Weekend Thoughts - 6.10.17

Image by Ed Schipul, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Although gardening can be a rewarding experience, identifying and pulling weeds is not always fun. That's why the creators of the Roomba are hard at work developing the Tertill, a robot that automatically weeds your garden for you. After placing protective collars around your plants, the solar-powered device will use sensors to identify small weeds and chop them down. The company, Franklin Robotics, will be launching a Kickstarter on June 13th to raise funds for this project.

2. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to settle a digital rights privacy case that will determine whether police will be required to obtain a warrant to get access to your cellphone location data, which is archived by wireless carriers. This will be an interesting case to follow, as it will decide once and for all whether a police officer can request access to private details of our lives without a warrant.

3. Dubbed "Subway Libraries", the New York Public Library has outfitted 10 MTA subway cars with downloadable ebooks that will be available to riders for free during the next six weeks. I'm all for encouraging reading, and if I was a New Yorker I would be all over this!

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 6.3.17

Image by Grant Guarino, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Although the story has been told many times before, I enjoyed this retelling of the Buddha's final encounter with Mara. In the story, the "demon" Mara attempts to tempt the Buddha to remain in Samsara with promises of worldly pleasures, but the Buddha poses a question that Mara is unable to answer. It is said that the Buddha attained true enlightenment after this encounter.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 5.27.17

Image by Andy Kaye, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. A couple months ago I wrote a bit about how Border Agents have been requesting U.S. citizens to turn over passwords for their devices and social media accounts. As a response to Maciej Cegłowski's demand for software developers to create a "travel mode" that would prevent account access during the period that a traveller is expecting to be outside of the country, the password manager application 1Password has announced that a "travel mode" feature has in fact been created and will be included to everyone with a 1Password membership. Although this is the first company (that I am aware of, anyways) that has developed this type of functionality, hopefully we will begin to see it become more frequently offered by all types of software manufacturers. In the long run, our privacy and security concerns may be further protected against the prying eyes of the government with this type of feature.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 5.20.17

Image by Binder.donedat, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Well this is a first (for me at least): an argument in favor of electing an artificially-intelligent President instead of a biologically human. It's worth a read—maybe we'll eventually get to the point in our society where this wouldn't seem so crazy.

2. As a child, I was fascinated by dinosaurs. I even wanted to grow up to be a paleontologist, and always responded that way whenever asked "What to you want to be when you grow up?" If I had actually pursued that goal, perhaps I would have ended up taking over after miners in Canada accidentally stumbled across the best preserved fossil of its kind ever found, a 110 million-year old armored plant-eater called a nodosaur. The condition of this fossil is impressive, especially considering its large size and old age.

3. Glowing bike paths are a big hit in the Netherlands and Poland, and America could be next. Texas A&M is adding neon bike lanes to its campus, a true innovation because it is the first of its kind. Increased visibility is always helpful for drivers to see cyclists, so this seems like a win-win for everybody!

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 5.13.17

Image by Pedro Travassos, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Our species has experienced three major revolutions thus far: the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We are on the cusp of the next big one, and the way that we handle the automation revolution will determine whether those who will inevitably experience technological displacement will suffer unnecessarily or not. At the core of this author's argument is the need for humans to change our relationship with money, something that I have been fascinated with ever since reading Charles Eisenstein's book Sacred Economics. This week's article is an excellent overview of automation and the concept of universal basic income, and is worth sharing far and wide.

2. The New York Times featured a thought experiment in the form of an interactive quiz asking its readers, "which tech giant would you drop?" The choices were some of the biggest technology companies in the world: Alphabet (Google's parent company), Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon. This quiz was mentioned in several tech blogs and podcasts last week, and it's an interesting thing to consider. My choices were as follows (in order of which company I would drop first to last):

1. Microsoft
2. Facebook
3. Amazon
4. Alphabet
5. Apple

I don't rely on Microsoft for anything that I can think of—I don't want to own a PC or Xbox, nor do I use Skype. Facebook provides some value to my life, as does its app Instagram, but I could give it up before the other three. Amazon is a convenient way to order physical items and ebooks for my Kindle, and I do use Amazon Prime Video on occasion, but it doesn't get nearly as much use for me as the other two. However, a considerable amount of the Internet relies on Amazon Web Services; without it we would be missing a large amount of content on the web. I do feel like another hosting service could replace AWS though. I don't use Google as my primary search engine, and I have recently switched over from using my Gmail address to my new Think Wilder domain address, david@thinkwilder.com, but Google owns YouTube, which is my main form of video consumption by far, and it brings considerable value to my life. Finally, Apple is the last company that I would give up. In my opinion, using other companies' hardware, software and service offerings is an extremely sub-par way to experience computing technology. If you're interested in taking the quiz, take the link above and give it a shot.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.