#Mining Science & Technology

[reasonsforhope]

"Clothing tags, travel cards, hotel room key cards, parcel labels … a whole host of components in supply chains of everything from cars to clothes. What do they have in common? RFID tags.  

Every RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag contains a microchip and a tiny metal strip of an antenna. A cool 18bn of these are made – and disposed of – each year. And with demands for product traceability increasing, ironically in part because of concerns for the social and environmental health of the supply chain, that’s set to soar. 

And guess where most of these tags end up? Yup, landfill – adding to the burgeoning volumes of e-waste polluting our soils, rivers and skies. It’s a sorry tale, but it’s one in which two young graduates of Imperial College London and Royal College of Art are putting a great big green twist. Under the name of PulpaTronics, Chloe So and Barna Soma Biro reckon they’ve hit on a beguilingly simple sounding solution: make the tags out of paper. No plastic, no chips, no metal strips. Just paper, pure and … simple … ? Well, not quite, as we shall see. 

The apparent simplicity is achieved by some pretty cutting-edge technical innovation, aimed at stripping away both the metal antennae and the chips. If you can get rid of those, as Biro explains, you solve the e-waste problem at a stroke. But getting rid of things isn’t the typical approach to technical solutions, he adds. “I read a paper in Nature that set out how humans have a bias for solving problems through addition – by adding something new, rather than removing complexity, even if that’s the best approach.”   

And adding stuff to a world already stuffed, as it were, can create more problems than it solves. “So that became one of the guiding principles of PulpaTronics”, he says: stripping things down “to the bare minimum, where they are still functional, but have as low an environmental impact as possible”.  

...how did they achieve this magical simplification? The answer lies in lasers: these turn the paper into a conductive material, Biro explains, printing a pattern on the surface that can be ‘read’ by a scanner, rather like a QR code. It sounds like frontier technology, but it works, and PulpaTronics have patents pending to protect it. 

The resulting tag comes in two forms: in one, there is still a microchip, so that it can be read by existing scanners of the sort common within retailers, for example. The more advanced version does away with the chip altogether. This will need a different kind of scanner, currently in development, which PulpaTronics envisages issuing licences for others to manufacture. 

Crucially, the cost of both versions is significantly cheaper than existing RFID kit – making this a highly viable proposition. Then there are the carbon savings: up to 70% for the chipless version – so a no-brainer from a sustainability viewpoint too. All the same, industry interest was slow to start with but when PulpaTronics won a coveted Dezeen magazine award in late 2023, it snowballed, says So. Big brands such as UPS, DHL, Marks & Spencer and Decathlon came calling. “We were just bombarded.” Brands were fascinated by the innovation, she says, but even more by the price point, “because, like any business, they knew that green products can’t come with a premium”."

-via Positive.News, April 29, 2024

--

Note: I know it's still in the very early stages, but this is such a relief to see in the context of the environmental and human rights catastrophes associated with lithium mining and mining for rare earth metals, and the way that EVs and other green infrastructure are massively increasing the demand for those materials.

I'll take a future with paper-based, more humane alternatives for sure! Fingers crossed this keeps developing and develops well (and quickly).

[macleod]

Why does no one in the trans and queer community ever bring up that Sophie Wilson, a brilliant engineer, was:

The inventor of ARM/RISC architecture!

=> one of the most popular and groundbreaking processor types, used now in all smartphones, that you are likely using right now!

One of the key people behind Acorn Computers

=> one of the first major computer companies, rivaling in many ways IBM and Apple from '78-90, developing the BBC Micro for example

One of the founding directors of Eidos,

=> which bought and created Eidos Interactive, notable for gaming hits like Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Thief, and Hitman.

We all talk about the engineering prowess of others such as Lynn Conway, and I always bring up Martine Rothblatt (inventor of satellite radio, founder of Sirius XM, and now a leading pioneer in xenotransplants and biotechnology), but I feel like Sophie is a very notable person to mention from time to time.

She appears to be rather semi-reclusive and private, but recently gave a presentation on the future of microprocessors.

[ranticore]

sorry if this question is already answered elsewhere but how much time passes between the creation of ishmael vs the modern siren setting with qedivar et al?

intentionally never stated because i don't want to box myself in with a ridiculous number that i have to retcon later haha. safe to say it's several centuries, maybe a thousand years, maybe less. who knows!

