Month: February 2012

Millions of drones by 2020

Printing Drones by the Sheet (or how we get to 10s of billions of drones by 2020) Pratheev Sreetharan on the old way of making micro-drones: “You’d take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue. Then, with that tiny ball of glue, you’d go in under a microscope like an arthroscopic surgeon and try to stick it in the right place.”

The FAA currently estimates that there will be 30K drones licensed to operate in US skies by 2020. It’s a misleading estimate. Why? It only counts large, professional drones (and even that estimate is low). It doesn’t count all of the small/micro drones operating below ~120m and at slower airspeeds. How many micro-drones will there be by 2020?

Anthropocene stats

  • We are the major form of erosion of rock.
  • We are using ~10% of the energy processed by the biosphere.
  • 83% of the earth’s land surface is influenced directly by human beings.
  • We are fixing 190 megatons of nitrogen per year, about the same amount that the entire biosphere fixes.
  • We appropriate 25% – 40% of the total net primary productivity of the planet for our use.
  • Humanity have 8x the mass of all wild land vertebrates (40 megatons), and the same biomass as all the fish and whales in the ocean. Domesticated animals have a biomass of ~100 megatons of carbon. The biomass of our animals is 20x the mass of all wild vertebrates on land, and 50% larger than the mass of all vertebrates in the ocean.
  • Only 10% of the land area is more than 48 hours from a large city.

Time Crystals


Sounds like the plot line from schlocky sf. And then there is this:

It may be possible to exploit time crystals to perform computations using 0 energy. It is interesting to speculate that a quantum mechanical system whose states could be interpreted as a collection of qubits, could be engineered to traverse a programmed landscape of structured states in Hilbert space over time.

2017-01-27: New paper by Norman Yao

If crystals have an atomic structure that repeats in space, like the carbon lattice of a diamond, why can’t crystals also have a structure that repeats in time? That is, a time crystal?

In a paper, he describes exactly how to make and measure the properties of such a crystal, and even predicts what the various phases surrounding the time crystal should be — akin to the liquid and gas phases of ice.

This is not mere speculation. 2 groups have already created the first-ever time crystals, using 2 totally different setups.

2021-08-06: They’re real.

Time crystals illuminate something profound about the nature of time. “However much you try to treat [time] as being just another dimension, it is always kind of an outlier.” Einstein made the best attempt at unification, weaving 3D space together with time into a 4D fabric: space-time. But even in his theory, unidirectional time is unique. With time crystals,, “this is the first case that I know of where all of a sudden time is just 1 of the gang.”

More bakeries wanted

There are way too many places selling shit like cupcakes and not enough places selling good bread. cupcakes, the short bus of baking.
2019-05-06: NYC eventually delivered.

Bakeries play many roles in our lives: They have that pick-me-up chocolate chip cookie we need after a particularly trying day or they’re home to our favorite lunchtime sandwich. They take all the guesswork out of Thanksgiving pies and simply make breakfast better in the form of croissants, bialys, and bagels. New York is no stranger to tightly spiraled pain au chocolates, dense savory scones, or life-affirming Rugelach, but that hasn’t stopped nearly 12 new bakeries — many of them European imports — from opening their doors in Brooklyn and Manhattan in hopes of securing a coveted spot in our carb-loving hearts. If you’re finding it impossible to keep up, don’t worry: Grub has you covered with this guide to New York City’s recent bakery boom.

War with Iran?

That is the path we are on: Israel and America will soon go to war with Iran — for as many times as it takes. In each instance, our proximate goal will be to kick the nuclear “can” as far down the road as possible, but our ultimate goal will be regime change.

Nothing is going to stop this war dynamic from unfolding — not China, the U.N., the Pentagon’s strategic “pivot” to East Asia, our upcoming presidential election, nor our nation’s much-discussed war fatigue, much less “decline.”

Nothing.

So get ready for war with Iran. Because once Assad is gone, that is what comes next.