I loved the India/China border sub-plot, both as a fun story and as a metaphor for geopolitics.
At the end of the book no faction of elites is clearly winning, they're just hashing out The Line Of Actual Control.
I've heard him say that REAMDE was his attempt to write an airport paperback. I don't think he succeeded there, but Termination Shock does work as a light thriller so maybe he was taking a second swing.
I think the moon theory was almost right, but I didn't see any reference to insects keeping the light source to one side or the other. The researchers seem to think that insects orient as if the brightest thing they see is "up".
Thanks, but the video doesn't actually explain it. It explains a lot around it, but it just says that the chip uses a "piezoelectric fan" and shows the intake slits and the outtake jets, but I'm still not finding an explanation of the mechanism itself.
I can vaguely imagine how valves might work, but I'm still curious how they do. I looked at the linked patent applications but the descriptions seem way too complex and abstract to get any kind of intuitive sense of the mechanism without already being an expert.
There's a related video they link to: https://youtu.be/NY-gA_zA_os?si=9ULOds_TqUO56MGs which demonstrates one type of piezoelectric fan, but it seems to be operating on totally different principles -- one end is freely swinging, rather than a membrane with fixed edges oscillating. And there are definitely no valves involved in that one.
Is there anywhere else that explains how oscillating membranes generate smooth airflow?
When I worked in an office it was much easier to casually ask for quick help. It was often pretty obvious whether a senior engineer was busy and focused or between tasks, checking email etc. and the overhead/friction of these ten-second conversations is higher when you have to wait for a response on slack, then launch a video call, share screen... instead of just making eye contact and saying "got a sec?"
I use Siri just for playing music, setting alarms, and reminders, but even there I run into bugs on a regular basis. One day she stopped being able to find songs from Apple Music, but could still play anything I'd saved to my phone (wasn't reception or CarPlay permissions or any of the obvious troubleshooting things you'd think, trust me I looked into it).
Sometimes she'll also misinterpret commands for unclear reasons. "Tomorrow at 7am, remind me to call John" and she responds "Ok, I've turned on your 7am alarm". I try again, speaking more clearly, and she says "Your 7am alarm is already on"
Businesses with high chargeback rates might get rejected by some payment processors, but there's usually another one willing to take them on in exchange for higher fees.
Interesting way of looking at it. I don't know if the marketing value alone could justify the $100m price, but when you think about a 30 second Super Bowl ad being $6m and compare that to all the discussion and news coverage generated by the Rogan deal... yeah I guess it was a pretty effective way of letting the public know they can listen to podcasts on Spotify.
Thanks for supplying the fact-check I was looking for. I think I've been seeing headlines about this "discovery" for over a decade, always presented as if it's a promising new technique but obviously there must be some reason it hasn't caught on by now.
Same. I would think at this point there would be companies focused on algae production for ruminants. AFAIK there is only one company in Australia that is doing this.
I haven’t read the Wired article yet but my critique is that there isn’t enough seaweed being farmed to adequately enrich a significant cattle population and all this headline does is relax self-judgement of environmentally-conscious meat eaters.
