[Popular STEM] Curating the Internet: STEM digest for February 27, 2021

IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Stunning onboard video recording of Mars2020 Perseverance's complete planetary descent; Historian's TED talk argues that objective reality doesn't exist; A blogger describes the boot process of IBM's 1401 punch-card computer, from 1959; and A truly decentralized Internet moves another step closer

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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

First posted on the Steem blockchain: SteemIt.

1. Video Friday: A Blimp For Your Cat - This week, the IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes these:
   • Here's another video of Digi, a biped from Agility Robotics navigating hills and slippery surfaces.
   • This video from SkyMul shows SkyTy P3, their quadrotor drone that can take over the back-breaking task of tying rebar.
   • I guess a pet robot is better than a pet rock. Here is Flatcat.
   • Dave's Armoury has a pandemic-era socially distanced, fully remote, romantic dinner date.
   • Lola, a biped from TUM, can walk on piles of loosely stacked boards.
   • and more...

   and here's the title video, a drone for cats to play with:


2. Onboard Video of the Perseverance Rover Landing is the Most Incredible Thing I've Ever Seen - More from IEEE Spectrum, here is video of the entire descent from NASA's Mars2020 Perseverance's onboard camera.
   
   
   
   
   Related: @primevaldad reports on Steem that the parachute design contained a message.
   
   
   See if you can figure out what it is.


3. Why there's no such thing as objective reality | Greg Anderson - In this TED talk, Greg Anderson argues that humans live in a "storyverse" that contains many different versions of reality. Drawing on his background as an historian, Anderson argues that the modern perspective that humans are unique individuals who are endowed with free will and independent rights is unique to our modern cultures. As an example, he uses the reality of the ancient Atheniens, whose reality was saturated with Gods and metaphysical characters, and whose reality was made up of families, not of individuals. The ancient Athenien reality, then was a symbiotic mix of Gods, nature, and people. He goes on to argue that this sort-of outlook on reality is far more common than the modern perspective where humans are individuals, and where the rest of nature is subordinate to human needs and desires. He goes on to suggest that it takes an immense amount of arrogance to think that our version of reality is right, and everyone else's is wrong. Finally, he points out that there has been research for more than a hundred years suggesting that reality is comprised of a mixture of what exists and how we interact with it. In closing, he summarizes his argument, saying that (i) historical real worlds were different from ours, but not wrong; (ii) the modern view of reality has failed - catastrophically - in practice; and (iii) Other perspectives on reality still survive in the modern world, and we can learn much about sustainability from them.
   
   Note: I don't question his facts, but I don't agree with all of his interpretations. It is a thought provoking talk, though.


4. Booting the IBM 1401: How a 1959 punch-card computer loads a program - Ken Shirriff describes the process used to boot an IBM 1401 computer from punch-cards in 1959. Challenges included the fact that the computer had no operating system and no read only memory (ROM). To work around these challenges, half of each card contained the code that was needed to load the other half into memory. This technology predates my own experience, but not by much. When I first joined the computing industry, we were still running payroll from punch cards, and the first corporate downsizing that I remember is when our keypunch operators got laid off. -h/t OS news


5. Welcome to ThreeFold - Truly decentralized Internet is getting closer and closer.... I've been looking for something like this for years, first around 2000 at the corporate/enterprise level, and starting around 2016 - with the advent of cryptocurrencies like "Golem", "GridCoin", "Storj", and "Sia" - at the global/retail level. Of course, Tron's Bittorrent File System (BTFS) plays in this sandbox, too.
   
   The explosion in offerings springing up since 2016 has been remarkable.
   
   One day in the not-too-distant future, every person in any household with power and Internet can generate income as a cloud computing operator.
   
   Related: I learned about it from the PreSearch page to Run a Node. Decentralized and private search is also becoming a reality.



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