HURRICANE FORECASTS HAVE GOTTEN INSANELY BETTER OVER THE LAST 20 YEARS
Back in 1998, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts housed the 27th most-powerful supercomputer in the world, with 116 cores providing a maximum performance of 213 teraflops. Today, the ECMWF forecasting center has the world’s 27th and 28th most powerful supercomputers, each with 126,000 cores and 20 times the computing power of its machine two decades ago. This dramatic increase in computing power at the European center—as well as similar increases at US-based and other international numerical modeling centers—helps to explain the dramatic increase in hurricane-forecast accuracy over the same time period.
Read moreTHE RESULTS OF A 100,000-PERSON QUANTUM EXPERIMENT SEEM TO VIOLATE EINSTEIN’S THEORY OF LOCAL REALISM
When you close your eyes, you don’t assume that the world is no longer there simply because you can’t see it. Similarly, everything we know about the age of the Earth, Sun, and moon suggests that all these celestial bodies were doing their thing long before some mostly hairless monkeys evolved to appreciate them. But what if your observation of the world was actually creating it? It’s a trippy and counterintuitive idea, but one of the largest ever participatory experiments in physics just gave this hypothesis a major boost.
Read moreWHAT ASTRONOMERS ARE LEARNING FROM GAIA’S NEW MILKY WAY MAP
On April 25, Teresa Antoja of the University of Barcelona was one of thousands of astronomers who downloaded and began exploring an exquisite new map of the Milky Way made by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. Within a day, she and her colleagues reported the discovery of never-before-seen substructures throughout the galaxy: “shapes such as arches … snail shells and ridges,” they wrote — each one a clue about the Milky Way’s obscure past.
Read moreARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETS GROW BRAINLIKE NAVIGATION CELLS
Having the sense to take a shortcut, the most direct route from point A to point B, doesn’t sound like a very impressive test of intelligence. Yet according to a new report appearing today in Nature, in which researchers describe the performance of their new navigational artificial intelligence, the system’s ability to explore complex simulated environments and find the shortest route to a goal put it in a class previously reserved for humans and other living things.
Read moreSHORTWAVE TRADING: THE WEST CHICAGO TOWER MYSTERY
Since 2014 this blog has extensively covered the wireless networks built by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms or network providers to reduce latencies between the different exchanges around the world (market makers need fast connectivity to manage risk, news traders also need to be fast, etc.). This epic investigation on microwave, which started with HFT in my backyard, will be fully reported in a book I’m currently writing (in French for now).
Read moreSMARTPHONES ARE KILLING THE PLANET FASTER THAN ANYONE EXPECTED
A new study from researchers at McMaster University published in the Journal of Cleaner Production analyzed the carbon impact of the whole Information and Communication Industry (ICT) from around 2010-2020, including PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones, and servers. They found remarkably bad news. Even as the world shifts away from giant tower PCs toward tiny, energy-sipping phones, the overall environmental impact of technology is only getting worse. Whereas ICT represented 1% of the carbon footprint in 2007, it’s already about tripled, and is on its way to exceed 14% by 2040.
Read moreEARLY THOUGHTS ON UBER’S FLYING CAR FROM AN AVIATION ENGINEER
Earlier today I was reading about Uber’s newest unveiling of their concept for a flying taxi and I love it. It’s an electrically powered, multi-rotor plane with two rotors for vertical flight and one for horizontal flight. This is reminiscent of the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor, where the propellers transition from vertical flight to horizontal – the difference being Uber’s rotors are fixed. This has the potential to reduce some maintenance by reducing moving parts, but you’re also adding a lot of weight which reduces the carrying capacity.
Read moreSPYING ON A STORM’S INFRASONIC SIGNALS TO IMPROVE TORNADO WARNINGS
Computers compare the signals recorded at each microphone, and perform filtering and signal processing to further minimize noise. If all three signals look alike, that rules out wind, Elbing says, because the noise from wind would be not coherent. By analyzing those signals, the researchers can then create a simple computer model of the fluid mechanism that produces the infrasound waves. Their system had its first success last May, when a tornado hit Perkins, Oklahoma, which is about 20 kilometers from the university.
Read moreGOOGLE LAUNCHES THE THIRD VERSION OF ITS A.I. CHIPS, AN ALTERNATIVE TO NVIDIA’S
Google on Tuesday announced that it has developed a third generation of its special chips for artificial intelligence. The new Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) will help Google improve applications that use artificial intelligence to do things like recognize words people are saying in audio recordings, spot objects in photos and videos, and pick up underlying emotions in written text. As such, the chips represent an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units
Read moreGOOGLE DUPLEX WILL CALL SALONS, RESTAURANTS, AND PRETEND TO BE HUMAN FOR YOU [UPDATED]
Tuesday’s I/O keynote included a segment on Google Assistant with a slew of newly announced features, but none was as startling as its rollout of Google Duplex: a voice-powered service that pretends to be human and calls businesses on your behalf. Google CEO Sundar Pichai played back two phone conversations that he alleged were 100-percent legitimate, in which Google’s AI-driven voice service called real-world businesses and scheduled appointments based on a user’s data.
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