Tales of True Adventure for Rugged Men Not Unlike Yourself
“Ring of Fire” eclipse drops tomorrow.
Nashville – the center of the universe – only gets a 50% eclipse from about 10:30am to 1:30pm, with a peak at noon.
The full experience passes right through Roswell, so I’m pretty sure that this is the mother ship coming to get us. I’ll see you onboard.
“I made from washing machines, televisions, computers, radios, printers, microwaves, videos, speakers, lamps, and various electro appliances portrait of Nikola Tesla, without his invention of alternating current would have none of them could work. This anamorphosis is 3D installation with the resulting 2D effect.”
– Czech artist Patrik Proško
A recent letter to the WSJ in response to a Theranos story:
I am a former biotech analyst. Several years ago, the chairman of a client company told me he had seen an interview with Elizabeth Holmes and thought she was terrific and his company would be interested in working with her. He wanted to know what I thought.
Here is what I did: I went to the Theranos website and looked at the management and board of directors. I immediately noticed two red flags: First, the lack of relevant experience in the CEO’s bio, and second, the board appeared to be decorated with famous names unrelated to Theranos’s business.
Next, I called the company and introduced myself to the person who answered the phone. I explained the reason for my call and that I would like to speak to Ms. Holmes or leave her a message. I was told that there was no mechanism by which I could do that or anyone else with whom I could speak. Red flag No. 3.
It took me 10 minutes and cost my client zero dollars. Any life-sciences analyst would have done exactly the same thing and undoubtedly reached a similar conclusion. No rocket science here. So pardon my skepticism at senior members of corporations testifying as to how much money they spent on due diligence. Perhaps it’s time for their shareholders to make a change.
Elizabeth Silverman
Prism Biomedical Research
New York
Space Cancel Culture is coming for George Lucas.
Betelgeuse!
Also called Sun Dogs, “they can be seen anywhere in the world during any season, but are not always obvious or bright. Sun dogs are best seen and most conspicuous when the Sun is near the horizon.”
On Hulu tomorrow.
(artist’s drawing of Google’s quantum computer chip)
In October, Google built a quantum computer that solved an incredibly hard problem in 200 seconds — a problem the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10,000 years to solve. This is called “quantum supremacy”, and has been compared to the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
”Until recently, every computer on the planet — from a 1960s mainframe to your iPhone, and even inventions as superficially exotic as ‘neuromorphic computers’ and DNA computers — has operated on the same rules. These were rules that Charles Babbage understood in the 1830s and that Alan Turing codified in the 1930s. Through the course of the computer revolution, all that has changed at the lowest level are the numbers: speed, amount of RAM and hard disk, number of parallel processors.
But quantum computing is different. It’s the first computing paradigm since Turing that’s expected to change the fundamental scaling behavior of algorithms, making certain tasks feasible that had previously been exponentially hard. Of these, the most famous examples are simulating quantum physics and chemistry, and breaking much of the encryption that currently secures the internet.”
I’m sure this will go well.
More here.
Let’s talk.
From Birth.Movies.Death. comes this great news …
A curious thing happened over the weekend: roughly halfway through Saturday, while the rest of the world was entirely focused on the goings-on at this year’s big D23 Expo, Netflix dropped something of a bombshell announcement – as recent rumors had indicated, the Breaking Bad movie was completed, and would hit the streaming service on October 11th.
And there’s even a poster.