At Tesla’s Investor Autonomy Day, they laid out their plan for building a self-driving network of robotaxis and made the argument that their computer vision approach is better than LiDAR-based approaches.
Here I take a look at the two strategies and see which one could be the first to create the self-driving car.
Buckminster Fuller wasn’t the massive success that he wanted to be, but he became a defining influence on the engineering, architecture, and design that shapes our world today.
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house was designed to be a machine that works around you.
It featured some of the same design elements that made his famous geodesic domes so sturdy, plus it featured smart home features long before smart homes were a thing.
Last week, the Event Horizon Telescope released their first images ever taken of a black hole, specifically the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. I thought this would be a good time to look back at how we’ve visualized Black Holes over the years and what we can learn from them.
In March, my Tesla Model 3 passed the 6-month mark, and I thought it would be a good time to update my experience with the car and give you my thoughts now that some time has passed.
David Hahn was a Boy Scout in Michigan in the late 80s with a particular interest in radioactivity. An interest that led him to build a working – and dangerous – breeder reactor in his parent’s shed.
All around the world, insect species are dying at alarming rates. It’e being called the Insect apocalypse, and aA new study looks at why this is happening, what can be done about it, and what would happen if the trend continues.
From sounds that literally damage your vocal cords to a language that’s entirely whistled, these are 5 of the strangest, quirkiest languages in the world.
The Piraha Language – Brazil This one is controversial because the theory is the language doesn’t have recursion. Recursion is a linguistic property where you can add phrases into phrases, also called Nesting. This is controversial because Noam Chomsky popularized the idea that recursions are a part of what he called “universal grammar” that you find in all languages.
And then Dr. Dan Everett studied the Piraha people of the Amazon rain forest in the 1970, first as a missionary and later just to research their language.
And in a paper in 2005, he claimed that the Piraha people do not use recursion, flying in the face of linguistic doctrine and shaking the very foundations of our knowledge to the ground, making international news.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/boo…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDM8G…
The Aymara language isn’t a small, tucked away language in some The reason it’s on this list is due to a little quirk that seems to be unique to the Aymara, which is the way they refer to the past and the future.
Why would they do that? The answer is a simple flip in perception, by saying that events from the past are known, meaning we can see them, they’re in front of us. Whereas the future is unknown, we can’t see it… So it’s behind us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vydhT…
It’s no secret that there are languages in sub-Saharan Africa that use click sounds along with other consonant sounds, there are several of these but this one is the quintessential one.
It features 5 different click sounds and 17 accompanying ones. Also 4 vowel sounds with four varying tones.
This language is not just difficult to learn, it’s physically straining on a non-speaker because some of these clicks are next to impossible to do without a serious amount of training.
http://www.economist.com/node/15108609
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQpLv…
Guugu Yimithirr is an ancient language, spoken by the aboriginal people of Australia for thousands of years, specifically the Guugu Yimithirr people of Far North Queensland, in fact it was actually the first aboriginal language ever written down by James Cook in 1770 and is where the word Kangaroo comes from.
All their directions used cardinal directions. Cardinal directions being North, South, East, West, and the directions in between. They didn’t have words for left, right, front or back.
What this means is that every speaker must always know what geographic direction they are facing at all times. It’s like the language has layered the geographic directions into the fabric of their culture. You literally can’t convey information without it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/mag…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF9RD…
La Gomera is an island, specifically the smallest of the Spanish Canary Islands just northwest of Africa. And on that tiny island is a language that’s not spoken anywhere else called Silbo Gomero, and it holds the top spot on this list for one simple reason. It’s spoken with whistles.
It’s literally like a whistled version of Spanish featuring two whistled vowels and four consonants.
In 1961, two amateur Italian radio engineers recorded what many believe to be the voice of a female cosmonaut burning up on re-entry. If real, this would have been the first woman in space.
Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia were two highly regarded radio engineers from Italy who, starting with the launch of Sputnik, made a name for themselves by tracking and recording radio signals from satellites in orbit.
Over time, they bought an old WWII bunker and transformed it into a listening station they named Torre Bert.
From here, the recorded everything from the heartbeat of Laika, the dog on Sputnik 2, to Yuri Gagarin.
But they also recorded some mysterious sounds from missions that were never made public by the highly secretive Soviet Union. One of these was of a woman crying out in distress in May of 1961.
If real, this would have been the first female in space, a full 2 years before the current first, Valentina Tereshkova.
To this day, Russian officials have never named or acknowledged the existence of a mission that this could have been from. Was this a doomed cosmonaut in her final moments? Or a clever hoax?
In 1957, the United States began testing nuclear weapons underground in the desert outside of Las Vegas, Nevada as part of Operation Plumbbob. One underground test, Pascal B, may have put the first manmade object into space.
Robert R. Brownlee engineered the Pascal A underground test to measure the amount of fallout that would occur from underground nuclear explosions. It involved digging a 485 foot shaft into the ground and capping it with a heavy steel plate.
The explosion blew the steel plate off the ground and caused Brownlee to wonder how fast it propelled the object, so he set up a second nuclear test, Pascal B, to measure the speed of the steel cap.
The high-speed camera only recorded the plate in one frame, which led Brownlee to conclude that it must have been traveling at more than 125,000 miles per hour, or 5 times the escape velocity of Earth. The plate was never found, and this has led many to believe it was jettisoned out into space.
If this is true, the steel plate from Pascal B beat Sputnik to space by 2 months and would be the fastest human-made object of all time.
There are many who believe this couldn’t possibly be true though because at that speed the plate would have vaporized in the atmosphere just like a meteor or satellite re-entering the atmosphere at orbital velocity. So the mystery of Pascal B carries on.
The Earth’s magnetic north pole is on the move. In fact, it’s moving faster than we’ve ever seen, and it may indicate that a major change is on the way for the planet.
