But if you tell somebody “a million gallons” they will imagine a much bigger volume of water than “a swimming pool” even though they are almost the same. And a lot of high schools and universities will have an “olympic-sized” pool that somebody is likely to have seen at some point, without actually going to the Olympic…

P.S. They can also make smaller chips with fewer cores by design, so there is a smaller chance of defect per chip, and they get more chips per wafer, for the cheaper cards. They might not do this until they better understand and reduce the defects per wafer in the new process level.

The GPU chips are massively parallel, and complicated. The complicated part means there are likely to be defects on the chip. The parallel part means they can often disable the core that had the defect, and the rest still works fine. So when they test the chip, the perfect ones get to be top-tier GPUs that sell for…

Ships and planes both have the problem of energy density. Batteries just aren’t good enough to cross an ocean either by sky or sea. Yet. And while ships do produce a lot of emissions, they are still very efficient when you consider the tons and miles they handle. Nothing gets 50,000 tons across 7000 miles for less…

It probably didn’t help that most transplant recipients must take immune suppression drugs so they don’t reject the new organ.

Curiosity did not have TRN. Every landing before now was selected to be a large safe flat space. This is the first time they were able to select a site with rougher terrain features, because the Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) system can literally see the ground and autonomously select a safe area to land. So they…

P.S. the above numbers are without wind. It gets much better range when the wind blows. But I can still make the LA to Catalina crossing without wind.

Your name: Brian

Depends on how deep the UI reskin is. At one level, it would be relatively easy to replace a few graphics and make it look kinda similar, in the way a website can be reskinned by some CSS: change the font, make this part blue and this other part white, etc. But you’re right that making a more substantial change to…

*Shock* People might actually have to go direct to the news providers? The news providers that were complaining that people don’t go direct to them anymore?

At this stage, all of the cameras are folded up and protected from the dust that would be blown around by the landing rockets. (Don’t want to scratch a lens!) The HAZCAM which is being used here has a transparent dust cover, which will be removed in a little while to improve the image quality. HAZCAM is mounted low…

Are we ever going to be able to convince people to switch to crypto currency that does not need “Proof of Work” mining to maintain, and all the energy usage (and CO2) that goes with it? (Proof of stake is an option, but I’m not familiar with the pros and cons or other options.)

The ASIC helps with some types of crypto, but not with others.

Maybe wet your finger slightly to improve results? Or use moisturizer. Or find some gloves with conductive fingertips.

That’s actually one of the ways machine learning technology improves itself. A “GAN” network has both a generator module and a detection module. As long as the detection module can detect a fake, the generator module is improved until it can’t tell the difference. The two modules “fight” to improve each other. (The…

Just saying you can gulp the liquid faster if you know the solids won’t get through the gap. It’s not a problem, per se, but it does slow things down. Of course sometimes you want to slow it down. But not always.

There’s a place for slush, and especially for cones, but there’s a place for ice cubes that don’t try to go in your mouth when you don’t want them.

(Not sure why that came out so garbled. It should say:)

Ditch the Samsung launcher. Use Nova, or my new favorite, Microsoft launcher. (Which is good if you have Outlook for work, but is a very good launcher on its own.)

Starship burns methane, which is relatively clean, producing 2 water and 1 CO2 for each CH4 it burns. It also produces much less soot compared to an RP1 rocket. One of Elon’s future goals is to produce that methane with solar energy, which would make it truly carbon neutral. (And equally important for Elon, makes it…