
Flying used to be fun. People dressed up, the stewardesses were posh, and everyone was a little excited.

Flying used to be fun. People dressed up, the stewardesses were posh, and everyone was a little excited.

My good friend and colleague, Chris Boch, recently posted on his blog about the naive views of the US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. I know something about that.
Early in my teaching career, I attended a summer workshop at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. The physicist in charge, Andrew Zwicker, is the guy on the left wearing sandals.

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the second-fastest single-GPU graphics card you can buy, and only because there’s a $1200 Titan Xp offering questionable value out there, too.
That was from an article written in 2017.
When I wanted to try out virtual reality, I bought a gaming computer with that graphics card. At that time, it was almost impossible to buy a graphics card because crypto-currency miners were buying all available graphics cards.
World’s first 1-step method by US-China team turns plastic into fuel at 95% efficiency
That’s promising. The trick is always collecting the waste without doing more harm than good.
At the end of the process, the products include the main components of petrol (gasoline), chemical raw materials, and hydrochloric acid
“I’m at a point right now where I have a hard time writing science-fiction,” Cameron told CNN this week. “I’m tasked with writing a new Terminator story [but] I don’t know what to say that won’t be overtaken by real events. We are living in a science-fiction age right now.”

Humanoid Robots Have a Serious Design Flaw, And We Need to Fix It
Watch Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot doing training routines, or the latest humanoids from Figure loading a washing machine, and it’s easy to believe the robot revolution is here.
From the outside, it seems the only remaining challenge is perfecting the AI ( artificial intelligence) software to enable these machines to handle real-life environments.
Humanoid robots won’t be attending the robot revolution.

Sparky isn’t eager to go out in the heat, but he likes to lounge in the sun. I modified the software for my robot window shades so that the center shade doesn’t go all the way down. I am so pleased that Sparky enjoys this feature.
Sparky won’t thank me for this because dogs don’t think that way. I’m not certain that when Sparky feels a tug on his collar, he understands that I pulled on the leash.
Having home automation and a dog is giving me more project ideas.

The robotic window shade project is completely operational. Ever since the IKEA motorized blinds were installed, this is how they needed to work. It seems like it’s been longer than a few weeks since work started on 2 weeks since on Implementing Home Assistant.

NYT: NASA Is Getting Fired Up About a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
NYT: NASA Is Getting Fired Up About a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
A base on the Moon isn’t going to look like an airport terminal, but it will need plenty of reliable power.
Jim Acosta interviews ‘made-up’ AI avatar of Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver
This is super creepy.
Jim Acosta, former chief White House correspondent for CNN, stirred controversy on Monday when he sat for a conversation with a reanimated version of a person who died more than seven years ago.
Exploiting a death like this is disrespectful, and putting words in his mouth to support a political position, is dishonest.
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