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Understanding machine learning models
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How Google uses logic in machine learning
Most of these stories here are about how we mistake incremental improvements. But the story of the movie projector is a story about theft.
Francis Jenkins built what we consider the ur-instrument of the motion-picture industry with a projector that showed strips of films for 1/24th of a second, creating the illusion of moving pictures.
But his financial backer stole the Jenkins prototype and sold it to a theater chain, which called it the "Edison Vitascope" for no better reason than the word Edison was familiar and useful for branding.
His legacy here was mostly the work of a thief.
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70 reads
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Incandescent light bulbs existed before Thomas Edison, and when other inventors got wind of Edison's tinkerings, they roundly sued him for patent infringement.
So what did Edison actually do?
He discovered that a special species of bamboo had a higher resis...
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192 reads
Speaking of building bikes, that's exactly what Orville and Wilbur Wright did before they became the first team to fly a heavier-than-air machine.
When the Wrights asked the Smithsonian for all available information on the history of flight in 1899, they o...
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204 reads
The "Farnsworth Invention" was named after Philo T. Farnsworth, the nominal father of television. But his invention was neither his nor an invention.
In 1927, Farnsworth projected a straight line on a machine he called the Image Dissector, which is truly t...
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69 reads
Samuel Morse was with friends and debating electromagnetism when he realized that if an electrical signal could travel instantly across a wire, why couldn't information do the same?
The telegraph was invented by not only Morse, but also Charles Wheatstone...
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91 reads
The car industry represents the epitome of incremental innovation. Take a tricycle. Add an engine. You've got a car. (Just look at the picture of the the original Benz Motorwagen from 1885).
Condensing the invention of cars to those six words leaves out a lot of detail and a few m...
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81 reads
The fabric cotton comes from cotton fibers that mix with seeds in the pods of cotton plants. To make the fabric, therefore, you have to separate the fibers from the seeds.
For centuries this was done mostly by hand, until Eli Whitney "invented" the cotton gin in 1...
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68 reads
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Alexander Graham Bell invented a technology that would later bear his name. But how much did he deserve it?
The problem that Bell solved was to turn electrical signals into sounds.
Philip Reis had already designed a sound transmitter in 1860, and Hermann Lud...
26
89 reads
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Tells the story of the lone survivor of a plane crash in the far north. Living out of the carcass of his plane, he hones a routine for staying fed and attempting to signal potential rescuers eventually leaving the plane to increase his odds of being rescued.
A lot of research on surv...
The car industry represents the epitome of incremental innovation. Take a tricycle. Add an engine. You've got a car. (Just look at the picture of the the original Benz Motorwagen from 1885).
Condensing the invention of cars to those six words leaves out a lot of detail and a few m...
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