I recall MMX stood for "multimedia extensions" in marketing speak, while it was really more about "matrix mathematix". I wouldn't waste my money on "AI cores" but if they're really just wider SIMD units, I'm much more interested — but even then only if they are freely programmable without some closed SDK. It doesn't need to become a SSE-like CPU extension, I'm fine with something like OpenCL support, where it might actually make more sense.

It's interesting, though, how linear algebra with large arrays is suddenly becoming cool and important. I thought people had been doing it on computers for decades, but I guess it was only important to a certain class of geeks. Gaming gave us cheap GPUs which helped a lot, and I guess we're in for some more windfall from the latest hype.

Do androids do it with electric sheep? Now that would be a dick news story.

<morbo>Ultrasonic humidifiers don't work that way!</morbo> They break water into tiny droplets, which then evaporate naturally more easily than bulk water (see Köhler theory / Kelvin effect). The effect of the article is about evaporation itself.

Ultrasonic humidifiers use less energy than traditional ones that rely on direct evaporation, but the droplets can be a health hazard. If the water has any pathogens (and it likely does), they may be carried about along the droplets.

As mentioned in another post, district heating is common in Finland and other Nordic countries -- we obviously care more about heating (as well as insulation and heat recovery) in these cold latitudes. But it hasn't always been the default option for new buildings. My childhood home had an oil furnace, and some time in the 2000s the house was connected to district heating. I don't know the actual costs, but my parents are regular middle class folk and it didn't look like a huge operation had taken place. Obviously some digging was done, but besides that, there's just the heat exchanger in the boiler room, and they kept the oil furnace as a backup.

The main point is that once you have circulating water radiators, you can quite easily switch to other heat sources, such as ground heat which I mentioned recently in another article. But if you only have electric radiators, you're basically screwed.

There have even been plans to use the waste heat from nuclear reactors for district heating in Finland, going back at least a decade. One of the main arguments why it hasn't been done is that it would be a huge single point of failure. So at least it's not just general scare of the nuclear, and it's interesting to see how the more recent plans of mini-reactors will fare.

A rotating mass will rotate the space-time around it, which affects the motion of objects around it. The accretion of matter around a black hole creates outward jets of matter, and the paper suggests that the axis of these jets if precessing, i.e. the direction is rotating about another axis. Frame dragging would suggest that this other axis is the axis of rotation of the black hole, and hence of the surrounding space-time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's quite interesting that the black hole and the accretion disk would have different axes of rotation. In contrast, Saturn's rings are closely aligned with the planet's rotation, presumably as they were formed in the same process. It's also fortunate that the two directions are different for this black hole -- we couldn't see the effect of frame dragging on the jets if they were on the same axis.

I think Finland is a pretty good example of a modern metric country, but I've never seen anything except inches on TV screen sizes here. They're not even actual inches, at least they weren't in the CRT days -- I remember 19'' CRTs having about 17'' of viewable area.

With today's huge flat screens in various aspect ratios, you'd think people were more interested in the width and height of the set in local units. But it's always the diagonal inches as it's always been done that way.

Here in Finland, air source heat pumps are mainly used for auxiliary heating, and one of the main selling points is use for cooling in the summer. To replace central heating here, you need ground heat. I don't have any personal experience on this, but there are success stories in the news around the country, and I'm also involved in a housing co-operative where it's being considered for the long term plans.

The main requirement is circulating water radiators, but it's even better with underfloor tubing. There the target water temperature is lower, so the heat pumps are more efficient.

Building height is sometimes quoted as a limiting factor, because you're basically getting a given heat flux per square meter of property. Of course this depends on how much of the property is taken by the building footprint. I recall figures such as 4 to 6 floors being feasible, so it wouldn't work very well in tight urban settings.

Besides air/ground heat, there's also interest in heat recovery from outgoing air and sewage.

Also found this via random googling: https://www.geothermal-energy....

Heat pumps are widely used here in Finland, and there's an increasing interest in geothermal systems for residential buildings. But as others have already pointed out, these consume a nontrivial amount of electricity. There's a particular problem with combined heat and power, as the power plants will always generate these in a given ratio. If there's less demand for district heating, these plants will have to wind down both kinds of output. It's pretty bad for the market if the supply goes down at the same time the demand goes up.

Heat pumps would be great if we had unlimited clean electricity, but currently a lot of processes generate waste heat which could be used for heating buildings, reducing the need for electricity. Nuclear would be great for combined heat and power if we could only get over the irrational feats and NIMBYism.

So you're Keeping Up with the Kardashevs?