bronz

This is really cool.

Can someone please comment on the significance of this for the physics layman.

Thank you very much.

Where can I learn more about the forces underlying the topography of cities? I find the connection you described between house width and taxation to be fascinating.

This has caught the attention of Elon Musk

https://twitter.com/elonmusk

OK, I have done a little Googling. The evidence boils down to only a few verifiable facts.

In the Bay Area, a van registered to apple was spotted. The van was mounted with hardware that is unmistakably designed for car automation, namely spinning cameras at the front and rear. It is basically conclusive that the car is a self driving prototype and not something for apple maps. There is video of that van linked below. This is not conclusive evidence that Apple has intentions to enter the EV market, though.

Recently, Apple has hired people from the automotive industry, including some from Tesla (Articles that state this as fact cite linkedin, so I am assuming it is true). Basically, based on the qualifications and expertise of these hires, it can be concluded that Apple is not assigning them to work on CarPlay, which is the only known alternative. (I have not verified this myself but feel that it is OK to accept as true for the time being).

As far as I could tell everything else out there is speculation or not verifiable. There are various instances of bloggers and reporters claiming that they have gotten word from Apple employees that Apple is exploring the possibility of entering the EV market. These employees have all remained anonymous and there is no evidence that their claims are genuine or accurate.

My own conclusion is that there is a strong possibility that Apple is attempting to enter the EV market in some way. Let us ignore the evidence that has come to the surface as of late. The EV market has a lot of growth left and a lot of unclaimed territory. Apple has a lot of cash sitting around, a relative familiarity with power electronics and most importantly a very strong leader, Tim Cook. Apple is large and old but it does not appear to be fragmented and it is, IMHO, still capable of pouncing on new opportunities and markets. The means, motive, and opportunity all seem to exist in the case of Apple and EVs. And bringing the recent observations back into the equation only appears to strengthen the hypothesis.

video of van: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lhU54nhyyk

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/02/04/mysterious-apple-car/

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-is-working-on-a...

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employee-well-give-tesl...

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-more-evidence-that-appl...

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-testing-street-view-com...

I would really like to know if it is likely that any video footage was captured of the soft landing. From afar or from cameras on the first stage itself.

Edit: Elon Musk tweeted a still image from what looks like video footage from aboard the first stage.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/565716774260576262

I haven't looked into the details or the validity of the claims made in this article. That said, this is really cool. The application of high throughput computing to optics and RF stuff is very exciting right now.

I am really excited for The Witness. If you ever watch one of Mr Blows interviews on Youtube you will see why. His philosophy about video games is interesting and refreshing. Particularly, his thoughts on establishing a dialogue between the player and developer through small events and patterns in the game is very insightful and inspiring. I'm sure that The Witness will be a very thoughtfully crafted game and I am definitely going to buy it. Mr Blow, if you are reading these comments, I wish you the best of luck with this game.

Do you need to pay royalties to Microsoft in order to use DX12/DX11 in a commercial game?

I would also recommend these readings for those of you who are interested in deep learning:

http://yyue.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-brief-overview-of-deep-le...

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/dlbook/

Reading List is annoying to use and inferior to tabs.

Wow, you really get it. You really hit the nail of the head about bookmarks. They are almost always completely forgotten. Tabs, however, are constantly groomed and sifted through and pruned. If I could have my way, I would take Safari with all it's nice features like sexy tab scrolling and tab view (these are major assets to the tab junkie) and reshape it into something entirely tab based. Instead of bookmarks, you would have long lived tabs. And all the tabs are categorized in whatever way the user wants. And tab view would actually allow you to manipulate tabs while viewing them (it is a fucking mystery to me why you can't do that). So it would be like having all your bookmarks and tabs mixed into one pot. And of course, bullet proof tab recovery features without the cloud. Jesus, maybe I should just write a Safari extension.

No apologies are needed, nothing critical was lost :). Cool project BTW.

Because I cycle through a lot of tabs. Yes, some of them I leave up for months to pick away at, but others I finish in just a day. It's much easier to close tabs than to edit my bookmarks constantly. And losing those tabs isn't an issue because Safari can be made to reopen those tabs each session, even after unexpected shutdown or whatever. But then this happened. I need to write something that will back up my tabs.

Just a warning, if you try this while using Safari it might crash and close all of your tabs somehow. And it might make it so that you can't reopen those tabs despite the fact that you have tabs set to be restored each session. And you may in fact experience the acute pain of losing a year's worth of painstakingly accumulated tabs. Not that this has happened to me.

What is this and why is it a big deal?

Does anyone know how the display works? You can see in the footage from the unveiling event, where the camera apparently has one of the units strapped to the front of it's lens, that virtual objects do not seem to blend in with the background. This suggests that it is able to block the transmission of light from the environment as well as add its own light to the scene. The blocking of light could be done with an LCD element but I'm not sure about illumination. I'm really curious about this.

Wow, thank you for mentioning that. Your source says that they have declined to compete because they are focusing on a commercial product of some kind. That is very exciting news.

Before anyone mentions that Satellites can only deliver inferior internet service, previous threads have taught us that with low earth orbit satellites latency is not a problem.

I watched the first one live. Hopefully the Atlas robots perform better this time around. I'm most excited to see the next iteration of Schaft, which Google now owns.

I prefer the way he is now. His soundtrack work is very good.

Ice is a poor conductor of heat. This means that thermal energy of the liquid medium will be exchanged between the ice near the surface of the ice body/bodies. Thus, the rate at which the ice accepts energy from the alcohol is determined by the surface area of the bodies of ice. A single sphere of ice produces the lowest possible surface area. On a graph of drink temperature vs time, crushed ice (highest surface area) would produce a large dip and then level out. The orb would create a broad valley of lower temperature, though never as cold as the crushed ice.