young children acquire verbs and we understand War, Enlightenment

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/steven-pinker-interview/ 

Steven Pinker's journey enlightening our perception of verbs as young children to our own nature and history.  Read the whole interview.

Schrödinger's cat experiment

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1287-z

Despite the non-deterministic character of quantum physics, is it possible to know if a quantum jump is about to occur? Here we answer this question affirmatively: we experimentally demonstrate that the jump from the ground state to an excited state of a superconducting artificial three-level atom can be tracked as it follows a predictable 'flight', by monitoring the population of an auxiliary energy level coupled to the ground state. 

The cat always survives.  Amazing!

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mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936

A complete Human Heart was 3-D printed

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.201900344

Wow, just wow.

Rings of Haven by Ryk Brown

Not bad.  I am curious about what happens next. 3/5 stars.

David Brin's AI talk at IBM (November 2016)

https://youtu.be/BlwsJpwg3e0

Still very interesting.

Human Brain genes in monkeys

Chinese scientists are putting human brain genes into monkeys and they the monkeys are smarter. Ethics? TiC (This is China!)

Empire of Bones by Terry Mixon

The writing and editing is not as strong as I prefer but the space opera themes are ok.  I plan to read a few more in the series, hoping the treacle tropes, style, and tone don't drown out the tech and story line.  3/5 stars.

Accelerated Mobile Pages and other predatory behaviors by the evil search giant (ESG)

There are a few, suppressed but strident rumblings by low-tech media companies trying to resist Google's new accelerated mobile pages (AMP) technology.  We, the end-users reading the AMP media pages, experience faster page load times.  However there may be some nefarious funny business enabling these experiences:

https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047

AMP aggressively pre-fetches everything you might possibly click on, burning the data in your data plan.

And Google is applying enormous, predatory pressures on media web sites to embrace their technology:

https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/

This latest phenomenon adds to the growing list of repressive, monopolistic practices the evil search giant (ESG) inflicts upon the web ecosystem:

http://listverse.com/2017/09/24/top-10-ways-google-does-evil/

I do not fault many of Google's efforts to move technology forward (e.g. Google's work on security, containerization, and services mesh).  In these cases, Google is applying dozens of great developers to pushing interoperable standards forward with a little less heavy-handed policy choice.

However, I do find Google's behaviors in the "Open Markets" story to be unethical.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/30/new-america-foundation-google-funding-firings

Shame on you, Google.  Please exercise some ethics and stop being so evil.

Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The opening scene and beginning were a little weak and I got worried the story and science would be bad but it got better and better, building to a very strong ending.  I really like the writing and shall explore more books by this author.  Very good, 4/5 stars.

Constitution by Nick Webb

Interesting story with too many contrivances, cardboard characters, silly melodrama, quite entertaining, not the best space opera around, 3/5 stars.