周六(8/17) 1.機器人送貨到家 2.時空旅遊 回到過去?

星期六 聚會時間 晚上7:00-9:00

板橋區文化路一段421巷11弄1號 (陽光甜味咖啡館)

新埔捷運站1號出口 旁邊7-11巷子進入20公尺 看到夏朵美髮左轉

機器人送貨到家

8 robots racing to win the delivery wars of 2019

By Jesus Diaz   fastcompany

CES 2019 has brought three new automated robot vehicles to an already hotly contested race to get your dinner, groceries, and packages to your home or office desk.

The goal of all these robots is to deliver for what the industry calls the “last mile,” or the distance from a local depot to a final destination. Right now, these routes are covered by humans in cars or vans. This is inefficient–it uses too much energy and worsens congestion. In some cases, for instance on campuses or inside large office complexes, it’s time-consuming and impractical.

Enter delivery robots. These small bots could, in theory, solve many of these “last mile” problems by offering an efficient, quick, and inexpensive way to get your stuff whenever you needed it. This is easier said than done; there are plenty of unanswered questions about how these bots should operate in society. They must be good citizens, respect humans, and do their job as invisibly as possible. All without getting attacked or bursting into flames first.

There’s a competition afoot to build the best delivery bot–and deploy them successfully in the real world. Here are some of the front-runners.

Meet the Loomo Delivery: a completely autonomous hauling robot debuted last week at CES 2019 by Segway, the personal mobility company (which seems to be doing lots of weird stuff these days).

If the Loomo looks like an office copier, well, that may be because it’s actually designed for use in offices. Segway’s aim here seems to be to own delivery within the many offices in the world that are large enough to need their own automated internal delivery systems to replace their human counterparts. The company says it’s aiming at China’s booming delivery market too, where the “last-mile delivery and takeout services market has been rapidly expanding with an annual growth rate of 30% to 50%.”

The company’s bot uses 4G or Wi-Fi to connect to the cloud to automatically set up map routes, adjust schedules, and be monitored by its human masters in real time. It can deliver a maximum weight of about 110 pounds. The technology that powers the Loomo Delivery bot is already available for preorder–but as a “personal transporter” that hearkens back to the company’s most famous product. The company says that the transporter’s success drove them to the development of Loomo Delivery.

Anybotics and Continental also introduced a new robot delivery system at CES 2019–one that scares the hell out of me after watching Metalhead, the Black Mirror episode about the hunting robo-dog assassin.

The two companies have invented a two-part solution: First, there’s an autonomous delivery van developed by Continental. Then, inside the van, there are robotic dogs developed by Anymal. When it gets to a particular area, the delivery van doors open and the dogs emerge, carrying packages and their destinations in their little AI-powered brains. This solves the problem of the limited range of small delivery bots. By deploying them from a larger vehicle, they can easily reach their destination and get back to the mothership to ride to another destination while recharging.

The companies say the robot dogs can carry your stuff on sidewalks, through doors, and up elevators and stairs–all the way to your home or office door. When it gets where it’s supposed to be, it places your package on your doorstep and rings your doorbell. Rest well for now, though: There’s no date for deployment yet.

This cute robot is Serve, a tiny electric beast that can carry up to 50 pounds over a 30-mile radius. According to Postmates–the delivery company looking to replace its costly gig-economy workers with a piece of machinery that never complains–the bot is designed to make people around it feel at ease.

For starters, the LIDAR-powered bot has big humanoid eyes, like Pixar’s cute robot Wall-E. Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann said in a press note that these eyes are not just decoration: “We have developed a specific rover-human interface so that people understand what rovers are doing at any moment.” Postmates clearly hopes that Serve’s human-centered design will help it avoid running into people or clogging up sidewalks–common issues with delivery bots.

 

時空旅遊 回到過去?

