The Position of Obstacles Seen in the Past
In today's edition: health and wealth, drones avoiding crashes, Pantone, Octavio Butler, and the thing you didn't know you'd been wondering about giraffes.
***I am extremely excited to announce our musical headliner for Saturday's Real Future of Sound show in San Francisco: KELELA! Her new EP Hallucinogen has been described as "confident, amorphous, and unapologetic," "as if her melodies were parting the sea before her." She'll be interviewed by Song Exploder's Hrishikesh Hirway and then play a set. Sandwiched in between, we've got a fun stage production by the Real Future crew featuring journalism and craziness. This here link will get you a 2 for 1 discount. Tell your friends. It's gonna be worth it.***
1. This is an idea that could get some purchase in the near future: Health inequality.
"House argues that we should think about the social determinants of health using the now popular sociological framework of intersectionality, with economic, racial, and gender 'axes' together playing a role in the production of health and disease. Indeed, the fact that the socioeconomically advantaged are as healthy as the residents of our peer nations helps buttress the point that, in America, there are indeed two interrelated inequalities at play — one of wealth and income, and the other of health. Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have outlined the quantitative contours of the former with great clarity, but the latter has received far less attention in the public sphere. And yet, shouldn’t it be the contrary? Isn’t health more fundamental?"
"We have demonstrated a novel stereo vision algorithm for high-frame rate detections of obstacles. Our system is capable of quickly and accurately detecting obstacles at a single disparity and using a state-estimator to update the position of obstacles seen in the past, building a full, local, 3D map. It is capable of running at 120fps on a standard mobile-CPU and is lightweight and robust enough for flight experiments on small UAVs. This system will allow a new class of autonomous UAVs to fly in clutter with all perception and computation onboard."
+ I love the drone's-eye view in this video. Retro and futuristic all at once.
"Through this system, graphic designers, fashion designers, interior decorators, and architects can now specify this deep dark blue—and not that navy blue—and know they’re talking about the same thing. Herbert’s system became the basis for the company he founded: Pantone (meaning 'all colors' combining the words 'pan' and 'tone'). Color standardization is now critical in a globalized world, where consistency is a must for big brands and color enmeshed with brand identity. Coca-Cola’s red (Pantone 185) is its signature, as is pine green (Pantone 3298) for Starbucks."
4. Adventures in the archives of Octavia Butler.
"Butler had a theory of bestsellerdom that preoccupied her and motivated her writing, but which she was unable to ever quite put into practice: she sought endlessly to write what she called YES-BOOKS, but felt they always seemed to collapse into NO-BOOKS instead. (YES BOOKS, she thought, were bestsellers—NO BOOKS sold, alas, the way her actual books did.) One of the things I was personally surprised by in the archives was the way that optimism—usually an optimism predicated on what Lee Edelman has famously called 'reproductive futurity,' the presence and survival of children—was quite often a late or unwilling addition to her novels, something that emerged as she struggled to turn her many swirling ideas into concrete forms she believed would actually sell."
5. Didn't realize that I'd been idly wondering about this.
"Lightning strikes may be a significant danger to giraffes in environments that have few tall trees and are topographically or geologically predisposed to attract lightning. One eyewitness report suggests that, during lightning storms, giraffes lower their heads and may even compete with one another to become lower in height (J. Schamotta, pers. comm.), though whether this is accurate was doubted by giraffe specialist Anne Dagg."
On Fusion: Latoya Peterson presents the second episode of her pathbreaking documentary series, Girl Gamers.
1. lareviewofbooks.org | @erdoganhs 2. youtube.com | @chrisbaraniuk 3. qz.com 4. boingboing.com | @claudiakincaid 5. scientificamerican.com | @tetzoo
The Position of Obstacles Seen in the Past