BASF CEO: Banning Russian Energy Imports Could Throw Germany Into Historic Crisis
April 9th, 2022Via: Reuters:
Germany could face its biggest economic crisis in nearly 80 years should imports of Russian gas and oil be stopped or disrupted in the long-term, the chief executive of BASF, one of the country’s biggest electricity consumers, said.
“This could throw the German economy into its biggest crisis since the end of World War Two,” Martin Brudermueller told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, adding this posed an existential threat to Germany’s small and medium-sized businesses.
The Global Fertilizer Shortage Means That Far Less Food Will Be Grown All Over The Planet In 2022
April 9th, 2022Via: Economic Collapse Blog:
A fertilizer shortage has added to growing concerns about the Ukraine war’s impact on the price and scarcity of certain basic foods.
Combined, Russia and Belarus had provided about 40% of the world’s exports of potash, according to Morgan Stanley. Russia’s exports were hit by sanctions. Further, in February, a major Belarus producer declared force majeure — a statement that it wouldn’t be able to uphold its contracts due to forces beyond its control.
Russia also exported 11% of the world’s urea, and 48% of the ammonium nitrate. Russia and Ukraine together export 28% of fertilizers made from nitrogen and phosphorous, as well as potassium, according to Morgan Stanley.
Astronomers Just Discovered the Farthest Object in the Known Universe
April 9th, 2022Via: LiveScience:
A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen.
“Will Famine Emerge by Year End? Yes.”
April 8th, 2022Via: Peak Prosperity:
The President’s Brother, James Biden, and the Chinese
April 7th, 2022Via: CBS:
“We have people with the Biden name, dealing with Chinese business people that have a relationship to the Communist Party,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge. “I think James Biden was very much a part of this.”
Bank records released by Republican senators this week indicate James Biden’s company, the Lion Hall Group, received payments from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, before his brother Joe announced he was running for president. Grassley says that same year James Biden and the president’s son, Hunter, received monthly retainers totaling $165,000 — $100,000 to Hunter and $65,000 to James.
Czech Republic Provides T-72 Tanks and Armoured Infantry Vehicles to Ukraine
April 6th, 2022Via: Daily Mail:
The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky’s plea for help.
Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.
Manure Supplies Run Short as Fertilizer Prices Soar
April 6th, 2022Just pull up to a Biden press conference and haul off as much as you need.
Via: Reuters:
For nearly two decades, Abe Sandquist has used every marketing tool he can think of to sell the back end of a cow. Poop, after all, needs to go somewhere. The Midwestern entrepreneur has worked hard to woo farmers on its benefits for their crops.
Now, facing a global shortage of commercial fertilizers made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, more U.S. growers are knocking on his door. Sandquist says they’re clamoring to get their hands on something Old MacDonald would swear by: old-fashioned animal manure.
“I wish we had more to sell,” said Sandquist, founder of Natural Fertilizer Services Inc, a nutrient management firm based in the U.S. state of Iowa. “But there’s not enough to meet the demand.”
NVIDIA Instant NeRF: 2D Photos to 3D Scenes in the ‘Blink of an AI’
April 5th, 2022Via: NVIDIA:
When the first instant photo was taken 75 years ago with a Polaroid camera, it was groundbreaking to rapidly capture the 3D world in a realistic 2D image. Today, AI researchers are working on the opposite: turning a collection of still images into a digital 3D scene in a matter of seconds.
Known as inverse rendering, the process uses AI to approximate how light behaves in the real world, enabling researchers to reconstruct a 3D scene from a handful of 2D images taken at different angles. The NVIDIA Research team has developed an approach that accomplishes this task almost instantly — making it one of the first models of its kind to combine ultra-fast neural network training and rapid rendering.
NVIDIA applied this approach to a popular new technology called neural radiance fields, or NeRF. The result, dubbed Instant NeRF, is the fastest NeRF technique to date, achieving more than 1,000x speedups in some cases. The model requires just seconds to train on a few dozen still photos — plus data on the camera angles they were taken from — and can then render the resulting 3D scene within tens of milliseconds.
“If traditional 3D representations like polygonal meshes are akin to vector images, NeRFs are like bitmap images: they densely capture the way light radiates from an object or within a scene,” says David Luebke, vice president for graphics research at NVIDIA. “In that sense, Instant NeRF could be as important to 3D as digital cameras and JPEG compression have been to 2D photography — vastly increasing the speed, ease and reach of 3D capture and sharing.”
The Next Google
April 5th, 2022Via: DKB:
DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google.
The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before.
In the last few years, different groups of people came to the same conclusion, and started working on the next generation of search engines.
For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads are not an option. But that’s where the commonalities end. Beyond that, they’ve all taken the idea of a search engine in very different directions.
Starlink: Roaming = True
April 5th, 2022Via: MikeOnSpace:
