I think Venmo failed me. It looks like I may be out $150.

Venmo is an app that lets you pay friends electronically. But my friend said she never got the money. So why did my bank deduct the $150 from my account? The bank said that was Venmo’s problem.

When I called Venmo, I got a recorded message: “Venmo cannot cancel a payment sent to a registered payee. Only if the payee agrees can it be refunded.” But my friend won’t agree to cancel something that never happened. Even her bank told her to steer clear.

I tried going to Venmo.com for more info, but my Malwarebytes Browser Guard flagged it as unsafe. I had to turn the guard off to go to the site. There I learned that the app lets you tap “take back” to cancel a payment. Unfortunately, it kept giving me an error message: “! HTTP 400 Bad Request.” So I waited almost a week and tried again. This time, the app let me cancel. But I still don’t have my money back. Venmo must be laughing all the way to the bank. Update: Venmo finally refunded the $150, but it took a while.

Learn Something New

“Learn About” is a new artificially intelligent tool from Google. It gives you direct answers in a conversational style, instead of a list of links.

Start by going to Learning.Google or do a Google search on “Google Learn About.” At the site, you can either type something or click an example. I clicked “What’s the biggest wave ever surfed?” It brought me to a video of a guy on an 86-foot wave in Portugal. By contrast, a regular Google search gave me lots of links with text before I got to the video.

Next, I asked: “How much can the US President really affect the economy?” Learn About divided the answer into four areas: fiscal policy, trade policy, appointments and regulations, with information on each. With the typical Google search, I got lots of links to articles about the effect of President Donald Trump on the economy. The first one, from CBS, gave specifics on how each income level would go up, from $320 for those making around $20,000 a year to $376,910 for those making over $14 million.

I like both approaches. Learn About is great if you follow up with questions. I had a great conversation about the impact of technology on human behavior.

Human Kite

On YouTube, you can watch a man in a wingsuit soar like a human kite, starting from a snowy Swiss mountaintop 13,330 feet high. As he flies over glaciers, waterfalls and forests, he battles tricky wind conditions, before descending at 124 miles per hour.

Peter Salzmman’s flight lasts nearly six minutes, covering 7.7 miles. From the side, he looks flat as a pancake. Head on, he looks like a disembodied head. His wingsuit, engineered by Red Bull scientists, is 6.8 feet long. The technology was inspired by water sports. His flight set a record.

Search on “Red Bull racing engineers helped design this record setting wingsuit,” to watch it. There’s a brief interview afterward the flight.

Solving the Partisan Divide

Everyone is talking about the partisan divide. As the old song goes, “I’m for peace and freedom, not like the rest of you squares.” But with Google’s Habermas Machine, an artificially intelligent mediator, we may get to some kind of consensus.

The Habermas Machine takes down everyone’s statements, looking for common ground, then creates a group statement. The statement with the highest predicted acceptance score is presented to the group. Then everyone has a chance to critique it, and their words are fed back into the machine.

To test it, over 5,000 British people discussed issues such as “should we be trying to reduce the number of people in prison?” Before the experiment, only 60 percent of participants said yes. After the machine’s mediation, 75 percent agreed. It didn’t work well on strongly divisive issues like Brexit, where people clung to their original positions. But at the end, the groups were much less divided than they were at the start.

Fun and Games

For a fun history game, search on “Tom Watson Wikitrivia.” It starts with an event on a timeline, such as “Middle Ages, 1500.” When I played, the second event was labeled “statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the seven wonders of the world.” After that, I got the “Ubaid period,” the “Opera web browser,” and the “birth of Tanya Roberts.” Your job is to place events on the timeline until you’ve made three mistakes. Afterwards, I looked up events I’d never heard of.

Printing Your Next House

Move over 3D printing for homebuilding. Now there’s a cement-free alternative. Called “impact printing,” it’s the brainchild of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Impact printing uses sand, silt, clay and gravel to make homes. The clay acts as a binder. The sand or gravel makes the mix stronger and more stable. You don’t need additives like cement because impact printing deposits the materials at a high velocity for maximum bonding, even before the bonding material is added.

Avoiding cement, which is responsible for eight percent of global CO2 emissions, is great for the environment. The materials used instead are less carbon-intensive, more sustainable and more affordable.

In three years, people may move into the first impact-printed homes. For more info, see the Ars Technica article and this video: “3D printing buildings without cement.”

Filed under: AI, digital, environment, games, Google, trends, YouTube