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Time for my yearly proselytizing for PBS UK’s Rough Science. Awesome educational show where a bunch of scientists are dumped on an island and have to work together to make something crazy out of local scavenged materials.


The group is taken to a disused prison on the island where they have to determine the longitude and latitude of the island, create a radio from a saucepan and create an insect repellent.

How is a Unitary Subject of Experience Possible? ~ Philosopher David Pearce.


Is Australia conscious? How would 86 billion classical neurons (mind dust) come together to form a unitary subject of experience?
The answer is related to the binding problem of consciousness.

Is Australia a unitary subject of experience?

Vid Robots normally need to be programmed in order to get them to perform a particular task, but they can be coaxed into writing the instructions themselves with the help of machine learning, according to research published in Science.

Engineers at Vicarious AI, a robotics startup based in California, USA, have built what they call a “visual cognitive computer” (VCC), a software platform connected to a camera system and a robot gripper. Given a set of visual clues, the VCC writes a short program of instructions to be followed by the robot so it knows how to move its gripper to do simple tasks.

“Humans are good at inferring the concepts conveyed in a pair of images and then applying them in a completely different setting,” the paper states.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Thursday opened Ghana’s newest medical drone delivery base at Asante Mampong as part of his duty tour of the Ashanti region this week.

This marks the second of what will be four medical drone delivery bases that have been commissioned to help expand access to critical and life-saving medicines for people across Ghana.

Zipline, a California-based robotics company, operates the medical drone delivery service with support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the UPS Foundation and other partners.

3D Printing was one example of how technological advancement made manufacturing accessible to all. Will robots take all the jobs? I doubt it, but technological advancement will make many things inaccessible, accessible to many more than before, by lowering the cost of production. This is but one example.

Better clear out several shelves of storage space, vinylheads, because your record collection is about to expand into infinity. Soon, you’ll be able to get absolutely anything on vinyl. Even better—you’ll be able to make it.


The Phonocut is an at-home vinyl lathe, allowing anyone with a digital audio file and a dream to make a 10-inch record.