How Traveling Back In Time Could Really, Physically Be Possible

It’s one of the greatest tropes in movies, literature, and television shows: the idea that we could travel back in time to alter the past. From the time turner in Harry Potter to Back To The Future to Groundhog Day, traveling back in time provides us with the possibility of righting wrongs in our own past. To most people, it’s an idea that’s relegated to the realm of fiction, as every law of physics indicates that motion forward through time is an absolute necessity. Philosophically, there’s also a famous paradox that seems to indicate the absurdity of such a possibility: if traveling backwards through time were possible, you’d be able to go back and kill your grandfather before your parents were ever conceived, rendering your own existence impossible. For a long time, there seemed to be no way to go back. But thanks to some very interesting properties of space and time in Einstein’s General Relativity, traveling back in time may be possible after all.

An illustration of the early Universe as consisting of quantum foam, where quantum fluctuations are large, varied, and important on the smallest of scales. Positive and negative energy fluctuations can create minuscule, quantum wormholes.

The place to start is with the physical idea of a wormhole. In our known Universe, we have tiny, minuscule quantum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime on the smallest of scales. These include energy fluctuations in both the positive and negative directions, often very close by one another. A very strong, dense, positive energy fluctuation would create curved space in one particular fashion, while a strong, dense, negative energy fluctuation would curve space in exactly the opposite fashion. If you connected these two curvature regions together, you could — for a brief instant — arrive at the notion of a quantum wormhole. If the wormhole lasted for long enough, you could even potentially transport a particle through it, allowing it to instantly disappear from one location in spacetime and reappear in another.

Exact mathematical plot of a Lorentzian wormhole. If one end of a wormhole is built out of positive mass/energy, while the other is built of negative mass/energy, the wormhole can become traversible. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Kes47.

If we want to scale that up, however, to allow something like a human being through, that’s going to take some work. While every known particle in our Universe has positive energy and either positive or zero mass, it’s eminently possible to have negative mass/energy particles in the framework of General Relativity. Sure, we haven’t discovered any yet, but according to all the rules of theoretical physics, there’s nothing forbidding it.

If this negative mass/energy matter exists, then creating both a supermassive black hole and the negative mass/energy counterpart to it, while then connecting them, should allow for a traversible wormhole. No matter how far apart you took these two connected objects from one another, if they had enough mass/energy — of both the positive and negative kind — this instantaneous connection would remain. All of that is great for instantaneous travel through space. But what about time? Here’s where the laws of special relativity come in.

A “light clock” will appear to run different for observers moving at different relative speeds, but this is due to the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein’s law of special relativity governs how these time and distance transformations take place, but it means that the stationary and the moving parties age at different rates.

If you travel close to the speed of light, you experience a phenomenon known as time dilation. Your motion through space and your motion through time are related by the speed of light: the greater your motion through space, the less your motion through time. Imagine you had a destination that was 40 light years away, and you were able to travel at incredibly high speeds: over 99.9% the speed of light. If you got into a spaceship and traveled very close to the speed of light towards that star, then stopped, turned around, and returned back to Earth, you’d find something odd.

Due to time dilation and length contraction, you might reach your destination in only a year, and then come back in just another year. But back on Earth, 82 years would have passed. Everyone you know would have aged tremendously. This is the standard way time travel physically works: it takes you into the future, with the amount of travel forward in time dependent only on your motion through space.

Is time travel possible? With a large enough wormhole, such as one created by a supermassive black hole connected to its negative mass/energy counterpart, it just might be.

Read More 看完整內容

周六(8/10) 1.單身狗! 2.聊天高手

星期六 聚會時間 晚上7:00-9:00

板橋區文化路一段421巷11弄1號 (陽光甜味咖啡館)

新埔捷運站1號出口 旁邊7-11巷子進入20公尺 看到夏朵美髮左轉

單身狗!

Words that Describe the Dating Scene in China

yoyochinese.com

From China to the USA, boxes of heart shaped chocolates are already half-finished and bunches of red roses are starting to wilt – February 14th is officially over (phew!).

In last week's Anti-Valentine's Day post, I introduced some of the fun and stress that young Chinese people face during China's hyper-commercialized Valentine’s Day. 

This week, I'm introducing expressions that show the intense pressure placed on young Chinese people to find love and get married.

You'll see that money isn't the only thing that makes the dating scene more frightening than fun.

