Category: Security and Privacy

Cameras are about to get a lot smaller

TheSmithy

THE pill-sized cameras in today’s mobile phones may seem miraculously tiny, given that a decade ago the smallest cameras available for retail sale were the size of a pack of cards. But Ali Hajimiri of the California Institute of Technology is unimpressed. In his opinion even these phone cameras are far too thick (witness the optical bump on the back of most mobile phones), so he and his team plan to replace them with truly minuscule devices that spurn every aspect of current photographic technology. Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat. The result, he hopes, will be the future of photography.

article

Economics of Money and Banking – Coursera

TheSmithy

About this course: The last three or four decades have seen a remarkable evolution in the institutions that comprise the modern monetary system. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 is a wakeup call that we need a similar evolution in the analytical apparatus and theories that we use to understand that system. Produced and sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, this course is an attempt to begin the process of new economic thinking by reviving and updating some forgotten traditions in monetary thought that have become newly relevant.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking

HN thread

More:

For a quick video intro I recommend this video from 3Blue1Brown (“youtube mathematician”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4

IMHO the best intro to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.

And a  guide

Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product. By Lewis H. Lapham (Petrified Forest)

TheSmithy

.. the distinctions between what Sigmund Freud in 1917 defines as real fear and neurotic fear, the former a rational and comprehensible response to the perception of clear and present danger, the latter “free-floating,” anxious expectation attachable to any something or nothing that catches the eye or the ear, floats the shadow on a wall or a wind in the trees.

.. people without a feeling of power over the outer world neither flee nor fight.

Fear is the foundation of all government, the law, or the commandment that maintains peace on earth, the hold on property, goodwill toward men. Several contributors to this issue speak authoritatively to the point, among them the Greek dramatist Aeschylus in 458 BC; Niccolò Machiavelli, sixteenth-century courtier and historian; Thomas Hobbes; and Andrés Bernáldez.

 

http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear

http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear/petrified-forest