Mitch's Blog

Meet the Xenobots, Virtual Creatures Brought to Life

Xenobots are designed to roboticists using algorithmic evolution in computer simulations.

Joshua Sokol at The New York Times:

Xenobots with a fork- or snowplow-like appendage in the front can sweep up loose particles (in a petri dish) overnight, depositing them in a pile. Some use legs, of a sort, to shuffle around on the floor of the dish. Others swim, using beating cilia, or link up blobby appendages and circle each other a few times before heading off in separate directions….

[Researchers crafted] virtual worlds that would reward particular behaviors by the clumps of repurposed frog. Take walking: First an algorithm produced many random body designs; some just sat there, others rocked or waddled forward. Then the algorithm let the best of the walkers procreate into the next generation; from these, another generation was produced, and so on, each one improving on the best designs. Another simulation, aimed at finding designs that could carry an object, became crowded with bagel-like bodies that had evolved a central cavity to hold things."

Eventually, robots like these could “sweep ocean microplastics into a larger, collectible ball,” “deliver drugs to a specific tumor,” or “scrape plaque from the walls of our arteries…. "

“[W]hatever their intended purpose, their bodies would be designed not by an engineer but by a simulacrum of real evolution built to encourage the right behavior in the target environment.”

Ethicists see possible problems.

Just before the lockdown went in place in California, I had brunch with Julie at Farmer’s Table. The coffee was excellent, so much so that I asked the waitress about it. She said they got the coffee from a place in Barrio Logan (and now I see on Google there is more than one coffee place in Barrio Logan. I think Cafe Virtuoso was the one she said.)

I asked the waitress what equipment they use to make the coffee, and she said just a restaurant coffee machine. Not a fancy pourover. Just a drip coffee machine.

So I remembered that and a while later I was Googling about coffee, and came across an article – which I now cannot locate – about how baristas make coffee for themselves, at home. One of the respondents said he used a Mr. Coffee. Just a Mr. Coffee.

And that intrigued me because the Aeropress, which is how I’ve been making coffee for a couple of years, is a bit more fuss than I like in the morning. Same for a French press. And with a Mr. Coffee you assemble the ingredients, press a button and you’ve got coffee a few minutes later.

I thought about that for a couple of weeks and priced a Mr. Coffee on Amazon and it was $22 for a four-cup version. I discussed it with Julie and we said sure why not and I ordered.

While I was waiting for the delivery, I read the reviews – really should have done that before I ordered, right? I had just looked at the overall rating. But now that I read the reviews, I saw that the four-cup machine didn’t actually make four cups. Mr. Coffee measures a cup at 5 ounces. WTF, I thought to myself. That’s 20 ounces of coffee. I like to have about 24 ounces in the morning. Three cups. Three real cups.

Plus, I realized that, although Julie and I make coffee separately, the reason we do it is because the Aeropress only makes three cups, and even that is pushing it. However, if we had a drip machine I could make coffee for both of us in the morning.

So I’d bought the wrong size.

Or had I? Yesterday, I thought to myself that three cups of coffee is really too much. The caffeine doesn’t bother me (or I don’t think it does – I do sometimes have trouble sleeping, but I do not attribute that to coffee. I attribute that to the world, which was a troubling place even before COVID-19). However, I just don’t enjoy that third cup as much as the first two. Plus, drinking three cups of coffee takes a lot of time. That doesn’t matter when I’m just working at my desk, but it’s annoying when I want to be out and about in the morning and I have to wait to finish my morning caffeine fix.

So fine, I said to myself. I’ll cut down to two cups. And Julie said she’s fine making her own coffee in the morning. So we decided to keep the four-cup Mr. Coffee.

But wait, there’s more to this.

Last night I remembered something. We have a third spigot on our kitchen sink. We have the normal hot and cold, and a third one that dispenses even hotter water, for coffee and tea. And that spigot dispenses water at the perfect temperature for brewing with the Aeropress.

Except I remembered that a few weeks ago I accidentally splashed myself with the spigot and it didn’t hurt. And I said to myself at the time, that should have hurt more. I wonder if the spigot is set hot enough? And I promptly forgot.

