Thursday Things: Deep Dive Edition
28 May 2020. Vol 2 No 22 By Dan McGirt. #42
Welcome to Thursday Things. This week’s issue is all over the map. We’ve got a deep dive, a revealing look, and the haunting music of the pan flute.
Raquel Welch not included. Photo by Michal Mrozek on Unsplash
Artificial intelligence can predict a person's personality using only a selfie. Are we making the machines too smart for our own good?
Computer models, with only a selfie to go by, proved better in tests at predicting a person's personality than human raters. ,,, When analyzing the faces of two individuals, the computer model made a correct personality comparison -- predicting which persons reported themselves as more extroverted or dominant, for example -- 58 percent of the time, a value above that of chance.
So now your computer is judging you. If it wasn’t already.
Tiny robots can travel through rushing blood to deliver drugs There was a classic 1966 science fiction movie called Fantastic Voyage in which a team of scientists, including Raquel Welch, was shrunk to microscopic size, along with a submarine, and injected into a man’s bloodstream to save his life by removing a blood clot in his brain that can’t be reached by surgery. This now almost reality, minus the shrinking people part:
Tiny drug-carrying robots that can move against the direction of blood flow could one day be used to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to cancer cells.
Metin Sitti at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues have developed tiny robots called “microrollers” that can carry cancer drugs and selectively target human breast cancer cells.
I say almost, because these robots deliver drugs to targeted cells, they don’t perform surgery. But that’s only a matter of time. Imagine — tiny robots might save your life some day! Unless, of course, they decide they don’t like your personality.
Here is a massive online collection of maps, the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection at Stanford University Library. Maritime, Global, Cities, Celestial, Cartoon, Historical … you name it, they’ve got it! There go hours of my life if I click this link.
Bolivian orchestra stranded at ‘haunted’ German castle surrounded by wolves
A Bolivian pan flute orchestra has been stuck in quarantine on the grounds of a grand 15th century palace outside of Berlin for two months. … Bolivia closed its borders — and the group was stranded at the 600 acre estate surrounded by 23 packs of wolves and haunted by the ghost of Frederick the Great.
There are almost certainly worse places to be stuck. I hope the wolves — and the ghost — enjoy pan flute music.
Fuzzy green glacier mice! ‘Scattered across the glacier were balls of moss. "They're not attached to anything and they're just resting there on ice," he says. "They're bright green in a world of white."'
Intrigued, he and two colleagues set out to study these strange moss balls. In the journal Polar Biology, they report that the balls can persist for years and move around in a coordinated, herdlike fashion that the researchers can not yet explain.’
Hertz Car Rental, as you may know, has filed for bankruptcy. This is unfortunate — unless you’re in the market for a car. To help pay its creditors, Hertz is selling off their fleet of late model vehicles, many at substantial discounts from book value. They’ll even deliver! If you’re in the market for a new (used, obviously, but new to you) car, check out Hertz’s sales site.
Is Email the Future of Journalism? — This is a self-referential and highly meta item because it is about Substack, the very platform that brings you Thursday Things each week.
Journalism’s advertising model is all but dead, strangled by Google and Facebook. ... But there is growing hunger for new models. Substack, a platform for paid newsletter subscriptions, is one such approach. In two and a half years, it has shown that it can provide a good living to individual journalists.
While this is a cozy little newsletter, there are many journalists and other writers delivering content to large and growing audiences via this same email newsletter format, while brand name legacy news outlets (newspapers, magazines, and news sites) collapse. So if you’re reading this now, congratulations! You’re a trend setter. Welcome to the future.
Thank you for reading Thursday Things. See you next Thursday!