Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Quantum Entanglement Gives Rise to Wormholes?
  That’s the theory, anyway. But what enables particles to communicate instantaneously—and seemingly faster than the speed of light—over such vast distances? Earlier this year, physicists proposed an answer in the form of “wormholes,” or gravitational tunnels. The group showed that by creating two entangled black holes, then pulling them apart, they formed a wormhole—essentially a […]
• Play-i Crowdfunds $1.4 Million
  We mentioned these robots last week in a post about teaching kids programming.  Here’s a fuller description of how they’ll work: The app presents visual sequences of actions and simple commands on the iPad that kids can then perform — like clapping, waving their hand or shaking one of the robots — that compel the […]
• Abandoned Building Photography
  And not ruin porn from Detroit, either:
• Bike Service At Your Service
  Beeline Bikes Like Uber? He started Beeline Bikes, which is kind of like an Uber or Homejoy for bike tune-ups. They have mobile vans, outfitted with all kinds of parts (see below) and trained mechanics that can fix up many bikes over the course of a day. The nine-person startup has three initial vans and the […]
• Healthcare.gov: Unrealistic Technology Expectations
  Gee, ya think? The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn’t all bureaucratic. Forcing slow and disparate databases run by government and insurance companies to work together in real time—and then launching the service all at once—would have challenged even technology wunderkinds. In particular, the project was doomed by a relatively late […]
• Misshapen, F1-Inspired Electric Motorcycle Is Coming to the U.S.
  Hey, innovation looks different.  Get used to it. The concern isn’t the look, it’s the handling, along with the recharge time and range issues that are endemic to electric vehicles.  I still think the right model is battery-swaps.
• Russians Zipline a Car
  Across a River: There’s video, too. This might seem crazy, but it’s very similar to how Indian Bridge at Lee’s Ferry in Utah was built.  The nearest crossings were a long way upriver and downriver, so for a while, they were loading up cars with material and sending them back and forth over the canyon […]
• Grand Canyon Temperature Inversion
  Doesn’t happen often, even less often on a sunny day.

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Canadian Cabin
  In my old line of work, “Stealth” meant something else entirely.  But here at the Glimpse, we love cabins as clever, cozy getaways.  Stock them with a few dozen hundred books, and we’re all set.
• The Classical Liberal Constitution
  Richard Epstein describes his new book: More specifically, the proper scope of the police power is tied to the two reasons that lead people to join a political compact in the first place. The first reason is to control the use of force and fraud. The second is to allow state taxation and coercion to […]
• Cool Bus Stops
  Denver’s got its share of odd bus stops, especially out in Lowry, but nothing like this: There’s been a lot of talk about making bus stops more functional, including announcements, apps that show when the next bus is due, and so on.  I don’t think it’s as important to make them fun and interesting, but it […]
• Income Equality Is A Bottom-Up Problem
  A look at the household demographics of income inequality, from AEI’s Mark Perry: Most of the discussion on income inequality focuses on the relative differences over time between low-income and high-income American households, but it’s also instructive to analyze the demographic differences among income groups at a given point in time to answer the question: […]
• Why Square Designed Its New Offices To Work Like A City
  Trying to encourage spontaneous, serendipitous interactions at work. The design of the office “motivates people to move around the office and interact in casual, unscheduled ways,” he explains–just like the well-planned public spaces of a great city. Early concepts for the office were motivated by old 18th-century maps of cities. “When I think about a […]
• Another Take on Burke-Paine
  This one from Ira Stoll: Mr. Levin acknowledges that, 200 years later, America’s right-left arguments don’t always map so neatly onto the Burke-Paine diagram. I found myself recognizing the libertarian hero Milton Friedman of “Free To Choose” fame in Mr. Levin’s description of Paine’s emphasis on the individual and choice. Mr. Levin refers once to […]
• The Pope’s Half-Truth
  A more nuanced rejoinder to the Pope’s comments on capitalism. As Rev. Robert Sirico points out in a recent interview, Pope Francis is from Argentina where “free market capitalism” isn’t, in fact, all that free. The economic system in his home country is plagued by corruption and cronyism, which have greatly limited real economic freedom. Perhaps this […]
• Why Are Gas Prices Falling?
  Alexis Madrigal posted this graph-filled gem about three weeks ago, but it’s still relevant.  At least some of the answer may be increased diesel demand in Europe.  