I mentioned this to Julie last night and she said she runs the water a few seconds before filling the Aeropress. She waits until she sees steam coming up. I said I used to do that too – why on Earth did I stop? No idea.

So I decided to make myself one more Aeropress this morning before I try the Mr. Coffee tomorrow, just to have a proper baseline for comparison. I made a three-cup pressing this morning because I only got about five hours' sleep last night. I don’t know if I taste much difference in the flavor but it’s hotter than it has been, which I like.

I may make a two-cup batch in the Aeropress tomorrow, just to be comparing like amounts with the Aeropress and Mr. Coffee.

I went to the big Von’s on University Avenue to stock up today

I wore nitrile gloves, as I did the other time I went to the supermarket nine days ago. I also wore an N95 mask – my first time out in public wearing one.

I felt self-conscious about the mask, and over the past few days I was mentally rehearsing the conversation I might have with a hypothetical person who might confront me about using the mask when healthcare professionals are doing without. I imagined myself saying, “We bought the masks long before the pandemic; Julie uses them when she cleans the litterbox. We had the gloves too. We’re not hoarding; we have 10 masks and 100-200 pairs of gloves.

“We do not have a large extended family in the area,” I would have said, “so if one of us gets sick the other one takes care of them. If we both get sick, well, we’re screwed.

“By protecting ourselves, we avoid becoming additional burdens on the healthcare system,” I would have said.

“And also, you may be right,” I would have said to the hypothetical person.

Nobody non-hypothetical confronted me.

The supermarket crowd was light, but I would not have found it remarkably light on an ordinary day. Only three or four of us wore masks, and a few more wearing gloves. None of the supermarket staff seemed to be wearing masks, but the pharmacy staff did. The cashier, at least, was wearing gloves, of the type that food service workers usually wear.

One man brought his son, who looked to be about 4 years old. Seems like a bad idea. Maybe he had nobody to watch the kid?

The supermarket had most of the things I was looking for. Plenty of fresh produce, even fresh asparagus for a treat tonight. They did not have Julie’s favorite brand of salad dressing, but that might not have been virus-related as the shelves were full of salad dressing. Maybe they just didn’t carry it.

Also absent: Toilet paper and cleaning supplies. I keep hearing the supply chain is fine with those, and people are just hoarding. So when will that ol' supply chain kick in? Eventually people will run out of room in their houses for toilet paper.

I also was able to find two big bottles of my favorite hand soap, Dr. Bronner’s. That was a pleasant surprise.

5 reasons why people hate Apple

I just got an email this morning.

The email had no context. Just a short two sentences on why the sender hates Apple – he’s an Android user and was using Dark Sky until Apple bought it this week and shut off API access, including Android.

I replied by asking him why he was sending the email to me. But I was still waking up when I sent that reply, because truly I already knew. That article.

I just reread it. It’s a pretty good article. If I were writing it today, I’d spend time discussing Apple’s monopolistic practices. Or quasi-monopolistic – they don’t own the market, but they control a big chunk of it. It’s the same all over the economy; a few big companies control each industry. They compete against each other but mainly they’re concerned with stifling new competition.

I’m still nearly exclusively an Apple user but I have fewer illusions today. When you do business in the current economy, you compromise your principles. Like using Facebook, for example.

Skimmed and bookmarked for later reading.

Food supply worries farmers in US as coronavirus disrupts their work - CNN

The Effects of COVID-19 Will Ripple through Food Systems - Scientific American

Emmanual Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, writing at the New York Times: According to some projections, unemployment might rise to 30% in the second quarter of 2020 in the US, far beyond what other nations are seeing.

Elsewhere, “governments are protecting employment. Workers keep their jobs, even in industries that are shut down. The government covers most of their wage through direct payments to employers. Wages are, in effect, socialized for the duration of the crisis.”

Then, when the crisis ends, workers and businesses just pick up where they left off.

But in the US, we’re relying on improved unemployment benefits. You suffer the stress of losing your job, you have to apply for unemployment, which is burdensome and swamps the system.

