Blockchain Real Estate, Bee Drone Tech & Narrative Economics

This Week Gamers Invested $1 Million in Virtual Blockchain Real Estate

  • This week alone, gamers, virtual reality enthusiasts, and the cryptocurrency community have invested nearly a million dollars worth of real world currencies into virtual real estate generated and maintained by blockchains.

Scientists look to bees to develop drone technology

  • British scientists are studying the way bees adapt to their surroundings to develop software which could guide a new generation of sophisticated drones.
  • “Bees are really consummate visual navigators,” he said. “They can navigate a complex 3D environment with minimal learning very robustly, using only a million neurons in a cubic millimetre of brain . . . For us they’re at a sweet spot for brain size and intelligence.”
  • Bee brains can multitask, adapt to new scenarios and learn very fast — in contrast to typical AI and machine learning systems designed by human engineers.

Robert Shiller on Narrative Economics

  • Shiller proposes a novel idea–that the narratives that people believe and use to understand the world affect their economic behavior and in turn affect the macroeconomy.

Odd Job: Meet an international pizza consultant

  • Anthony Falco travels the world, perfecting pizzas.

When rich folks move downtown, inequality gets worse

  • While this process of gentrification has long been decried for pushing out poor people, it also measurably worsens income inequality.