Merrill

Why wouldn't any reasonably good AI be able to replicate large portions of the US Army TM 31-210 "Improvised Munitions Handbook"?

MPEG's patent policy was not its own. The Moving Picture Experts Group was Working Group 11 of Sub Committee 2 of ISO-IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. Other Working Groups in SC2 were the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the Joint Bi-Level Image Group, and the Multimedia/Hypermedia Experts Group. Therefore, the patent policy was the ISO-IEC policy for including patented technology in their standards.

MPEG was also joint with the video conferencing standards group within the CCITT (now International Telecommunications Union), which generally required FRAND declarations from patent holders.

My recollection is that MPEG-LA was set up as a clearing house so that implementers could go to one licensing organization, rather than negotiating with each patent owner individually.

All the patents for MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 must be expired by now.

Besides patent gridlock, there is a fundamental economic problem with developing new video coding algorithms. It's very difficult to develop an algorithm that will halve the bit rate for the same quality, to get it implemented in hardware products an software, and to introduce it broadly in the existing video services infrastructure. Plus, doubling the compression is likely to more than double the processing required. On the other hand, within a couple of years the network engineers will double the bit rate for the same cost, and the storage engineers will double the storage for the same cost. They, like processing, follow their own Moore's Law.

So reducing the cost by improving codecs is more expensive and takes more effort and time than just waiting for the processor, storage and networking cost reductions. At least that's been true over the 3 decades since MPEG 2.

Due to chromosome crossover, you do not inherit genes individually from ancestors, but instead you inherit segments of chromosomes containing many genes.

However, the randomness is great enough that first cousins do share approximately 1/8 of their genes, second cousins 1/32, third cousins 1/128 and so on. The rapid decrease of shared genes among relatives in successive generations also means that if mating in a population is really random, the population rapidly becomes homogeneous.

It is only assortative mating which generates and maintains distinctive subpopulations.

Migration and reassortment events in the US would include depopulation of Appalachian coal fields, the migration of farm kids from rural counties as farm size increased, and core city to suburban movement in rust belt cities as manufacturing decreased.

Most of my high school mates from a rural county who went to college never returned to a rural area. Those who stayed behind were disproportionately from the lower half of the class.

There is also antenna gain in decibels.

A good configuration is a pair of mainframes running parallel sysplex in two data centers on separate power and communications grids, with another pair more than 200 miles away for disaster recovery, and maybe a 5th in a single data center for more redundant data backup. Then you are set to do overnight runs to calculate where a few trillion dollars went that day.

Wouldn't it be better to arrange the network and software to run the GPUs continuously at optimal usage?

Otherwise a lot of expensive GPU capital is idle between bursts of computation.

Didn't DeepSeek do something like this to get more system level performance out of less capable GPUs?

How would use of the Kylin OS instead of Windows 11 affect the user's perception of performance?

"Building new lamps" is why the engineers and technicians developing new scientific instruments and experimental processes deserve more credit than they get.

59% indirect research costs for administrative overhead seems high. Could it be that these charges against grants are used to fund students in other subject areas where grants are not available?

They could have more grad students if they reliably graduated them with a PhD in four years. I was once a lab tech for two grad students that had been there 11 and 13 years respectively.

1990s was the time that the AIDS epidemic took hold. Lots of needle-sharing addicts died, reducing the number of crimes needed to support their habits. AIDS also affected the prison population, further reducing the number of active criminals.

In an early minicomputer, the $500 power fail interrupt feature was field installed by clipping a jumper.

There were mainframe line printers that implemented a different lines per minute feature depending on which gear set was installed.

New Jersey trains use overhead catenaries. LIRR use third rail. How are through running trains powered?

The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cases, and quality goods all contributed to a pleasant environment. Seasonal changes in decoration and products kept the experience fresh. The escapist experience was paid for by pricing the goods to cover the overheads.

When the department store migrated to being the anchor store at the suburban mall, its role as an escapist haven was diluted by the mall's amenities and by the proliferation of boutique shops lining the corridors.

On-line shopping now offers a wider selection of goods at lower prices. And social media offers an alternative mechanism to escape their present reality.

The benefits of a research project as described to the funding authority and the benefits of a research project after it is done are often not the same.

The cost of the hides and the labor of turning them into vellum dominated the labor of inscribing a page. Printing would not decrease the cost of finished pages, especially for small numbers of copies.

The decrease in the cost of paper resulted from the increased availability of linen rags, use of wind power in production of rag pulp, and the larger volumes of rag paper used for commercial records and correspondence before the invention of printing.

"Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge Economy, 1200-2007" by Rodney Edvinsson and Johan Söderberg Department of Economic History Stockholm University: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT0...

See page 10, Figure 5: Price of paper/CPI in England, 1356-1869, and the Netherlands, 1450-1800.

