The un-Christmas, all the aspects of the traditional Christmas tree, minus the pine tree itself.
Whether by virtual reality or a Harry Potter magic wand, the ability to minimize a Christmas tree into nakedness is a fascinating concept. As Leonardo Da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
For $949, you could own a robot that chases the sun to keep your plants alive.
Technology company Vincross created the spider-like HEXA as a multi-functional robot. It turns out one of those functions is for the six-legged robot to take care of your plants for you.
With blueprints downloaded from the Vincross website, any HEXA owner could program their device to move around when the plant’s leaves need sun and shade.
The bot can even warn owners when the plants need to be watered.
Yet another reason for millennials to turn their apartments into “house jungles.”
Google confirmed that it has officially achieved achieved quantum supremacy with the 54-qubit Sycamore processor.
Writes Engineering Director Hartmut Neven on Google’s blog:
Today, the scientific journal Nature has published the results of Google’s efforts to build a quantum computer that can perform a task no classical computer can; this is known in the field as “quantum supremacy.” In practical terms, our chip, which we call Sycamore, performed a computation in 200 seconds that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years.
IBM has downplayed the innovation saying that the the classical computer can run the same simulation in 2.5 days.
Writes the IBM Research Blog, “We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced.”
IBM also said that Google “failed to fully account for plentiful disk storage” in a traditional supercomputer to exaggerate the supremacy of its machine.
Both Google and IBM make valid points, with the objective takeaway being how quantum computing will make its way into everyday tasks and how much more potential there is in classical computing.
Either way, the 54-qubit Sycamore processor is a far cry from the 5MB hard drive that IBM released in 1956 that weighed over a ton.
If you're an artist, photographer, writer, etc., I highly recommend creating your own blog and publishing something new every day (read my post on how to set up a FREE blog on Wordpress).
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the world’s first supercomputer with 5 MB of data.
The machine weighed over a ton — it took a team of people to transport it.
To put the computer size and storage in perspective, our pocket-sized phones contain 256GB of storage.
Like fire and farming techniques before it, the ubiquity of computers and the exponential processing speed of chips, also known as Moore’s Law, changed the course of history. But even Moore’s Law is dying in exchange for brain-inspired chips.
Writes venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson who updated Ray Kurzweil’s visualization of Moore’s Law:
The fine-grained parallel compute architecture of a GPU maps better to the needs of deep learning than a CPU. There is a poetic beauty to the computational similarity of a processor optimized for graphics processing and the computational needs of a sensory cortex, as commonly seen in neural networks today.
Stephen T. Jurvetson
Dare we say it, the next supercomputer is not only artificially intelligent, but it also melds the mind and the machine.
Forget Google. Imagine having already downloaded all the relevant knowledge directly to your mind and using it expeditiously.
Here’s how IBM’s Director of Research Dario Gil sees the fusion of chips, neurons, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing wiring together.
“We’re beginning to see an answer to what is happening at the end of Moore’s law. It’s a question that has been the front of the industry for a long, long time.
And the answer is that we’re going to have this new foundation of bits plus neurons plus qubits coming together, over the next decade [at] different maturity levels – bits [are] enormously mature, the world of neural networks and neural technology, next in maturity, [and] quantum the least mature of those. [It] is important to anticipate what will happen when those three things intersect within a decade.”
Dario Gil
If you're an artist, photographer, writer, etc., I highly recommend creating your own blog and publishing something new every day (read my post on how to set up a FREE blog on Wordpress).
This dual-mounted listening device served as an aircraft detection device before the invention of radar in 1935.
The Dutch military used the elephant-looking ears to detect approaching enemy aircraft by listening afar for engine sounds.
There were various iterations of the acoustic locators.
The Germans created a dual sight and sound system in 1917 that combined sound-ranging capabilities with binoculars to scope out aircraft.
The Dutch also created personal horns in 1935 that were double the size of the personal sound locator.
England built concrete acoustic mirrors around its coasts up until 1935.
Learn more about pre-radar objects here.
If you're an artist, photographer, writer, etc., I highly recommend creating your own blog and publishing something new every day (read my post on how to set up a FREE blog on Wordpress).
Brooklyn-based inventor Joseph’s Machines makes comical DIY contraptions. His latest video shows a chain-reaction machine deliver him a piece of cake. It also includes a baby poking an iPhone, a string of melting butter, and a chandelier.
The video took 3 months to make. Piece a cake!
Joseph’s gadgets are inspired by the cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg who built complex, interconnected machines in the early 1900s. Today, people use the expression Rube Goldberg machine. to describe anything convoluted, from machines to politics.
