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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • Rail is required below Vyšehrad, or else Prague’s transport gets severely crippled.

    Now the corridor desperately needs a third rail. The main question right now is whether to:

    • upgrade the bridge, whose longetivity is dubious (studies vary wildly by how much needs to be replaced within 20 years), or
    • dismantle and move the bridge to a place where a cycle/pedestrian one is needed and build a similar-looking but modern one, which would easily last over 100 more years. This is potentially more expensive and UNESCO doesn’t like the panorama to be messed with.










  • I’m wondering what it would be like to keep the metabolism of a brain-dead organism going and controlling it via the nervous system, thereby creating a cyborg (but in reverse as opposed to most sci-fi ones).

    Like, imagine an irrecoverable comatose patient whose every speech-related nerve is tapped. Using machine learning, one could create a neural network that maps all muscle movements to sounds and vice versa. The setup could then play any waveform to just about the best of the vocal tract’s ability – in short, turning the body into a peak beatboxer. (With multiple such cyborgs or a looper, one could achieve arbitrary precision at recreating sound waves! There can be actual uses too, like letting paralyzed people speak again, but I all can think of is whether the paper of this research ends up using Bad Apple!! or Never Gonna Give You Up as the demo song, and whether there’s going to be an acapella band touring with effectively propped-up corpses.)