2020 started out being a weird and devastating way to end the decade yet we naively thought those Australian wildfires were as bad as it could get.Now people outside that country barely remember they happened. Because then we got coronavirus. Luckily, we dodged the murder hornets but then went right to race wars. New York, the city, county, and state, has had the worst of both COVID-19(1) and the...
read moreIf you've read anything about computers for the last 25 years, you've read the hype about quantum computing and how it is going to be better and faster and with less heat and replace conduction-based chips and it will generally be awesome. And then nothing happens outside a lot of arXiv papers and some physics magic published in journals. Quantum computing has basically gotten the best marketing...
read moreRay tracing has been a hot topic since...well, at least 350 B.C. in the western world, when Aristotle described his camera obscura and wrote that the eye is 'a darkened chamber awaiting light.' Da Vinci was fascinated by it, as was Descartes. And of course Einstein wanted to understand light quanta.In the 1990s, software and hardware companies began to tout it, but like Atari Jaguar's claim it...
read moreIn 2018, you can guess the politics of many people by which newspapers they read, and you could also do that 100 years ago. Certainly some people, like me, read both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times but if someone defaults to MSNBC or Fox News, you can estimate their voting record with high levels of accuracy.read...
read moreIn 2018, you can guess the politics of many people by which newspapers they read, and you could also do that 100 years ago. Certainly some people, like me, read both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times but if someone defaults to MSNBC or Fox News, you can estimate their voting record with high levels of accuracy.read...
read moreKFC is launching a 5-in-1 meal with a built in power bank so you can charge your phone while you eat lunch. Watt a Box is designed to offset the drop in discretionary spend brought on by the moribund economy. One way to gain a competitive advantage over other companies is to introduce a feature they don't have. And that feature is a phone that won't die during chicken.Sorry, US diners, right now...
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