Sapere Aude
Month: June 2017
what it looks like when global fishing stocks collapse.
Gangs of aggressive killer whales are shaking down Alaska fishing boats for their fish. The animals have learned to target individual boats, and are leading fishers on high-speed chases to get away
wow. reminds me of cyriak in parts
IEEE floats are broken. Posits beat floats at their own game:
• superior accuracy, dynamic range, closure
• Bitwise-reproducible answers (at last!)
• Proven better answers with same number of bits
• …or, equally good answers with fewer bits
• Simpler, more elegant design can reduce silicon cost, energy, and latency.
on the utter failure, on all levels, of ubuntu touch, a attempt to build a new mobile os.
I feel like the announcement of a new and independent mobile operating system platform was a good reason for the architects to say: “Yeah, let’s do this, but let’s do it The Right Way™ and be better than all the others”. Ubuntu wouldn’t just have a graphical user interface, it would have one that could work on all devices and adapt to all form factors. It wouldn’t just isolate applications against each other the way the Linux kernel or Android did, it would have full-blown confinement which also protected your data and privacy. It would magically prevent apps from draining the battery. And so on. Whatever the others did on the technical side, Ubuntu would do it better and in a more elegant way.
From this day forward, Ken doesn’t always have to look like the most basic frat bro ever to get a B- in econ. He can be complicated, mysterious—maybe even vegan. No more Mr. Nice Ken. Actually, he’ll still be very, very nice.
The first spacecraft to fly into the sun’s atmosphere will also be the fastest human-made vehicle ever, at 195 km / s.
2019-07-29: There’s a related experiment that simulates the solar magnetic field in a lab:
The twisting loops of the sun’s magnetic field control the flow of charged particles throughout the solar system. For the first time, researchers have created a scale model of this mysterious environment. “Because they’re a lab experiment, they can change some of their parameters, right?. And we can’t. The sun does what it’s going to do.” As the Parker Solar Probe circles the sun over the next few years, it will pass through the corona and collect data that researchers can compare to the laboratory results. “Stuff that they’re seeing, if it’s real, we should see it.”
2021-12-15: This has now happened.
The first passage through the corona, which lasted only a few hours, is one of many planned for the mission. Parker will continue to spiral closer to the Sun, eventually reaching as close as 8.86 solar radii from the surface. Upcoming flybys, the next of which is happening in January 2022, will likely bring Parker Solar Probe through the corona again.
It’s everybody’s favorite vacation getaway: Uzbekistan! I knew almost nothing of Uzbekistan before my visit there so everyday was a cascade of surprises. While Americans think of Central Asia as the most remote places possible, people in Uzbekistan see themselves as at the center of the universe. They’ve been farming there for 6000 years, and everyone has passed through over the centuries. I was so delighted I could as well.
RISC-V is a open instruction set architecture originally developed at UC Berkeley for research and education that has been seeing a lot of exciting developments lately. You can buy a RISV-V based microcontroller right now. It is officially supported by GCC. The lowRISC project, founded by some of the same people responsible for Raspberry Pi, aims to provide a fully open source Linux system-on-a-chip. UC Berkeley has developed a (relatively) high performance, super-scalar, out-of-order RISC-V core.
2023-02-11: RISC-V status update. I remain skeptical because only losing players have adopted it, probably out of a position of weakness. Citing government investments as helpful is hilarious.
RISC-V is inevitable. RISC-V is going to have the best processors. And RISC-V is going to have the best ecosystem. All the technical stuff in RISC-V is amazing, but it’s really this change in the business model that makes RISC-V inevitable. And just think about this: Once you move to a high-quality open standard, you never go back to sole-source proprietary standards.
Explore the Peutinger Map presents The Peutinger Map in different ways, including with overlays and lists of geographical features. But what’s The Peutinger Map? Also known as Tabula Peutingeriana, it is a Medieval copy of highly stylized 4th Century map of the Roman road network, extending to India. Jacob Ford explains why it is often compared to modern public transit maps and then redraws 1 section as a New York Metro map.
Some of the fastest progress on clean energy is occurring in states led by Republican governors and legislators, and states carried by Donald J. Trump in the presidential election. The 5 states that get the largest % of their power from wind turbines — Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma and North Dakota — all voted for Mr. Trump. So did Texas, which produces the most wind power in absolute terms. In fact, 69% of the wind power produced in the country comes from states that Mr. Trump carried in November.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 