• ASICMINER’s Threat to Bitcoin’s Model
  All your Bitcoins are belong to us: How much of an impact on the difficulty of Bitcoin mining such super miners will have is difficult to say. The Bitcoin algorithm adjusts the difficulty every 2016 blocks to keep the rate at about 10 minutes to solve a block. It the hardware improves then the difficulty […]
• Zappos Turns Baggage Claim Carousel Into Wheel of Fortune
  This sounds like fun: This Thankgsiving Eve, travelers through Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport found their baggage claim conveyor belt festooned with what appeared to be Zappos advertising banners, but which were in fact prize markers for clothing, appliances, accessories and gift certificates. I would gladly trade the grisly post-apocalyptic set of murals at DIA […]
• The Return of Iceball
  Some climatologists are now worried about global cooling: According to the scientists, the oft-cited “stagnation” in rising global temperatures over the last 15 years is due to the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean oscillation cycle, which lasts about 65 years. Ocean oscillation is past its “maximum,” leading to small decreases in global temperature. The de Vries […]
• Pssst. Wanna Buy a Phone?
  Apple previews iBeacon in its stores today: If you own any iPhone more recent than the 4, walk into any US Apple retail store today and you’ll get a taste of the possibly-dystopian future of retail and the internet of things. That’s because Apple just rolled out a technology called iBeacon in all 254 of its […]
• Caution on the Yuan
  Reports of the yuan replacing the euro are greatly exaggerated: At most, around 15% of China’s trade (paywall) is currently settled in yuan. Either a big chunk of global trade—more than half—would need to come from China for 8.7% of global trade to be settled in yuan, or companies outside China would need to be […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Robot Navigation and QR Codes
  Programmers won’t like the lack of an algorithmic solution, but this looks like a good idea: Interesting though these problems are, there is another way of doing things. Most robots navigate around a “built” environment and there is no reason why we can’t simply augment the environment so that the robot finds it easier to […]
• The Obama Language Wars
  Tim Carney on politics and the English language: After Chait implies Hillyer is like a slaveowner, he writes something actually defensible: Critics of Obama should be careful not to use language that will come across as racially tinged…. But here’s a point for Chait: The worst possible way to cultivate racial sensitivity is by haphazardly […]
• Desert Cabin of Wood and Mirrors
  In Joshua Tree, California:
• Cut-and-Fold Artwork
  Like you’ve never seen it before:  
• Nanotech to the Rescue Against MRSA?
  Another idea for how nanotech could rescue us from our post-antibiotic future: Nanosponges that soak up a dangerous pore-forming toxin produced by MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) could serve as a safe and effective vaccine against this toxin. This “nanosponge vaccine” enabled the immune systems of mice to block the adverse effects of the alpha-haemolysin toxin from […]
• The Bombe That Beat The Enigma
  From Bletchley Park, the computer that helped break the Enigma codes: The small size here doesn’t do it justice.  This was truly an awesome, beautiful machine in the way that only mid-century technology can be.
• Quantum Gravity and the Proton Radius
  Using quantum gravity to resolve differences in measurement? This inconsistency between proton radius values, called the “proton radius puzzle,” has gained a lot of attention lately and has led to several proposed explanations. Some of these explanations include new degrees of freedom beyond the Standard Model, as well as extra dimensions. Now in a new […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Who Really Betrayed Detroit?
  From Steven Malanga at City Journal: Most press accounts note that city-worker pensions in Detroit are modest. They rarely mention that, for two decades, the city supplemented those pensions with annual, so-called “13th checks” for retirees—an additional monthly pension payment. Pension-fund trustees—themselves city workers, retirees, city residents, and elected officials—handed out nearly $1 billion in […]
• Paging Cleavon Little
  Obamacare isn’t helping Democrats with white women: Remarkably, only 16 percent of blue-collar white women have a favorable view of Obamacare. They disapprove of it by a 4-1 ratio. (The poll found 21 percent did not know enough about the ACA to hold an opinion.) These voters are by no means a strongly Democratic group: Obama […]
• A New Maunder Minimum?