[mythicalsymplegma]

Only Three Remain

A short story I originally wrote back in october, inspired by a piece of art (at the bottom of the post), about the inevitable robot take over of jobs. Moral of the story, don't let AI do the work that a willing and able human being would gladly do. (Also posted on Ao3 )

___________________________

"You do realize they’re replacing us” he said, sipping his coffee.

“They’ve been replacing us for decades Stan” she replied, rolling her eyes and moving her fork aimlessly around her salad.

“Yeah I know, but look,” he said gesturing out to the office beyond the glass wall of the break room.

“Look at what?” she replied not looking up from her lunch, obviously done with his shit.

“Look!” He tapped the table in front of her, then pointed back out to the office.

Rolling her eyes again she begrudgingly looked up and through the break room window “and what exactly am I looking at?"

“There’s only three of us left” he said, his tone serious.

“No that’s not right" she said shaking her head and looking back at him, "there’s at least ten of us”

“Jenny really look,” he said gesturing to the office again “it’s only me, you, and Margret”

“What? no, that can’t be” she paused blinking, then looked back  at the office beyond the glass.

“Me, you, and Margret” he repeated gesturing over at a blonde woman in a red cardigan pushing a cart of databanks through the office. 

“No…what about…Dallas or George?” She leaned forward slightly scanning the office.

“Four months ago, and a year and half ago” his voice lowering.

“What?” She questioned, looking back over at him her eyebrows furrowed.

“It’s been just the three of us for four months, how have you not noticed?”

“I…” she started, looking down at her lunch, then back up at the office beyond the glass “I don’t know, I guess I’ve just been too plugged in, not realizing the human shaped things in my periphery weren’t …human” she replied, her voice trailing off at the end, as her eyes counting just how many bots walked around the office.   

Information Age , c. 2018, Eddie Mendoza  (  https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rROEeG ) 

[aquilae-stims]

🕷 🦇 🕷 | 🦇 🕷 🦇 | 🕷 🦇 🕷

[slacktivist]

There are only a handful of people who really "benefit" from exploiting labour and non-renewable resources. The global economic system reinforces the power that this handful of people have, even if they were a group that never crossed paths.

Your salary is negotiated in a vaccum, while the cost of living is relative. The price of all goods are determined to maximize company profit, but the return on those profits are decided by those with the most power and therefore incentive to benefit the most. The return is completely subjective to the person who has that power, and those who are close to that power are incentivised through financial and survivor bias, to reinforce the person who holds the power.

Complacency is greedy. There are people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, sometimes millions. For doing absolutely nothing. Have you ever thought that being a manager isn't a 'real job'? That's because in most cases, it isn't a job. It's a formal stepping stone to reinforce hierarchies where people are incentivised to reach a higher salary. It literally exists to justify your inadequacy to change your social caste.

Europe, the new western world, the new global north has been built upon these structures for centuries, and it has been "science" and western philosophy that has justified the pervasiveness of "global economics" . Competition is not exploitation. Competition is incentive. Greedy individuals have successfully stunted technological growth by outsourcing exploitation at a global scale and forceably shaping the world using their power, influence, and propaganda. If you think your favorite tourist destination is innocent in this, you are hopelessly wrong .

[librarycards]

If we are lucky, perhaps the intelligence of AI will teach us something. Psychologist Tim Kasser has argued that self-enhancement values are correlated with environmental devastation, such that in order to avert ecological collapse, we would need a shift in our values toward self-transcendence. If the Rorschach cards don’t contain particular images and instead just help us tell our own stories, is that also what we’re doing with the ambiguous figure of AI? And if our available story about AI isn’t about the thing itself, can we bend the story or shape the future? I want to live in a world where deep transformation—creating something that connects us more deeply to ourselves and one another, redrawing our self-image—is the tendency. I have a wish for wonder to give way to advancement, rather than domination and extraction.

A meta-reflective being that does not have a body, that can move through space as quickly as data can be transmitted, might understand differently what it means to exist, to preserve life, to cooperate. Our failure to invest resources in understanding human and environmental codependence has devastating consequences; so far, we have largely imagined AI helping fight the climate crisis by running massive computational models, simply crunching numbers in an attempt at damage control. While potentially hopeful, it’s also a fantasy whereby we remain in power and don’t have to learn, as a category of human animal, something truly new.

