Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Astronomers Despair As SpaceX Starlink Train Ruins Observation Of Nearby Galaxies
November 19th, 2019That’s just the first 120 Starlink satellites out of tens of thousands that will go up in next few years. Via: Fortune: In the early hours of the morning today, Monday, November 18, two astronomers checked in on their remotely operated telescope in Chile, expecting to see images of distant stars and galaxies. Instead, they […]
Heliogen Achieves Breakthrough Temperatures from Concentrated Sunlight for Industrial Processes
November 19th, 2019The Heliogen website says, “Can be scaled from sizes as low as 1 MW to several gigawatts.” Several gigawatts??? “I see broken heliostats. Lots of broken heliostats.” Anyway, if there is some “secret sauce” here, I can’t tell what it is. Although this gets above 1000C, you have all of the problems with concentrated solar, […]
Japan: Wind and Solar Power Plants Will Be Built on Fukushima Farmland Polluted by Fallout from 2011 Disaster
November 18th, 2019Via: Daily Mail: Farmland in Fukushima that was rendered unusable after the disastrous 2011 nuclear meltdown is getting a second chance at productivity. A group of Japanese investors has created a new plan to use the abandoned land to build wind and solar power plants, to be used to send electricity to Tokyo. The plan […]
Prince Andrew’s Pizza Party Alibi: A Theory
November 17th, 2019Via: Reddit User stop4me_its_the_claw: Prince Andrew has now denied ever meeting 17 year old Virginia Roberts, as well as denying having sex with her, despite the photograph of him with Virginia with his arm around her bare midrif while Ghislaine Maxell lurks in the background. Prince Andrew bizarrely claims he was at a “pizza party” […]
U.S. Restaurants Remove Dining Rooms as More People Use Food Delivery Apps
November 16th, 2019Via: Reuters: Restaurants are doing away with dining rooms as consumers increasingly order food deliveries through apps such as Uber Technologies Inc’s Uber Eats and GrubHub Inc.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch: Automation Could Replace 800 Million Jobs by 2035
November 15th, 2019Via: Yahoo Finance: Some half of all jobs worldwide — or up to 800 million total jobs — could be at risk of becoming obsolete by 2035 due to the rise of automation. That’s the assessment from a new report written by Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC) analysts highlighting 10 themes to watch for […]
Now Daimler Is Dialing Back Expectations for Self-Driving Taxis
November 15th, 2019Via: Ars Technica: Daimler is planning to “rightsize” its spending on self-driving taxis, Chairman Ola Källenius said on Thursday. Getting self-driving cars to operate safely in complex urban environments has proved more challenging than people expected a few years ago, he admitted. “There has been a reality check setting in here,” Källenius said, according to […]
NASA Report Finds Boeing Seat Prices Are 60% Higher Than SpaceX
November 15th, 2019Via: Ars Technica: On Thursday, NASA’s inspector general released a report on the space agency’s commercial crew program, which seeks to pay Boeing and SpaceX to develop vehicles to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. Although the report cites the usual technical issues that the companies are having with the development of their respective […]
Amazon Challenges Pentagon’s $10-billion Cloud Award to Microsoft
November 15th, 2019Via: Reuters: Amazon.com Inc on Thursday said it is contesting the Pentagon’s award of an up to $10 billion cloud computing deal to Microsoft Corp, expressing concern that politics got in the way of a fair contracting process. The company filed notice last Friday that it will formally protest the decision on the Joint Enterprise […]
Engineer Created Algorithm That Can Remove Strong Blue-Green Color Cast and Backscatter from Underwater Photographs
November 15th, 2019Not Photoshop levels, hue, saturation, etc. Wild results. Via: PetaPixel: An engineer has developed a computer program that can, in her words, “remove the water” from an underwater photograph. The result is a “physically accurate” image with all of the vibrance, saturation and color of a regular landscape photo. The technology, called Sea-thru, was developed […]
