Universal income, a necessity

I strongly believe a basic income would greatly improve most people's lives. Here is an excellent presentation supporting such program. Poverty is an economic problem when 1% in the world has everything and 99% have almost nothing.

AI is getting a lot more powerful, starting to replace human jobs.

“Our software is going to get superpowers” thanks to AI, says Frank Chen, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Computer programs will be able to do things that “we thought were human-only activities: recognizing what's in a picture, telling when someone's going to get mad, summarizing documents.” But more importantly, Chen says, AI capabilities are about to be everywhere. Until recently, big companies focused on adding AI capabilities to their own products — think about your smartphone transcribing your voice and Facebook identifying the faces in your photos. But now big companies are starting to open up their powerful AI capabilities to third-party developers.

At the same time, more sophisticated developers will be able to use the tools provided by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and their competitors to push the envelope even further. Chen believes that machine learning techniques will lead to improvements in medical care — for example, helping radiologists identify cells with cancer.

Richard Branson discusses with CNN's Christine Romans the importance of Universal Basic Income and says that cities should experiment with putting it in place.

U.S. bills redesigned

Industrial designer Andrey redesignd U.S. bills, starting with the material: Polymer, imagines greenbacks as modern plastic banknotes, similar to the more daring bills in Australian and UK currency, with UV-readable serials that are repeated in QR codes with PGP-signed hashes.

They look more like high-end collectibles than fiat, and they miss an important usability aspect in that they're all the same size, rather than following the sensible custom of printing larger-denomination bills on larger sheets.

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The birds stop singing today

The Queen Of Soul

My favorite thing about American culture is our interpretation of royalty. To me its the most altruistic thing about our so called "land of opportunity" that one can earn the title Queen or King through achievement. It's widely held that Blues, Jazz, and Soul are the USA's most important exports in USA's short history.

No one's life can be condensed to one word — but Aretha Franklin came close when she sang one word: "Respect."

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We experiences warmest weather in 262 years

Stockholm have been suffering unusually dry and hot weather for the past two months. It’s expected to be the longest heatwave since 1756. Sadly we're not the only place in the Northern Hemisphere with extreme temperatures since 262 years...

Authorities in Greece are dealing with the aftermath of devastating wildfires that killed at least 85 people, while efforts to control blazes in Sweden and in California continue. In Japan, 23,000 people have been taken to hospital in the past week and the weather described by officials as a “disaster”. In Algeria, a new African record has been set of 51.3C and meanwhile at the ice cap of Nordaustlandet at the north east ice cap of Svalbard...

  The Nordaustlandet ice cap gushes high volumes of meltwater - Photo Paul Nicklen

If there was ever a time on this site to press a red alert button if it had one it would be now. Climatologically in the Northern Hemisphere at most locations the hottest time of the year is in July into the first week of August, so even during cooler global periods prior to 1980 people experienced hot conditions during thus period of the calendar year. Adding increasing carbon pollution into the climate mix is like pouring kerosene onto a campfire making the thing explode with record heat, which indeed has happened this month.

The 2018 European drought and heat wave is a period of unusually hot weather that has led to record-breaking temperatures and wildfires in many parts of Europe during the spring and summer of 2018. It is part of a larger heat wave affecting the northern hemisphere, caused by the jet stream being weaker and further north than usual, trapping hot high-pressure air above North America, Europe, and Asia, and blocking low-pressure systems that would bring cooler air and rainfall.

Below the satellite images reveal the true extent of damage the UK’s heatwave has caused

Satellite images reveal the true extent of damage the UK’s 2018 heatwave has caused.

“What is striking now is that multiple heatwaves are happening at the same time.

The key is the jet stream. This year it’s been meandering in great loops and the UK has ended up to the south of it. Add to that sea temperatures similar to previous heatwaves and climate change, the warming of the atmosphere - it all makes heatwaves more likely.”

— David Shukman, BBC's science editor

Adapting to hotter temperatures is sensible but ignoring their causes is dangerous !

Meanwhile in California they experiance extrema weather and fires...

20 years ago I got my first Netscape Server

On this day, in 1998 I started my first internet company with my friend JJ (J.Jenny). It was probably one of the first Netscape servers in Geneva, except those at CERN.