If the cheesiness and monetary drain caused by Valentine’s Day is bad, then being single is even worse. Traditional attitudes of parents and relatives often view an unmarried person in their 30s as an embarrassment at best, and a disaster at worst. The weight of this burden is so big that the industry for “fake” boyfriends and girlfriends is booming in China. That's right, an unmarried Chinese person can pay a

If the cheesiness and monetary drain caused by Valentine’s Day is bad, then being single is even worse. Traditional attitudes of parents and relatives often view an unmarried person in their 30s as an embarrassment at best, and a disaster at worst.

The weight of this burden is so big that the industry for “fake” boyfriends and girlfriends is booming in China. That's right, an unmarried Chinese person can pay a "fake" boyfriend or girlfriend to travel home with them for the holidays.

The following two expressions perfectly illustrate the stresses facing single Chinese people. Use these to complain about being unlucky in love, or commiserate with your single friends.

单身狗 (dān shēn gǒu)  – "single dog"

This is a mildly insulting term for a single person. You can use it to describe yourself, or poke fun at your close friends.

Come February 14th, my WeChat (China’s version of Facebook) is usually full of friends complaining:

我是单身狗 (wǒ shì dān shēn gǒu)  – I am a single dog.

Note: when several friends are all single, they often take pride in the title 单身狗 (dān shēn gǒu).  "Single and proud!"

 单身狗 (dān shēn gǒu) –

剩女 (shèng nǚ)  / 剩男 (shèng nán)  – “leftover” woman/man

This unfortunate name refers to people in their late 20s or older who aren't married yet.

Given the stigma attached to being above 30 and single, these people are seen as unlikely to find a husband or wife, and are therefore “leftover”.

This term is most often used to apply to educated urban women who prioritize their career above starting a family.

In my adoptive city of Shanghai, people will often comment:

上海剩女越来越多 (shàng hǎi shèng nǚ yuè lái yuè duō)  – There are more and more “leftover women” in Shanghai.

There is a lot of pressure to find a partner. So it’s not surprising that most people in China want to get coupled up—most importantly for the annual trip back home at Chinese New Year (which usually falls in the same month as Valentine’s Day).

The familiar approaches of meeting potential life partners at college, work, or through online dating services are certainly widely used. But the 相亲市场 (xiāng qīn shì chǎng)  – "matchmaking fair" or "marriage market" remains an important, if slightly ruthless, method of finding a spouse.

These events can range from a low-key street corner gathering (where parents clutch their children’s credentials and negotiate fervently), to large-scale Expo-style fairs with tens of thousands of attendees.

The familiar approaches of meeting potential life partners at college, work, or through online dating services are certainly widely used. But the 相亲市场 (xiāng qīn shì chǎng) –

 

聊天高手

Ways to get better at small talk

Shana Lebowitz businessinsider.com

Whether you're speed-dating, networking, or simply socializing, knowing how to start an engaging chat is a must.

But it's not always easy. What if you and your conversation partner seem to have nothing in common? What if there's an awkward pause? What if you accidentally insult the person?

To help you out, we reviewed the Quora thread "How can I get better at small talk?" and highlighted some of the most helpful responses.

Read on to impress new acquaintances with your masterful conversation skills.

1. Demonstrate interest in your conversation partner

Several Quora users noted that the best way to keep a conversation rolling is to show you care about what the other person has to say.

"If you don't fundamentally care about the person you are speaking with, that will show, and that may be the primary reason why you are running out of things to discuss," writes Kai Peter Chang.

That also means letting your conversation partner share information about himself or herself.

"Let the other person speak more," writes Anam Gulraiz. "People LOVE talking about themselves."

2. Ask open-ended questions

Instead of asking yes/no questions that lead to dead ends, encourage your conversation partner to share some more detail about his or her life.

"In general, open-ended questions lead to more conversational paths," says Craig Welland.

For example, instead of asking a fellow party guest, "Are you here with your family?" you might ask, "How did you meet the host?"

3. Allow your conversation partner to teach you

"If there's a subject you're not familiar with, just be honest with that person and nine out of ten times they'll teach you about it," writes Michael Wong.

