Using the Vulcan printer, ICON can print an entire home for $10,000 and plans to bring costs down to $4,000 per house. “It’s much cheaper than the typical American home.” It’s capable of printing a home that’s 800 square feet, a significantly bigger structure than properties pushed by the tiny home movement, which top out at about 400 square feet. In contrast, the average New York apartment is about 866 square feet.
Category: ideas
The Internet Has Failed Us As Public Space
Not long ago, the scientists and software developers who pioneered the World Wide Web thought it would democratize publishing and usher in a more open, educated and thoughtful chapter of history. But while the Internet and its offshoot technologies have improved society and daily life in many ways, they have been an unmitigated disaster for the way we communicate and learn.
The Humanities Dying? Hardly.
“Many a scholar will have a hard time admitting this point, but, beyond the academy, there’s not a single skill set that would be enhanced by reading Virgil. A mechanic or surgeon who reads Virgil will be neither a better mechanic or surgeon—nor a better human being. He’ll just be a mechanic or surgeon who enjoys Virgil. When it comes to being relevant to a larger purpose beyond ourselves, there is no case to be made for reading Virgil. Unfortunately, we persist in making our cases in response to the standard attacks.”
America’s Dangerous Distrust Of Expertise
“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” Tom Nichols would write in the preface to The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Expertise and Why It Matters, which was published by Oxford last year and quickly became a bestseller. “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.” Further down the page, he would add: “I’m worried.”
Why We Can’t Simply Transfer Human Intelligence To Machines
“Minds are not made by nervous systems alone but rather by nervous systems in cooperation with many other and far older living systems of our body, including metabolic, endocrine, immune and circulatory systems. Nervous systems are late-comers in evolution. They are useful servants of the older life systems
English Speakers Love To Call Each Other Out For ‘Bad’ Grammar, But Why?
The internet has made the pace of language change much, much faster. “Now that every English speaker in the world can talk to every other English speaker in the world, the virus is mutating vociferously. The modern grievance airer must keep pace.”
Recent Movies Show That Science Fiction Is For – And About – Women
If you look at the early days of science fiction with the author of Frankenstein, and then turn to recent movies Black Panther, Annihilation, and A Wrinkle in Time, you get pretty serious acknowledgement that women are an integral part of the genre. The films “dispute a mainstream perception of science fiction as a masculine genre, using feminine costumes and environments to build the strong-willed characters. Nothing will stop these women from overcoming the perilous obstacles ahead of them.”
New Study Delivers Deeply Depressing News About Spread Of Fake News
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? Dumb Luck, Says New Computer Model
“[A team of researchers in Italy] created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process. … Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science.”
How AI Took Over A Community Of Knitters
“The knitting project has been a particularly fun one so far just because it ended up being a dialogue between this computer program and these knitters that went over my head in a lot of ways. The computer would spit out a whole bunch of instructions that I couldn’t read and the knitters would say, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read.”