Tag: images

4-way Galaxy Merger

4 massive galaxies are colliding in the largest galactic merger ever seen. The smash-up is shedding light on how the biggest galaxies in the universe form – and why many of them stopped giving birth to stars billions of years ago.

massive galaxies lose their gas early and do not create new stars.

Global Grid

Converting the worlds power lines to DC would cost terabucks and save terawatts. it would allow for a global energy grid with all its load balancing advantages.

the premier global strategy is the interconnection of electric power networks between regions and continents into a global energy grid, with an emphasis on tapping abundant renewable energy resources – a world wide web of electricity.

2016-11-14: Asia Super Grid

Entrepreneurs in China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that seeks to create the Asia Super Grid. It will transmit electrical power from renewable sources from areas of the world that are best able to produce it to consumers in other parts of the world. The idea is dependent on development of an ultra-high voltage grid operating at 1000 kilovolts AC and 800 kilovolts DC over 1000s of kilometers. It envisions interconnecting grids across regions, nations, and even continents with a capacity of 10 gigawatts.


2022-01-04: This doesn’t make a lot of sense for the reasons explained in this video: Huge cost for the grid, red tape.

Corruption FPS

A downloadable Chinese game called “The Incorruptible Warrior” is an unexpected success — something attributed to Chinese exhaustion and frustration with official corruption. In the game you’re a civil servant out for blood, torturing and executing corrupt officials. The reason for the public interest is that the hero of the game is a “honest and upright official” whose assignment is to weed out corrupt officials, along with their children and mistresses. Here ‘weed out’ does not ‘putting in jail’ — it means using weapons, wizardry and torture to kill them.

sponsored by “the Communist Party Disciplinary Committee”

Google Maps Microformats

Today we’re happy to announce that we are adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results. Why should you care about some invisible changes to our HTML? By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily. Firefox users can install the Operator or Tails extension; IE or Safari users can use one of these bookmarklets.

yay for me, and for microformats in general

a Web browser could automatically send all encountered hCards, adrs and geos to a map called “Web History.” The user could then turn this map on to view all of the pieces of information they recently encountered online geographically.

Google Maps may not be the first to embrace microformats, but it is definitely one of the largest services and should significantly increase the public’s exposure to the usefulness of microformats.

There’s a lot more that they could do along these lines if they went with RDF and/or RDFa

With this seismic shift in the landscape of published microformats, I think we in the microformats community may have to shift our focus slightly. Instead of just being concerned with evangelising the publishing of microformats, it’s now incumbent upon

The Google Maps team’s new deployment of Microformat support is yet another brilliant development in their evolution of local search

State of Robotics

At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: 1 robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence — and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy — is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not?

2009-03-05: Robot overview

Robotic systems continue to evolve, slowly penetrating many areas of our lives, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance. Developers in Japan are currently building robots to assist the elderly, while NASA develops the next generation of space explorers, and artists are exploring new avenues of entertainment. Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and perhaps a glimpse into the near future.


Compare with similar galleries from the last few years:

Robots at work and play
Robots part 3
More robots
Robots

(all put together by Alan Taylor). The progress is palpable.
2016-02-24: Don’t be fooled by the goofiness: This is amazing progress.

2023-08-31: World Robotics Conference

Bionic butterflies and performing humanoids: Beijing’s World Robot Conference – in pictures