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Elizabeth Warren Silenced on the Senate Floor
Bar Bots
Some highly paid people seem to not be very good at thinking straight... or at all.
We’ve all seen robot bartenders in movies: Star Wars episode one; The Fifth Element; I, Robot, etc. Ever notice that human bartenders often have a lot of screen time in movies, but robot bartenders don’t? The reason is simple: robots are boring. Which is why we won’t see many robot bartenders in real life, and this real life robot bartender is going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon.
I suspect that the engineer who designed the thing doen’t frequent bars, but likes science fiction movies, because nobody goes to a bar to drink. From my upcoming Voyage to Earth:
“Is Mars still short of robots?”
“Not since that factory opened two years ago.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have robots tending bar, then.”
“Screw that. People don’t go to bars to drink, they go to bars to socialize; bars are full of lonely people. If there’s nobody to talk to but a damned robot they’re just going to walk out. I do have a tendbot for emergencies, like if one of the human bartenders is sick and we don’t have anyone to cover. The tendbot will be working when we’re going to Earth, but I avoid using it.”
Someone who doesn’t visit bars inventing something to use in bars is about as stupid as Richardson in Mars, Ho!, who assigned a Muslim to design a robot to cook pork and an engineer who didn’t drink coffee to make a robotic coffeemaker.
Just because it works in the movies doesn’t mean it works in real life.
Micron 2017 Roadmap
Micron 2017 Roadmap Detailed: 64-layer 3D NAND, GDDR6 Getting Closer, & CEO Retiring
Worth a look, but not a submission just yet.
Trying Vitamins For Sleep
I recently griped that I sleep more than anyone, but that all that sleep does not make me feel rested. Actually it makes me feel terrible; when I first wake up in the morning I feel as if I've been beaten with a baseball bat.
Back in the day I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, a phenomenon in which one stops breathing during sleep. It partially wakes you, reducing the quality of sleep.
But I had surgery for it in 2008. As far as I could tell the surgery worked. Actually for some time my sleep was just dandy.
In response to my comment, AC recommended I take Vitamin D. Now I am skeptical of nutritional supplement treatment, but at this point I'm willing to try waving a dead chicken over it. I googled it and found what appeared to be a credible report of peer-reviewed research that indicates Vitamin D deficiency diminishes the quality of sleep.
For several months I've had a low-sugar, low-cholesterol diet. I'm pretty sure that diet is low in Vitamin D as well. It's been a cold winter here in the Northern Hemisphere; I haven't had much of the exposure to the Sun that causes our skin to make Vitamin D.
I stopped at the drugstore on the way to work just now and bought some 2000 IU Vitamin D3 tablets. I also got Vitamin B12. The article also recommended Vitamin B5 but the store didn't carry it. I took my first doses when I stopped at Peet's for a coffee.
A while back I complained to my witch doctor that I often slept all day, that no amount of sleep made me feel rested. In response he prescribed the antidepressant Welbutrin. It's working partially, in that, if I didn't have to get up, I would sleep until noon.
My present contract has a long commute. I don't have a key to the office. To work a full day I need to get out of bed at 7:00 AM. It is uncommon that I manage to do that.
I just bought a Mac Mini. Soon I should be able to work from home, but even so it's not going to work if I'm sleeping all the time, especially if that sleep is not restful.
Trudeau avoids poking the "grizzly bear" Trump
Canada's Trudeau decides not to poke U.S. 'grizzly bear' for now
Just play it cool and use Canada's great strength: utter invisibility despite sharing a border with the United States.
Supreme Court: Apprentice Edition
Trump is reportedly going to summon two finalists for the position to the announcement, at 8 PM EST. There can only be one.
2.5 GB/s, 2 TB M.2 SSD
Mushkin Announces Helix SSDs: 2.5 GB/s, 3D MLC NAND, SM2260, 2 TB Capacity
Saliva is dribbling down my shirt.
