Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) has one single instrument onboard – the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation, aka the DRACO camera. DRACO serves as the spacecraft’s eye and will guide DART to its final destination: impact with asteroid Dimorphos. The stream you’re watching is a real-time feed from the DART spacecraft enabled through the DRACO camera sending one image per second to Earth. In the hours before impact, the screen will appear mostly black, with a single point of light. That point is the binary asteroid system Didymos which is made up of a larger asteroid named Didymos and a smaller asteroid that orbits around it called Dimorphos. As the 7:14 p.m. EDT (23:14 UTC) impact of asteroid Dimorphos nears closer, the point of light will get bigger and eventually detailed asteroids will be visible.

At 7:14 p.m., the DART spacecraft is slated to intentionally crash into asteroid Dimorphos. This stream will be delayed due to the time it takes the images to arrive at Earth, plus additional time for feeding the images to various platforms. For the most up-to-date DRACO camera feed, please tune into the NASA DART Impact Broadcast here: https://youtu.be/4RA8Tfa6Sck.

Continue reading “Watch a Live Feed from NASA’s DART Spacecraft on Approach to Asteroid Dimorphos” »

Researchers working to analyze the Antikythera Mechanism believe they may finally have a model that fully describes its functions and capabilities.

No matter what physical system we consider, nature always obeys the same fundamental laws. Must it be this way, and if so, why?

Electrostriction enhanced by interfaces in multi-layer structure.

Real superpowers based on advanced technology.

The world famous Artificial Intelligence designer/expert Hugo de Garis has some horrific views on the future of technology. He demands people listen to his warnings wherever he goes. I thought I’d help him spread his nightmare with Camper Killer Commentary 17 “The Artilect War. The Nightmare of Hugo de Garis”. I hope you enjoy learning about your doom.

Hugo de Garis on AI, the story leading up to where we are now, and the possibilities for AI in the not too distant future. We have seen AI sprint past us in many cognitive domains, and in the coming decades we will likely see AI creep up on human level intelligence in other domains — once this becomes apparent, AI will become a central political issue — and nations will try to out-compete each other in dangerous AI arms-race.
As AI encroaches further into areas of economic usefulness where humans traditionally dominated, how might avoid uselessness and stay relevant? Merge with the machines say’s Hugo.

Many thanks to Forms for the use of the track “Close” — check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFY0JbwrPlE | Bandcamp: https://soundcloud.com/forms308743226

Continue reading “Hugo de Garis — AI, Species Dominance and Our Cybernetic Future” »

About five minutes after the 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit near Mexico’s southwest coast Monday, typically calm water deep in a Death Valley National Park cave started sloshing against the surrounding limestone rock.

The reverberations from the earthquake more than 1,500 miles away created what experts have called a “desert tsunami,” which on Monday made waves erupt up to 4 feet high in the cave known as Devils Hole, a pool of water about 10 feet wide, 70 feet long and more than 500 feet deep, in Amargosa Valley, Nevada.

The water in the partially filled cave has become an “unusual indicator of seismic activity” across the world, with earthquakes across the globe—as far as Japan, Indonesia and Chile—causing the water to splash up Devils Hole, according to the National Park Service website.

Methods for learning from noisy data, using phonetic embeddings to improve entity resolution, and quantization-aware training are a few of the highlights.