  Still not very many sunspots: But scientists are watching the sun carefully to see whether cycle 24 is going to be an aberration—or if this solar calmness is going to stretch through the next cycle as well. “We won’t know that for another good three or four years,” said Biesecker. Some researchers speculate this could […]
• Flashback: Orchids
  From January, 2009: “He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.” Coloradoans, right now, as I write this, it’s -9 in Denver.  Minus.  Nine.  Remember this when you get […]
• Top Complaints About Offices
  Noise.  Everything else is practically non-existent by comparison: The worst part, according to the data, is that these office workers can’t control what they hear — or who hears them. Lack of sound privacy was far and away the most despised issue in the survey, with 60% of cubicle workers and half of all partitionless people […]
• Obama Changes Course, Accepts China Air Defense Zone
  And people wonder why the world thinks we’re unreliable: Japan, a vital American ally, has expressed fury over the Chinese move and ordered its commercial airliners not to provide information about their flight paths to the Chinese military. By contrast, the United States made a point of flying a pair of B-52s through it last […]
• Unbuilt London
  Urban transport as it never was.  Some of these are pretty cool, others are a little silly, and some are outright desecrations.
• What is Gene Therapy?
  An explanation of why it’s so hard: Several early efforts at gene therapy have focused on diseases of the blood, inherited anaemia, immune deficiencies, and blood clotting disorders. In these cases, the theory is relatively simple. But, in practice, gene therapy has proved much harder than we might have expected. Lots of promising technologies never make […]
• Perils and Promise of Working Remotely
  From a company that waded in at the shallow end, and is now trying it full-time.  The good, and the bad. NO COMMUTING! Cutting out the commute means that if you’re working from home, you can spend the time you would be commuting exercising, gardening, cooking, or whatever it is you’d rather be doing than […]
• Wittes on Drones
  Benjamin Wittes takes Eugene Robinson to task for getting just about everything wrong about drones: Over at the Washington Post, columnist Eugene Robinson has a piece decrying the morality of drone strikes—a piece that expresses with an admirable economy of words nearly every conceptual error one can make on the subject. Let’s dissect…. …“I don’t see how drone strikes […]
• Theodore Dalrymple on the Pope’s Economics
  While sympathizing with the impulse to find consumerism disotasteful, Dalrymple points out what ought to be obvious by now: He writes, inter alia, that ‘Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed on the powerless.’ This is demagoguery of the purest kind, the kind that ruined […]
• Political John Doe Investigation in Wisconsin
  In a link-filled guest post for Legal Insurrection, Wisconsin Watchdog report Matt Kittle details what looks like abuse of prosecutorial discretion in Wisconsin, operating secretly but within the law, targeting Governor Scott Walker. There’s a secret war being waged in Wisconsin, and the outcome could have national ramifications on free speech and the rule of […]
• Shazam for Neo-Nazi Music
  German police are building an app that will identify right-wing music: Many themes and ideas can get media placed on the list including, “indecent, extremely violent, crime-inducing, anti-Semitic or racist material,” as well as “media content that glorifies National Socialism… and to media content that discriminates against specific groups of people.” This is the law […]
• Triathletes And Pain
  Apparently, they handle it differently from the rest of us: In the tests, the triathletes could discern pain just as well as non-athletes, but they felt it with less intensity and were able to withstand it longer. The researchers explain that detecting pain is a relatively straightforward sensory experience, whereas evaluating pain and being willing […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Liberals Lose Effort to Defund the Right Via SEC Disclosure
  Via Bainbridge, quoting Marc Hodak: Mary Jo White, former United States Attorney, is bringing a strong prosecutorial agenda. This shift in priorities appears to have manifested itself in a new Rule List that, at least for now, drops the push for disclosure of corporate political contributions. The pro-regulatory crowd is not going to be happy. … Corporate political spending […]
• Using Nanographene Oxide to Destroy Tumors
  More nanotechnology promises: Scientists have learned over the years that the cells in cancerous tumors are more sensitive to heat than normal cells in the body (it makes them more porous). To take advantage of this property, researchers have developed techniques for heating such cells before applying other techniques meant to kill them—heating tumors before using chemo or radiotherapy […]
• Origins of Common UI Symbols
  Not all of them got their start with Tech.  
• A New Book On the Mumbai Massacre
  The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark gets a favorable review at Lawfare. The Siege discloses a new intriguing wrinkle about Headley.  The two British authors’ investigations in Pakistan, India and the US led them to believe LeT and the ISI became suspicious that Headley was a double agent, secretly […]
• LA’s Former Forest of Oil Rigs
  LA used to look like this: They’re still there, often hidden under a building or a decorative shell, but there are some down near the airport, if I recall.  I do remember a season of 24 opening with Jack working at one of today’s oil pumps.
• 3D-Printed Modular Cell Phones?
  So say Motorola and 3D Systems: Last month, Motorola announced a plan for a modular smartphone. Project Ara, the company said, will be a simple way for users to individualize their phones, swapping out parts like the battery and camera until users have a phone that’s just for them. How do they plan on doing that? With 3-D […]
• The 5 Coldest Places To Live
  Congratulations, Fraser, Colorado!