It goes back to that central idea of letting other people do most of the talking. Asking the other person to explain what they mean means they'll be talking for at least another few minutes.

In the days leading up to a social function, take time to peruse the news.

Flickr / Elvert Barnes

4. Read the news

In the days leading up to a social function, take time to peruse the news, "including the sections that don't really interest you," writes Mark Simchock.

That way, if a conversation should come to an abrupt halt, you can fill the silence with, "Hey, did you hear about …" or "Man, how about that … ?"

Read More 看完整內容

周六(8/3)1鬼月禁忌.2.毒舌

星期六 聚會時間 晚上7:00-9:00

板橋區文化路一段421巷11弄1號 (陽光甜味咖啡館)

新埔捷運站1號出口 旁邊7-11巷子進入20公尺 看到夏朵美髮左轉

鬼月禁忌

Taboos to dodge during Taiwan's Ghost Month | Taiwan News

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) -- Taiwan's Ghost Month (鬼月), observed in the 7th month of the lunar calendar, is once again here, this year running from Aug. 1 to Aug. 29, and Taiwan News has created a list of 10 creepy taboos to duck during this month in Taiwan.

 Don't go near dangerous coastal areas or streams

Although many say it is dangerous to swim at all during Ghost Month. A more nuanced version of the superstition is that one should avoid dangerous coastal areas and streams.

It is said that water ghosts like to find someone to replace them. From a common-sense standpoint, it is probably prudent to avoid places such as Mystery Beach in Nan'ao Township, Yilan County when typhoons approach and mountain streams when afternoon thunderstorms are frequent during this time of year.

Avoid going into the wilderness at night

There are believed to be many spirits in the forest at night. If a person's Eight Characters (八字) horoscope (four pairs, including year, month, day, and hour of a person's birth) horoscope is "too light" (太輕) it will be easy for them to be influenced by spirits, so they may encounter ghosts more easily and be put under their spell.

Don't hold an umbrella indoors

The umbrella is traditionally used to collect souls and is also a typical hiding place for ghosts. If one holds an umbrella in the house, Good Brothers are liable to be attracted to hide underneath.

Avoid taking the last bus at all cost

Midnight during Ghost Month is Yin energy is at its strongest. Do not take the last bus or other modes of mass transit to avoid Good Brother joining in on the journey home.

Knock on the door when entering hotel room, step in sideways

Knock on the door before entering a hotel room for the first time. After knocking, enter the room sideways to avoid a head-on collision with a Good Brother.

 Don't arrange shoes in doorway, next to bed, or facing bed

Seeing the shoes in the doorway will inform the Good Brother how many people are in the room. The direction of the shoes indicates where they are.

If the shoes are pointed toward the bed, the ghost will hop in too. This could lead to a situation of being pinned to the bed by a ghost (鬼壓床).

毒舌

The Tongue Like a Sharp Knife    zendirt

“The tongue like a sharp knife… Kills without drawing blood.”

It is said that a dull knife is far more dangerous than a sharp one.  The idea being that a dull jagged blade will cut with tearing and great mess, whereas a sharp edge will cut with surgical precision and no tearing.  Using this metaphor with the tongue, which of course forms our words, sends a powerful message.  It is saying that words can be very powerful, and can do great damage, can even kill, but without drawing actual blood.

Words can be used to command an army to kill a large number of people, destroy cities, and execute innocent people.  They can also be used to hurt people around us, those we don’t know, and even people we love.  If we are mindful of our words, and respect their great power, like a sword, we will know to hesitate before drawing this deadly weapon.  When we get angry, we may speak horrible, deadly words without thinking, and without intending the maliciousness that they will be perceived as.

We must keep our words sheathed, ready but knowing that unless we want to do damage, we should wait to speak until we know how to control the words that come out.

Q:

What do you think the saying that “the tongue like a sharp knife”?

How to avoid hurting others' feelings with our words?

How to show respect when making conversation?

Is being sarcastic good or bad?

How to communicate your opinion peacefully?

How to block out negative comments?

Read More 看完整內容