slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
I'm still working on the blog, but as a quickie: it's the lesson of the Datasaurus dozen, that sometimes you need to look at the actual distribution rather than statistics.
There's no (safe) gaps. Plenty of physical space, but the safety margin eats it all up. Nothing else is allowed to use those orbital shells or anything between them.
Also, this is what happens if you put them all in a single orbit at the same altitude:
> slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
500ms means ~150,000 km travel distance; for that distance as round-trip time from origin to destination and back again means the one-way distance is 75,000 km, so if it's via a single satellite bounce then the average distance to the satellite would be 37,500 km: [You]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[Them]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[You].
I think they must be assuming all comms are via geostationary satellites. In some talks, this is what the speaker actually meant, though they may not have been clear about it; other times, there's talks from people who copied the former but perhaps didn't understand.
For DCs in space, even in GEO, it would be half the distance because you're communicating with the satellite itself not with someone else somewhere else on the ground.
People already talk about that, so I wouldn't be adding much new. That said, had already put in a bit about cost of launching.
TL;DR: Alphabet researchers (and Alphabet owns more of SpaceX than the entire IPO so if anything they're biased to optimism), recon it will take SpaceX launching about 370,000 tons to orbit before they've even figured out how to get the costs down to the point it makes sense to put these in orbit.
The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.
Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.
Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.
Here in Northern Europe there seems to be something of a renaissance of traditional linseed oil paints, both because of people being more environmentally conscious and wanting to avoid VOC's and microplastics, but also because there's plenty of scare stories of people rotting their houses after painting them with more modern but less breathable paints like the usual alkyds or acrylics.
Not saying it's not possible to be successful with the modern paints, but they demand a different style of construction that allows air to flow on the backside of the facade.
This is the kind of note I was hoping for. Standard pigment codes (PR170, PR254 etc) are a good call and I wanted a proper Color Index field and this pushes it up the list. I will also take another look at the Van Dyke Brown swatch. You may be right that it reads too close to burnt sienna. Chromatopia looks like a lovely book and thanks for the Langridge pointer, glad those artisanal makers are still going.
> Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month (approximately $15 billion annually) to use the computing infrastructure at the Colossus and Colossus II data center clusters in Memphis, Tennessee. This massive infrastructure deal gives Anthropic access to over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs (mostly H100 and H200 chips) for large-scale AI inference.
Australia is proposing a CGT tax of 30% on "capital gains" .. essentially taxing the _income_ from wealth.
This is more of a fair comparable to reason about when comparing taxing wealth and taxing wages.
In nerd-speak, taxing the Derivative of Wealth is comparable to taxing Income.
You could argue that a fair comparison of wages and wealth would first subtract the minimum cost of living, so that wage tax is effectively a tax on the growing wealth of wage-earners. This would arguably be a fairer tax comparison - in both cases it is the derivative of wealth that is being taxed.
If a large portion of the populace spends all their income on basic food, rent and petrol then they have no chance of wealth increase, and perhaps should fairly be charged 30% of their $0 growth in annual wealth.
As someone who is fairly ambidextrous, but predominately a lefty - the things that are harder to switch between are some of the gross motor skills.
For example, throwing (or kicking) with your non-preferred side is not as simple as picking up and throwing a ball or simply kicking it. You have to adjust your position and stride to lead with the correct foot. I found learning right-handed pace bowling in cricket (for fun) especially challenging as you have to land your back foot in the right place as you bowl through the popping crease. A few steps and rolling the arm over to spin was easy, and I actually can get more spin on the ball with my right hand.
My theory is that the handedness came about through learning basic survival activities such as running and jumping, throwing spears or rocks, etc that require using a preferred or learned hand.
This is true for me as well. I can't really play volleyball, because you are supposed to hit the ball with both hands, but my left hand is constantly ahead of my right hand. All my shots are crooked.
Climate change is too soft of a term. Maybe that's why it doesn't interest people who like to declare war on things.
The targeted term must be something that is clearly human made, something that sounds undeniably bad and something that is easily understood by everyone at first glance:
_War on Pollution_
Nature is good, pollution is bad. People who pollute are _obviously bad_ and they do bad things. Pollution is wasteful and ugly. Yuck!
Also it's more general than climate change. Ocean plastic is also bad. Chemical, electronic and light pollution etc.
The people who think of chemtrails and 5g waves. They really hate pollution so much, they see it everywhere. Give them a war that they can join in.
They did declare war against climate change and decided to continue polluting. This is the only moral calculus the elites of America have always cared about: will it make me more money?
From slavery to oil to silicon, exploitation is what America has always been good at.
slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
Not an expert, feel free to weigh in.