I don't think this is the first 2 TB SSD in the M.2 form factor, so not really worth a submission, but damn is that one heck of a drive. Note the 3 year warranty.
More stuff:
Crypt keeper wasp is a parasite of a parasite
Physicists patent detonation technique to mass-produce graphene
CRISPR genome engineering research institute expands into agriculture, microbiology
Medical first, children had cancer cured with genetically engineered T-cells from another person
New antibody suppresses spread of HIV-1 in infected individuals
Printed human body parts could be available for human transplants within a few years
Organovo bioprinting human tissue for drug testing and within 6 years for implanting human livers
Evolutionary Biologist to Run for U.S. Senate (CA)
What Can Replace Kuro5hin?
Rusty Foster, the site's owner, said the site went down when its entire data center was decommissioned. While he promised to post a read-only archive, it's been a long time. We speculate that he did not have offsite backups.
Kuro5hin provided an outlet for our cynicism; for example I myself am responsible for the meme of "Ignorant Mother Fucker" - "Mother" and "Fucker" being two separate words, as I feel it sounds more obscene that way.
It also published much-longer essays and stories than one sees anywhere else. My own Living with Schizoaffective Disorder, first published there in 2003, is fifty pages in hardcopy form.
The problem I've got is that I'm bored out of my mind. I really like Soylent News, but it would be inappropriate for me to urge my fellow Soylentils to, for example, "Die In A Fire".
I need something more interactive than just reading what others have written. I like to write, I need a venue for my writing. I have my own website but it's not set up for discussion. "K5" provided that.
Bernie Madoff Speaks: "Ponzi Supernova"
Bernie Madoff is cornering the prison market on Swiss Miss hot chocolate
“One of the most important things about this story is that it is a mistake to view him as an outlier,” Fishman told MarketWatch. “He profited from the way financial systems work, which is a point most people don’t really grasp. He wasn’t a freak. He was sustained by the system, embraced by it, because it profited from him.”
[...] Madoff’s multidecade scheme unraveled in 2008, when the market collapse in the financial crisis caused a number of his investors to pull their holdings, but Fishman said he “was never really caught.”
“The system never really rejected Bernie,” he explained, noting that Madoff’s 150-year prison sentence only came after he admitted the fraud to his sons, who, on the advice of a lawyer, alerted authorities. When questioned, Madoff confessed.
“It’s clear to me that if he hadn’t confessed there would have been years of expensive work to get him convicted,” Fishman said, referring to the cost of an investigation and a trial. “Who knows, maybe if he had pulled down the gates on his fund, gone out and raised money, he might have been able to continue.”
Never-before-heard Bernie Madoff tapes reveal details of ruinous Ponzi scheme
Fishman, who conducted three hours of interviews with Madoff personally, points out that while the fraudster ruined many lives, roughly half of Madoff’s investors still ended up in the black. “Yeah, he was a criminal talent, with God-given gifts in a sense, but Madoff was Patient Zero,” Fishman said. “What really makes him a pandemic is all the feeder funds [who introduced new clients to Madoff] and the banks,” Fishman told the Guardian. “They take him around the world. They recruit investors, in Latin America and through Europe, and they basically pour gasoline on this dumpster fire. Madoff could have been kind of a local swindler until he meets this massive distribution network.”
[...] When an investigator asked to see a report that a legitimate firm would have on hand in the course of its normal businesses, Madoff’s second-in-command, Frank DiPascali, stalled for time while downstairs others printed out a faked report, put it in the refrigerator so it wouldn’t be obviously warm from the printer, and “played football with it”, Schwartz says – tossing it back and forth across the room like a football to make it look weathered.
Set dressing was also important: on the credenza behind his desk, Madoff displayed a sculpture by the renowned artist Claes Oldenburg of a giant black screw, listing a little to one side. The 1976 sculpture, called Soft Screw, drew nearly $50,000 at Sotheby’s when Madoff’s assets were sold off after his disgrace.
When financial regulators visited his firm’s offices, Madoff put the Soft Screw away.