This shows that the price of paper declined exponentially from 1350 to 1650. The decrease in the cost of paper made printing economical. Printing on vellum was not. They point out that each Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum required the skins of 300 sheep.

It's not clear whether it is desirable to build a new Göttingen. Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of assembling brilliant minds in one place, other than temporarily for conferences and visits.

"Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture" https://www.quantamagazine.org/monumental-proof-settles-geom... is an interesting article that describes the multi-year effort to obtain this important result. The final proof has nine authors affiliated with seven institutions: Denis Gaitsgory, Max Planck Institute; Sam Raskin and Joakim Færgeman, Yale University; Dima Arinkin, University of Wisconsin; Nick Rozenblyum, University of Toronto; Dario Beraldo, University College London; Lin Chen, Tsinghua University; Justin Campbell and Kevin Lin, University of Chicago.

With all the intelligence built in to current cars, the salesman should be able to send a group text to the cars on the lot asking whether any of them has all or most of the desired features. And if so, what are its GPS coordinates. Or turn on it's emergency flashers and sound horn in five minutes.

In college I was struck by a housemate's law books. They only contained text with no pictures, drawings, diagrams, tables, graphs, formulae, or any of the other tools for organizing information common to engineering. They looked to be extremely tedious and boring.

Later, another former housemate, a math major who was developing software, went to law school for a JD. It was his opinion that many of the tools from computer science were useful for deciphering the more complex laws and regulations.

How you think may be a significant factor in whether you are a good match to certain occupations.

Given adequate rainfall and the right range of soil acidity trees will seed and grow themselves. This town was farm fields in the 1930s. Some trees were planted when the streets were laid out and houses built. Others, particularly ornamentals, continue to be planted. But there are a great number of trees that are volunteers that have been allowed to mature over the last century. Norway maples, sweet gum, tulip poplar, and red oak are particularly good at volunteering.

Mexico has about half as many TikTok users as the US. I would think that ByteDance would continue that operation, as well as other major user populations in Indonesia, Brazil, etc.

It seems unlikely that Byte Dance would divest of all of TikTok, since the US users are only about 10% of global TikTok users.

They would more likely either shut down the US operation, support US users from outside the US, or sell the US users to one of the other social media networks.

My recollection is that the operating telephone companies paid AT&T 1% of revenues as the license fee for use of AT&T's patents. This funded AT&T's engineering department as well as Bell Labs research, systems engineering and advanced development. Th other main chunk of civilian work was development engineering funded by Western Electric. Prior to the end of the anti-missile systems military work, the military budget was greater than civilian work.

Sometime prior to divestiture, the 1% may have been raised a little. There may have also been additional operating company funding for Bell Information Systems, which developed administrative software for their use.

The notion that Bell Labs was an idyllic competition-free environment is incorrect. In the development organizations there was fierce competition between developers of analog versus digital transmission systems, microwave versus coaxial cable systems, space division versus time-division switching, etc. There may have been less in the basic research, but having worked later with ex-research staff, I'm pretty sure there was considerable competition for resources, funding, and scientific credit and internal/external recognition.

PL/I had features from COBOL, FORTRAN and ALGOL.

One advantage over FORTRAN IV was that PL/I had complex number types and the associated math libraries. This made certain engineering calculations much easier, for example, transmission line calculations.

It suffered from being IBM proprietary and from its size and complexity, which were too great for the early wave of minicomputers. Hence the rise of the much smaller and more open C language.

Nanoimprint lithography semiconductor manufacturing system that covers diverse applications with simple patterning mechanism

https://global.canon/en/news/2023/20231013.html

Canon Says New ‘Stamp’ Machine Will Slash Chipmaking Costs – FT

https://www.asiafinancial.com/canon-says-new-stamp-machine-w...

The trash was mainly wastepaper, lunch bags, waxed paper and possibly a few food scraps such as apple cores, orange rinds, etc. from lunches each student brought. There would have been minimal plastic or aluminum packaging at the time. One of the older students would bring the wastebasket to a 50-gallon drum well away from the school building and light the contents with ordinary kitchen matches. It was a rural area, and that was how farm families disposed of combustible waste.

I went to a one-room schoolhouse in the US. Every month or so, we would have a school meeting where kids were elected to do various jobs like sweeping the room, taking out and burning the trash, washing the blackboards, cleaning erasers, pumping and bringing in water, etc.

Decision making seems fundamental to intelligence, is done by animals and humans, and can be done without the use of language or logic. This is the case when someone "decided without thinking".

Decision making requires imagination or the ability to envision alternative future states that may result from various choices.

Imagination is the start of abstract thinking. Consciousness results from the individual thinking abstractly about itself and how it interacts with the world.