The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English. Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8 ka and still refers to a particular fish.
Month: November 2020
Open RAN
Open RAN looks like a great alternative to all the proprietary 5G nonsense.
contrary to the information being published by legacy RAN vendors, Open RAN is real; Open RAN has been deployed in commercial networks today; the Open RAN community is thriving; the cost savings are being realized; and operational performance requirements and KPIs are being met.
Charts & Graphs
lots of intriguing, silly, clever charts from history.
Makapansgat pebble
a 260-gram, 8.3 cm long, reddish-brown jasperite cobble, ca 3M years before present with natural chipping and wear patterns that make it look like a crude rendition of a human face. it has been suggested that some australopithecine might have recognized it as a symbolic face, in possibly the earliest example of symbolic thinking or aesthetic sense in the human heritage, and brought the pebble back to the cave. This would make it a candidate for the oldest known manuport
Women hunters
In a search of reports of burials at 107 other sites in the Americas older than 8000 years, he found 10 other women and 16 men also buried with hunting tools. This meta-analysis suggests “early big-game hunting was likely gender neutral“
Mink COVID-19
the situation is “very serious” and that the worst case would be a restarted pandemic spreading out of Denmark: “The Serum Institute estimates that 5% of the viral infections among people in North Jutland are of the new type of virus mutation“
Liquid-filled window
When sunlight hits the liquid-filled window, the water begins to absorb the heat, blocking it from entering the room. The hydrogel causes the liquid to turn opaque in sunlight, further reducing thermal transmission. The result is that less energy is required to cool the space. As the sun goes down, the window turns clear again and the heat is released. As a side bonus, the liquid between the panes also doubles as a sound insulator. Testing indicating that it “reduces noise 15% more effectively than double-glazed windows.”
Desk Forklift drivers
these kinds of intermediate solutions will drastically speed up the transition to autonomy, since all this teleoperation creates training data, and you can start having operators monitor more than 1 vehicle, like drone operators have for years.
DRL sample efficiency
We find considerable progress in the sample efficiency of DRL at rates comparable to progress in algorithmic efficiency in deep learning. If the trends we observed proved to be robust and continued, the huge amounts of simulated data that are currently necessary to achieve state-of-the-art results in DRL might not be required for future applications such that training in real world contexts could become feasible.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 