A mask that detects COVID, autonomous wormbots, and why Netflix films look so creepy
Today’s Linkfest: I find things to help you procrastinate
It’s Monday, and you’re desperately trying to avoid doing work!
Friend, I’ve got your back. Every Monday I send out this Linkfest, in which I scour the Global Information Superhighway to find the finest procrastination material. While you read this, stare attentively at the screen and pretend you’re reading a memo.
Let’s begin …
1) 🦠 A mask that detects COVID
Check out that mask above: It contains what is essentially a tiny lab — freeze-dried bits of the molecular machinery inside cells that can read DNA and output RNA. If the mini-lab detects the presence of COVID-19, it’ll display the results on a little strip that’s kind of the “results” panel on a home-pregnancy test. Basically, if you’re wearing the mask, it’ll tell you if you’ve either been exposed to COVID-19 or been infected with it yourself. (Full paper here; plaintext writeup here.)
It’s super cool. This tech could also be used to detect lots of different pathogens and diseases, too; as one of the inventors notes …
“This technology could be incorporated into lab coats for scientists working with hazardous materials or pathogens, scrubs for doctors and nurses, or the uniforms of first responders and military personnel.”
Quite apart from COVID, this could be key for managing future pandemics. One big lesson we learned from the coronavirus is that rapid, rapid, rapid testing is key to preventing spread and keeping society functioning as much as possible.
2) 🤖 Behold the Tremors-like spectacle of an autonomous burrowing worm-robot
“Soft” is the new trend in robotics — where engineers are discovering that supple-limbed and squishy robots can be better at navigating the world than stiff-legged ones. This makes sense, of course: Humans and other animals are jiggly and soft, and that’s a key part of what make us so nimble. General Electric has created an earthworm-style robot, “powered by fluidic artificial muscles,” that can burrow into the ground. As a GE engineer said in their press release …
“By creating a smaller footprint that can navigate extreme turning radiuses, function autonomously, and reliably operate through rugged, extreme environments, we’re opening up a whole new world of potential applications that go well beyond commercially available technologies.”
I’m impressed! Yet that wormbot is pretty … unsettling to watch in action, no?This is some Tremors-level stuff, man. I’ve found this is a general trend in soft robotics: It is a remarkable, ingenious, pioneering field of engineering that often leaves my skin crawling. Indeed, robotic biomimicry in general seems to suffer from this perceptual problem, as the NYPD recently discovered when it proudly showed off its robotic dog from Boston Dynamics and the public was like “what the hell is that”.
3) 🕹️ Tic-tac-toe created using COBOL
Here’s a delightful project by @iwriteawfulcode, who explains: “got tired of all my other projects and wrote a tic-tac-toe game in cobol”. Her Github repo for the project is here.
What can’t COBOL do? It rocks, people! I love reading it. It’s logorrheaically verbose, crufty, weird, ancient and designed to allow — nay, encourage — spaghetti code … but damn, it runs the entire financial world. (“The second most valuable asset in the United States — after oil — is the 240 billion lines of COBOL.”)
Let’s re-implement everything in COBOL. Let’s implement Instagram!
InstaCOBOL! COBOLfluencers! “Doin it for the cobe.”
I’ll shut up now.
4) 🎥 Why made-for-Netflix movies look so weird
I often find them offputtingly hyper-real, and wondered: Is it just me?
Nope. It’s because Netflix requires all made-for-Netflix films to be shot in with a “true 4K UHD sensor” that is 3,840 pixels wide. Aaaaand …
“This is not as much of a problem on a big screen, when the images are huge, but the high resolution is really noticeable when the images are compressed on the kind of domestic TV or computer screens most people use to stream Netflix. The edges look too sharp, the shades too clearly delineated — compared to what we have been used to as cinemagoers.”
We’ve seen this problem before. Video games developed a version of this precise problem back in the 00s and 10s. The games industry spent two decades frantically rolling out hardware and 3D engines in a desperate attempt to make games photorealistic, only to find that ultra-realism doesn’t look good. These days, “realistic” game companies are so neck-deep in the Uncanny Valley that their only hope is to normalize the creepitude, and train generations of gamers to believe that plasticine-textured skin and dead-fish expressions look wonderfully true to life. (In this latter task, they are, alas, succeeding.) Now it’s Hollywood’s turn to join them in this cultural hole-digging …
5) 🎼 What a FOR loop sounds like — turning Node events into music
Ronen Lahat wrote a fun tool that takes the event loop in Node and turns it into sounds. Here’s what a long FOR loop (run 1 million times!) sounds like …
Listening to your code is a super cool idea. It could, as Lahat notes, give programmers a whole new way to debug — you could notice things with your ears that might not be apparent with your eyes. (He includes some great sound clips of common server errors.) Cognitive psychologists have long noticed that multimodal perception is super powerful: When the stuff our eyes and ears matches up (or diverges) it really helps us figure out what’s going on in the world.
Now we need someone to add an olfactory element, so “bad smells” in code can become literally true.
6) ✨ Oh, you’re *still* not ready to start working? Cool. Here’s a sudden-death round …
➡️ Americans use 20 trillion gallons of water annually watering our lawns, which is 66% of what we use irrigating all crops. ➡️ Despite its name, DARPA’s “Underminer” project is not, in fact, trying to develop high-tech ways of negging people. ➡️ Oven bacon. ➡️ Would you like a phone that includes a built-in drone that can fly out to take remote pictures? ➡️ The genetic reason that cauliflower grow in fractal patterns. ➡️ If you’re sick of fidget spinners, you could try fidget strips.
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.