We did spend 25’000 CHF (at that time 130’000 SEK) on a Netscape Application Server running on a Compaq 5050 Desktop with an Intel 333mhz, 256mb RAM 8GB hard drive and CD/Floppy and some other nerdy goodies including two SCSI Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM hard drives, it was very fast but very expensive at the time. And we did also register two URL’s at NIC: cmb.com and cmb.ch

Yes, yes, I know that all this is a bit geeky. But I am a dude with extended eccentric and non-mainstream, expert, running my Windows 3.0, since 1990…

Remove artifacts, noise, grain from a image with AI.

It takes two to make a good picture, one in front and one behind the camera. And a photographer with a creative eye, so no, I don’t believe photographers will completely replace by machines. However, taking a photo in poor lighting can often result in something too pixelated and noisy to be useful. Then a smart service that "clean" the image from noise is an excellent service and can also be widely used for satellite images, astronomy and within medical applications... This program could help to bring old images in line with modern quality standards. But what happens when we use the AI to removing watermarks and other copyright marks from artwork.

Last week at the Thirty-fifth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Stockholm, a team of NVIDIA researchers, in partnership with researchers from Aalto University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), shared details of a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that can remove grain from images with a extraordinary accuracy.

What's incredible about this particular AI is its ability to know what a clean image looks like without ever actually seeing a noise-free image. Rather than training the deep-learning network by giving it a noisy image and a clean image to learn how to make up the difference, NVIDIA's AI is trained using two images with different noise patterns.

We want peace, not war!

The world have already spent too much money on the US Defense Industry.

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The rise in global arms sales that began in the early 2000s continued in 2017.

America’s biggest business lobby wants the Trump administration put the American defense industry first and require the Pentagon to explain the impact on domestic jobs and national security each time it denies a foreign request to buy U.S. weapons. Nearly half of US arms exports over the past five years have gone to the war-stricken Middle East, with Saudi Arabia consolidating its place as the world’s second biggest importer. Western arms makers are jockeying to take advantage of expanding defense budgets among NATO allies and in other regions.

China, by contrast, is becoming increasingly capable of producing its own weapons and continues to strengthen its relations with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar through arms supplies. The five largest exporters in 2013–17 were the USA, Russia, France, Germany and China. Together, they accounted for 74 per cent of the total volume of arms exports.

All this, is such a waste of human lives, but such good money...

U.S. weapons exports from 1950 to 2017. Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's Arms Transfers Database. Units are expressed in trend indicator values (TIV). Each dot on the map = one TIV. Visualization by Will Geary.

2001: A Space Odyssey and A Answer

2001: A Space Odyssey is regarded not just as a sci-fi masterpiece, but as one of the greatest films of all time. Yet, still, people find themselves wondering exactly what happened at the end of the movie, where Dr. David Bowman gets sucked into a Star Gate, trapped in a neoclassical French room then turned into a fetus known as the Star Child.

A plosible explanation of the 2001: A Space Odyssey comes from a Japanese paranormal documentary from TV personality Jun'ichi Yaio made during the filming of The Shining. The documentary was never released, but footage was sold on eBay in 2016 and conveniently appeared online this week timed with the movie's 50th anniversary.

While we don't see Kubrick in the footage, we do hear all of an hour-plus phone interview between Yaio and Kubrick, during which the filmmaker offers his explanation of 2001:

My Great Anual Migration

The Great Burner Migration takes place in SouthAfrica between Western Cap and Namibia in Tankwa Karoo and is the second largest migration of Burnersin the world, the biggest one is in Nevada, USA near the  Black Rock Desert.

I do participate to this. And I document all with my camera.

Here is another excellent film about Afrikaburn by three filmmakers Dewald Brand, Herman du Toit and Michael Zomer.

Art for free or almost

Unsplash is a community where anyone can share high-resolution photos for anyone to use freely. Unsplash could seem more devaluing to a commercial photographer than other photo-sharing platforms because you’re giving up your copyright ownership of your photo when you share it.

Let’s create something beautiful together with Banksy.

Before the internet, holding on to copyright for photos was more beneficial because the value in licensing a photo was high. The issue today is a licensed photo is losing its value. The price photo buyers are willing to pay to license a photo is accelerating downward.

At the same time, the cost to produce a photo is going down. The five most valuable companies in the world today are all competing on the camera. While professional photography gear is still expensive, mobile cameras are improving at a rate that will eventually put a professional-level camera in everyone’s pocket.