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Microsoft took time during today’s Windows 10 Devices event to give the audience a more in-depth look at what its new HoloLens AR system is capable of. Minds were blown, jaws were dropped and more than a few digital robots were blown to smithereens during the 8-minute demo.

The game is called Project X-Ray. Microsoft developed it in-house as an experiment in “mixed-reality entertainment” and involves using the HoloLens controller as a ray gun to blast digital enemies which emerge from the room’s walls. Running around your living room while wearing a $3,000 headset (what Microsoft is reportedly planning to charge developers) probably isn’t the safest of indoor activities, but dang this game looks insanely fun regardless.

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Until recently, Facebook was reportedly looking into developing, launching and operating its own satellite. Anonymous sources revealed to The Information that Facebook pulled out of the project due to its rising costs, but was still considering moving forward with a leased satellite.

Google To Beam Internet From Balloons

The satellite is one facet of Zuckerberg’s Internet.org initiative, which aims to “make affordable access to basic Internet services available to every person in the world.”

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The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears today in the international journal Nature.

“What we have is a game changer,” said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW.

“We’ve demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate — the central building block of a quantum computer — and, significantly, done it in . Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.

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My presidential campaign and health care ideas gets a nice mention in this popular article by Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein, considered a top political journalist in America. It’s nice to see young people like Ezra challenging the entire system. We must move beyond old, dysfunctional ways.

The most important problem in health care, in other words, is health.

If the health-care system got much better at delivering health, then it might make sense to spend what we do now — or to spend even more than that. So long as the system isn’t delivering good value for the money, then yes, cutting costs makes sense. But it’s important not to lose sight of the real goal: more health, not less health spending. Washington’s myopic focus on costs risks doing just that.

Continue reading “The point of a health-care system isn’t to spend as little money as possible on it” | >

Ray Kurzweil’s singularity of human superintelligence is a polar opposite of the singularity described by Vinge, Hawking, and Bostrom:

“The singularity will be a merger of our bodies and minds with our technology. The world will still be human, but transcend our biological roots. There will be no distinction between human and machine, nor between physical and virtual reality.”

Dear readers,

This month celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the classic book The Singularity Is Near, written by Ray Kurzweil, published in September 2005.

In the decade since its publication, we’ve witnessed an explosion of breakthroughs in genetic engineering, medical regeneration of the human body, autonomous robotics, computing power, and renewable energy. Advanced sensor arrays and internet meshes are uniting all people and things within the interconnected environments we live in, and with each other. Today’s massively scaled, crowd-sourced knowledge, innovation, and shared human experience are driving this momentum. The future is now.

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What is ideally needed is a bulk electricity storage device which is scalable to gig watt, which is reliable, efficient and economically viable, but more importantly, it should be environmentally friendly. One such promising technology on the horizon with a capability to compete with pumped hydro and gas turbines for peaking and immediate power generation is storing energy by gravity.

A gravity storage system consist of a pair of two deep shafts one large, and the other smaller in diameter connected at the top and bottom, forming a closed formed circuit via a reversible pumpturbine, as seen in Figure 1. The shafts are filled with water, which acts as a medium for energy transfer, and the bigger shaft is fitted with a huge steel piston filled with reinforced rock and concrete. The whole device operates on the simple action of vertical motion of piston.

During the availability of surplus electricity, the reversible pumpturbine converts the grid power supplied by a dual purpose motorgenerator to potential energy, by pumping the water in the larger shaft to raise the heavy piston. At times of need, like during peak demand, this stored potential energy is converted back to electrical energy by allowing the piston to descend, which in the process energizes the water molecules to rotate the turbinepump blades, leading to power generation at the generatormotor end.

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