• Pensions, Midwestern Style
  Detroit finally gets a break: Rhodes — in a surprise decision this morning — also said he’ll allow pension cuts in Detroit’s bankruptcy. Rhodes emphasized that he won’t necessarily agree to pension cuts in the city’s final reorganization plan unless the entire plan is fair and equitable. Illinois is considering its own pension reform plan, and […]
• Thanksgiving, The Founders, and Religion
  There’s a reason that religious liberty was specifically written into the 1st Amendment. If we seek evidence of the broadly shared public view of the meaning of the Establishment Clause at the time of the Founding, we find not an insistence on strict separation of church and state but instead a largely uncontroversial willingness to see the […]
• How Elon Musk Thinks
  Reason things out from “first principles” rather than by analogy: The benefit of “first principles” thinking? It allows you to innovate in clear leaps, rather than building small improvements onto something that already exists. Musk gives an example of the first automobile. While everyone else was trying to improve horse-drawn carriages, someone looked at the […]
• Young Adult Readers ‘Prefer Printed To Ebooks’
  Hope from, of all places, the youth of Britain: Sixteen to 24-year-olds are known as the super-connected generation, obsessed with snapping selfies or downloading the latest mobile apps, so it comes as a surprise to learn that 62% prefer print books to ebooks…. The top-rated reasons for preferring physical to digital products were: “I like to hold the […]
• Happy 250th, Touro Synagogue
  One hundred years to the day before the completion of the Capitol Dome, the current building of the recipient of Washington’s famous letter was dedicated. Documents associated with the letter are much sought after by collectors today, not least because contemporary printings of Washington’s letter in Rhode Island newspapers, the Newport Mercury and the Providence […]
• Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe
  Along with everyone else: So almost everywhere in Europe, people are living longer but having fewer years of healthy life. Only in the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands did people buck this trend with the numbers of years of healthy life increasing in these places since 2003. That raises an obvious question: what happened in […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Greeks and Jews
  For Hanukkah, via Mosaic.  Leo Strauss on the separate missions of the Jews and the Greeks. Yet our intention to speak of Jerusalem and Athens seems to compel us to go beyond the self-understanding of either. Or is there a notion, a word that points to the highest that both the Bible and the greatest […]
• Japan’s Solar Ring Around The Moon
  Behold the power of this fully-operational substation! Shimizu, a Japanese architectural and engineering firm, has a solution for the climate crisis: Simply build a band of solar panels 400 kilometers (249 miles) wide (pdf) running all the way around the Moon’s 11,000-kilometer (6,835 mile) equator and beam the carbon-free energy back to Earth in the form of microwaves, which […]
• Appreciating Bagehot
  A review of a new biography of The Greatest Victorian, written in the form of memoirs.  From what I’ve known of Bagehot, I’ve always liked him, now I have a better idea of why. Quoting from Bagehot’s actual writings, which assert that free institutions thrive among dullards, Prochaska goes on, “The English are unrivalled in […]
• Time-Varying Pricing For Electricity
  Pricing electricity by demand saves consumers money and encourages more efficient usage: Sacramento Metropolitan Utilities District (SMUD) has decided that time-varying pricing makes sense. It saves the utility money because it doesn’t have to buy as much expensive wholesale power during peak periods. And, it can pass these savings on to customers. It thus has […]
• Curiouser and Curiouser
  Practically nothing about quantum mechanics surprises me any more: In their proposed experimental set-up, the physicists show that a photon will travel through the left arm of an interferometer with 100% certainty, yet its polarization can be detected in the right arm, where there is 0% probability of the photon traveling. That is, the photon […]
• Billionaire Lobbyists On Keystone XL
  It’s not what you think: Billionaire Tom Steyer plans to renew his fight against Keystone XL in Washington on Monday. NextGen Climate Action, founded by Steyer, will host a summit where participants will argue the Keystone XL pipeline proposed by TransCanada Corp. cannot pass President Obama’s climate test…. Steyer is opposed to the pipeline project […]
• How Partisan Are Your Representatives
  A cool interactive info-graphic from Visualizing.org.  In Colorado’s case, pretty partisan. If you’ve been listening to feminist propaganda about what the world would look like if women ran it, filter by Sex.
