — especially if they are operated as fleets and you only use one when you need it, summoning it Uber-style — would mean we could have fewer vehicles per person, less traffic congestion, less pollution, far fewer vehicles produced per year (thus lowering the environmental impact of production), and, best of all, safer streets. The blind, people with epilepsy, quadriplegics, and all manner of others who today have difficulty ferrying themselves around as they go through the mundanities of an average day will be liberated. Eliminating the automobile’s need for a human pilot will be a positive thing for society.
I look forward to a driverless future, with less parking lots and less overall cars on the road. Granted, as Honan describes in this article, we do all the necessary legwork and ensure we ask the right questions about privacy, ethics, etc. before these become commonplace.
Interesting look into why mail delivery on Sundays was stopped.
Sometimes Rhode Island likes to pretend that it’s the Windows XP wallpaper.
#FromWhereIRun
This is a pretty interesting and laudable long-term goal for Lego:
Three years ago, it set the goal of finding a sustainable alternative by 2030, and quickly realized that the project would be a major challenge.
Also kind of interesting to consider that this research, if successful, could make Lego a powerful contender in plastics manufacturing and technologies in the near future.
A thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on the necessity for diversity in physics and astrophysics.
Abdus Salaam once said that when Blacks started to enter physics in large numbers, it would create something like jazz. The problem is that astro/physicists don’t really want jazz. They say they do, but they don’t want to do the work of learning a new way of doing things. They want to keep playing the same classical songs, exactly the same way.
Astro/physics loses so many people, including white men, because the community refuses to acknowledge this dual reality, that science is both a mathematical process and a human, social enterprise.
Sean Carroll discusses why dark matter exists:
Generally, physicists love asking these kinds of questions (“why does the universe look this way, rather than that way?”), and yet are terribly sloppy at answering them.
If you look at the app under a microscope, it might have a lot of steps, but it doesn’t feel like a lot of steps. There’s a big difference.
A look into the lovely visual and interaction design that went into making OneShot.
Pretty great and detailed timeline of events in the Mario universe. The reasoning behind the sports titles is especially hilarious, and the ending is sorta sad…
Pretty interesting how the Photos application handles importing existing libraries.