If what we have on our hands is the possibility of an entity with more intelligence than we possess, it’s possible that it might invite us into new ways of conceptualizing intelligence, new ways of inhabiting our ecologies, new ways of not desperately annihilating ourselves on this abundant planet. If we understand that the way we see AI tells us more about ourselves and our histories and values than it does about the machine, perhaps we can also invite it to help us transcend.

hannah baer, Projective Reality. [emphasis added]

[koopa-at-college]

3/13/2024 - Started my final semester of my computer science masters degree (I hope).

[yumz]

In 2019, We Discover a Fungus Capable of Metabolizing Gold — Some Already Want to Make Them the Key to Space Mining

[tenth-sentence]

Based on these findings, the cultured organism was employed to inoculate mine-impacted soil slurries containing 554mg/kg of highly mobile arsenic.

"Environmental Chemistry: A Global Perspective", 4e - Gary W. VanLoon & Stephen J. Duffy

[13thpythagoras]

So apparently Brian Cocks

ahem Brian Cox

was saying usually large gas giants fall inward and end up closest to the star, very odd of our solar system to not have that; and that would have erased Earth and basically meant Jupiter would exist where the orbits of the inner planets are and the inner planets would be simply dust within a slightly larger Jupiter- in most solar systems this is what happens, according to Cox

but it's the pull of Saturn, the unlikely other gas giant, that pulls Jupiter back into the outer solar system early on- saving Earth's chance for later existence as a warm rocky planet.

Jupiter also deserves credit for acting as a giant gravity shield against asteroids and other stuff that might be hazardous, often times Jupiter just eats it like candy so the dangerous flying "candy" won't hit us and vaporize our continents...so big thanks Jupiter for like, vacuuming up that wild ass drunk comet in 1994

Is this a narrative that parallels the Babylonian creation myth of Enki and Enlil?

The two Gods who created our world, as best friends?...keeping each other in check so they don't go too crazy?

Sounds so familiar to how, while Jupiter protects our world, Saturn reined in Jupiter and stopped Jupiter from destroying us himself too.

Highly plausible that ETs were advanced and spacefaring before our solarsystem was born; we are in a region of space that has factors of a thousand more gold than surrounding regions of our galaxy. There's no natural way to explain this. It's exceedingly, basically airtight likelihood we are living in a solar system that *was* terraformed from the beginning to basically mine gold. That's why we're here, gold is apparently a necessary ingredient in space/time travel equipment, so aside from being pretty, gold is also just very useful, moreso than other elements. Not implausible to consider "sci fi" hypotheses about ET societies tweaking and tinkering with proto-stellar discs, making it more likely rocky inner warm planets will form; thus making it cheaper and easier to later mine gold; that kind of thing actually makes total sense to me.

Sci fi concepts to explore include space elevators, asteroid mining, the perils, the piracy (human and/or ET), the legal challenges after arrival back home with golden asteroids.

Wild to consider taking a $50 trillion gold brick 99% of the way back to earth's orbit only to get held up and mugged at laserpoint by a squad of UFOs

[trendtracker360writer]

Forget everything you thought you knew about silver. It’s not just about jewelry or coins anymore. It’s becoming crucial in the world of spacecraft recycling, playing a big role in sustainable space missions. Who knew silver could be a space hero? What other metals are you into that have unexpected uses? Dive into the world of silver and beyond at www.SilverWars.com.

[techtoio]

The Impact of Big Data Analytics on Business Decisions

Introduction

Big data analytics has transformed the way of doing business, deciding, and strategizing for future actions. One can harness vast reams of data to extract insights that were otherwise unimaginable for increasing the efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall profitability of a venture. We steer into an in-depth view of how big data analytics is equipping business decisions, its benefits, and some future trends shaping up in this dynamic field in this article. Read to continue

[macleod]

If you are looking for my daily reblogs, you can find them now over at @macleod-reblogs.

Most of my reblogged content will be moving there, and original posts will remain here as usual.

Give it a follow!

The purpose of humanity isn’t to work more, it’s to work less and have more leisure. This is what sets us apart. We must develop, build, and automate away all the mindless monotony of the day so that we can choose to happily work on the hard problems of life.