• Bad Time for Climate Alarmist Predictions
  First, Roger Pielke, Jr. notes the relatively constant rate of US hurricane landfalls over the last century, which has culminated in a record time between Category 3+ landfalls: The red line in the graph above shows a decrease in the number of US landfalls of more than 25% since (which given variability, may just be […]
• Cheap Cute Dog Post
  Good to end the day with:
• No, Your GMO Corn Isn’t Killing You
  The paper that gave so much hope to anti-GMO luddites is being retracted by the journal in which it appeared: All of these criticisms of the study could have been incorporated into the original press coverage, except for the fact that the people behind the study manipulated journalists to ensure that they were unable to obtain any […]
• Howdy, Neighbor
  The Solar Neighborhood, with locations, temperatures, and sizes of the nearest stars.
• More Openness, More Sales
  So says a study showing a sales boost from removing DRM from music: According to Zhang, the 30% sales increase for lower-selling albums can be explained by the fact that DRM-free music makes it easier for consumers to share files and discover new music. The finding that removing DRM from top-selling albums has no effect […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Babbage, Ready For His Close-Up
  From a little over a year ago, some beautiful pictures of the Babbage Difference Engine #2: For some reason, we’ve been conditioned to think of old technology as clunky or ugly.  Often, it was anything but.  The clean lines and repetition, lend even things like power stations, telephone exchanges, and pneumatic tube centers elegance and […]
• 150 Years Ago Today
  The Capitol Dome was topped off: On December 2, 1863, the last section of the Statue of Freedom was put in place on top of the dome amid a great celebration with military salutes. The interior of the dome was finished in January 1866 when the scaffolding was removed from below Constantino Brumidi’s great fresco, the Apotheosis of […]
• How Bitcoin Works
  A great infographic explaining everyone’s favorite alternative currency:
• Cave Photography
  Phenomenal cave shots from all over the world:
• Amazon PrimeAir
  For those of you not watching 60 Minutes tonight: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to 60 Minutes to reveal the company’s latest delivery method: drones. In what is likely a cunning reminder of the e-tailer’s upcoming Cyber Monday sales, these bots will apparently be capable of delivering packages up to five pounds (86 percent of orders are apparently under […]
• Reform to Repatriate?
  Rumblings of rational reform of our corporate tax code, including how we handle foreign earnings: As the Senate Finance Committee’s draft proposals suggest, the US should jettison its worldwide approach to corporate taxation and adopt a territorial system for taxing US MNCs’ foreign earnings. Such a system would provide a level playing field that supports […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Creeping China
  We were always worried that the Soviets would use ‘salami tactics,’ pushing us far enough to provoke a crisis that needed to be resolved, and not far enough to provoke a war.  We put an effective end to that in Europe by standing by Berlin, eventually.  But China seems to have perfected the method: Here, […]
• Good By Stealth
  Via Standpoint‘s Tom Gross: Which is one reason why one of the more remarkable stories coming out of the Middle East over the last two and a half years has been largely overlooked: the bravery of Israeli doctors and civilians who have gone into war-ravaged neighbouring Syria to treat the injured, and feed and clothe […]
• Hot Stove League
  Ballpark Design:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Ken Nordine, Call Your Office
  Mirrored Infinity Room:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• 17th Century London in 3D
  Courtesy of the Off The Map Challenge: Following the development of the environment on the team’s blog you can see some of the gaps between what data was deemed noteworthy or worth recording in the seventeenth century and the level of detail we now expect in maps and other infographics. For example, the team struggled to pinpoint […]
• Old Movie Theaters
  Staten Island Paramount:
• “Lassie, Come Home:” Thurber Responds
  On Thanksgiving, Turner Classic Movies plays a “Family Favorites” Marathon, which includes “Lassie, Come Home.” James Thurber expands on the theme, in his “Look Homeward, Jeannie:” The homing dog reached apotheosis a few years ago when “Lassie Come Home” portrayed a collie returning to its young master over miles of wild and unfamiliar terrain in […]
• ESA to Make Raw Copernicus Data Available
  For free: The European Delegated Act on Copernicus data and information policy will enter into force in the coming days. This Act provides free, full and open access to users of environmental data from the Copernicus programme, including data from the Sentinel satellites. As always, the question is who the gatekeepers consider to be a […]
• Programming for Kids
  Kids adapt, toys adapt to help kids adapt: All of Primo’s electronics are concealed inside wooden boxes, so from the child’s point of view they’re playing with blocks, a board and a cute little robot. But as they snap the coloured pieces (instruction blocks) into the board (the physical programming interface) they are building up […]