Many Americans will find that when the crisis ends, their jobs are gone, with many of their former employers out of business.

That’ll slow down recovery, whereas in Europe, people will just get back to work.

And as they’re losing their jobs, Americans also lose health insurance.

There’s a saying that when the US goes to war, it mis-applies the lessons of the last war. That’s what’s going on here. Conservatives and progressives were both rightly appalled by the lesson of the 2008 bailout, when we propped up broken businesses and rewarded the thieving and incompetent investors and managers who crashed the economy, while abandoning middle class and poor victims to fend for themselves.

But the situation is different now. Yes, we still have an economy that rewards greed, stealing and incompetence, but coronavirus is slaughtering both good businesses and badly run businesses. Government’s goal should just be to press the pause button on the entire economy, then resume, and fix structural problems, when the crisis passes.

Via Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.

Cory says: “The package also needs to create Covidcare For All, universal health coverage for the duration of the emergency (and beyond, ideally – once Americans get a taste for it).”

Yes, you read that right. The company, Alteon Health, slashed benefits to emergency room healthcare workers during the pandemic. These emergency room healthcare workers are literally the most important people in the world right now.

Isaac Arnsdorf at ProPublica:

Alteon Health, a staffing company backed by private-equity firm Frazier Healthcare Partners, will cut salaries, time off and retirement benefits for providers, citing lost revenue. Several hospital operators announced similar cuts.

Most emergency room providers in the US work for companies like Alteon – staffing companies with contracts with hospitals. Coronavirus is eating into those companies' profits.

Steve Holtzclaw, CEO of Alteon Health, delivered bad news to employees Monday: “Despite the risks our providers are facing, and the great work being done by our teams, the economic challenges brought forth by COVID-19 have not spared our industry.”

The memo announced that the company would be reducing hours for clinicians, cutting pay for administrative employees by 20%, and suspending 401(k) matches, bonuses and paid time off. Holtzclaw indicated that the measures were temporary but didn’t know how long they would last.

In other words: Thanks for risking your lives and families to save the rest of us. Now go fuck yourselves.

The cuts are coming at a time when these emergency room workers are accruing the cost of living apart from their families to avoid infecting loved ones.

One doctor said he’s getting a $20,000 annual pay cut.

He said, “This decision is being made not by physicians but by people who are not on the front lines, who do not have to worry about whether I’m infecting my family or myself. If a company cannot support physicians during the toughest times, to me there’s a significant question of integrity.”

That’s far more diplomatic than I would use.

Hospital operators, including Tenet Healthcare, Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Atrius Health, are also announcing cuts.

Another Alteon physician said he had been planning to ask for time off to go help out in New York, where the coronavirus outbreak is the worst in the nation. Now he has no paid time off, and he thinks his employer won’t support him if he gets sick. He said if his pay drops he’ll have to look for a new job.

“I have a huge loan payment. I have rent. I have groceries. I’m not going to sacrifice my life for when I get sick and they’re going to say, ‘You were replaceable,’” the physician said. “I cannot believe they did that to us."

Tell me again why it would be bad for the US to have Medicaire for all?

Via Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

Until a few days ago, he and his seizure dog, Poppy, lived at Terminal 6, sleeping on the floor behind a pillar.

Stranded and homeless at LAX. Then coronavirus hit - Los Angeles Times

Devastating story, by Maria L. La Ganga with photographer Francine Orr:

Davis had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and epilepsy. He had been in foster care or adult protective services for most of his three decades. He survived on Social Security and food stamps. As Christmas Eve turned into Christmas Day, his wallet was stolen. Then his identity was hijacked and his bank account plundered.

What was already a precarious life began to spin out of control.

Davis and Poppy were not sick, yet the coronavirus hit them hard. The agencies that could help them, he said, had been mostly overwhelmed or closed in recent weeks. On Tuesday evening he had $5 and change. Poppy was out of dog food.

They were homeless and alone.

You’ve maybe heard that about half of Americans are one paycheck away from disaster and ruin. Davis is one of those people. $350 made all the difference to him between a comfortable, albeit difficult, life, and homelessness.