The Machines Keep Dying
1. Some intriguing history in this piece on Uber's effect on Portland's Ethiopian cab drivers.
"Berhan fell in behind Kedir Wako, another Broadway driver who sought to start his own cab company. Another Ethiopian immigrant, Tesfaye Aleme, had won approval for Green Transportation in 1998, but there had been no new permits issued since then. Wako spent four years trying to get City Hall to OK his new company. Radio and Broadway cabbies jammed the streets around City Hall in protest, but then-Mayor Sam Adams backed Union Cab, which had support from the Oregon AFL-CIO. The City Council approved Union Cab in 2012 and awarded it 50 taxi permits. Wako says he lost taxi-driver friends over Union Cab, and many blame him for the ease with which the city welcomed Uber and Lyft. 'They think Uber comes because of me,' he says. 'Because I opened that door.'"
"My Warboys use this all the time, a real step up from using toxic chrome spraypaint which was causing odd tumors."
3. A quick start guide for the autonomous vehicle of the near future.
"It's easy to speculate about the self-driving car. But, touch on the topic of allowing one's self-driving car to be used in the Uber network of modern-day taxis immediately begs the question — what do you do if you forget a bag of groceries after sending it into Uber mode? Will there be a geo-fencing mechanisms to control where the car goes — and how fast it goes — when you give the "keys" to your teenage son to take to football practice. How does the car pickup groceries — and how do you upload the list — when you send it on errands?"
4. We could lose a lot of the recorded aural history of the 20th century.
"The British Library Sound Archive, housed on the ground floor of the annex to the Library's main building on Euston Road, London, is like a museum of dead media. The corridors are clogged up with Soundmirror tape machines from the late 1940s and military-grade wire-recorders from even earlier. Cupboards are crammed with dat players and ADAT machines. 'The difference between us, in sound, and the guys in books and manuscripts, is that we have always required technology to access the content,' Will Prentice, the Library's head of technical services in sound and vision, told me. 'We've always needed a machine.' Therein lies the problem. The machines keep dying. The Archive holds over a million-and-a-half discs and tapes containing some seven million recordings. That's about a hundred years of continuous listening, day and night. Even with their five engineers and support staff, with studios containing multiple machines running simultaneously, Prentice estimates it would take another 48 years to digitise the whole collection. Unfortunately they don't have 48 years. Their best guess is maybe 15."
"Squashed between a highway overpass and a towering suburban shopping center east of Paris, a drilling rig is completing the second of two geothermal wells aimed at capturing the earth’s natural heat for homes and offices. The project is one of five around the French capital being built by Engie, the new name for GDF Suez SA, accelerating a geothermal boom in the region. Greater Paris already boasted the world’s largest concentration of deep geothermal wells linked to heating networks, even before these latest additions. An energy law making its way through the French parliament that seeks to spur rewewable energy could lead to more."
On Fusion: What Google finds beautiful (based on the data-mining it does of your photos).
1. wweek.com 2. amazon.com | @sideshow 3. nearfuturelaboratory.com 4. thequietus.com | @james3neal 5. bloomberg.com | @justinpickard
The Machines Keep Dying