My family had a shared radio and a shared phone and at one place where we lived the phone was shared by a neighbor. I built a crystal radio when I was 11 but didn't use it much. I think I was 14 when we bought a television which of course, was shared. IIRC we were able to receive 3 stations. When I 19 I bought a new-fangled transistor radio so no longer had to share the family radio but by then I was in University and not home. a few decades later, around 1996 when I was married, we bought a family computer and by 2005 or so each of us had our own computer.

Since there's no link for more information, in my imagination the actual chip is about 1 mm on a side with the drive about 10 cm x 10 cm x 3 cm including the active anti-vibration mechanism. This would yield about 200+ GB storage and write rates slower than SSDs, poor random access, and use more power. Not bad for a beta product.

I think it was Jerry Pournelle who said silicon is cheaper than iron.

Yellowcake is to a special form of powdered uranium as water is to a special form of powdered hydrogen.

Awesome!

Thanks.

It's first required to detect the apoE gene and whether there are one or two copies to provide a provisional diagnosis, I guess that's not really a problem but the article doesn't say. I would guess that when patients reach some age or perhaps at birth the genetic test would be prescribed by physicians as a matter of course. What's the normal function of the gene?

Having one copy of the apoE gene doubles and two copies multiplies by 12 the chance of contracting Alzheimer's according to the article, which implies that there are other causes of Alzheimer's and also implies that having the gene doesn't predict with any certainty that carrier will exhibit symptoms if he or she lives long enough. Never-the-less this approach appears to have great promise, probably too late to help me (I'm not yet exhibiting symptoms though despite what my detractors may allege!)

If your conservative friends think you are a liberal and your liberal friends think you are a conservative you are surely a conservative.

It's the incandescent bulb of power efficiency.

Oh, I'm certain that the fuel will be obtained from renewable resources.

Right, I agree. I heard that the US Naval Academy stopped teaching celestial navigation for a few years but recently decided that it was a good idea in case the GPS systems went down.

As far as AIS goes if the GPS system is out or jammed there's no way to show your ship's position nor any other ship's position so that makes it useless and it's foolish not to use it in conjunction with radar.

My not so long nautical career started on merchant ships with no radar, just eyes and ears. The last time I was OOD in the US Navy (1967) the ship had essentially the same surface and air radar as late WWII ships had and Loran-C which never gave a good position when we needed it, such as Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf off North Vietnam.

Backup is good!

All ships use the AIS collision avoidance system. The sending ship sends a radio signal that contains information about the ship, its position (derived from GPS), and its course and speed. The receiving ship has a receiver that displays the information from nearby vessels (and its own position and course) overlaid on a chart. Without the position derived from GPS the system collapses.

Dead reckoning can give a good approximation of where the ship is, if the navigation monuments (lighthouses, etc.) can be picked out from the buildings on the shore, especially at night with thousands of of other lights on the shoreline.

The problem isn't so much running aground as avoiding collision. Picking out running lights of a ship against the background of the shore lights can be daunting. Even then it's a guess as to the ship's course and there may be several ships that need to be watched perhaps with only the mate on watch to keep track of everything.

Read about the recent collision of the USS Fitzgerald and the MV ACX Crystal.

I learned FORTRAN 66 (or FORTRAN 4 - can't quite remember) in 1975 when I was 36 years old. The class was offered by the School of Business and run on a CDC 6500 60 bit computer. Input was punch cards ander the cycle was: punch the cards for code being really careful to keep them in order; sandwich the cards between the CDC control language cards, wrap with rubber bands and drop in an input window; after 45 minutes to a couple of hours time later start checking for output consisting of the printer output wrapped around the cards; correct errors; and repeat the cycle.

I learned quite quickly that the lab was almost empty at 10 PM so I got in the habit of doing my homework at night. I made friends with the operator and learned how to operate the machine which had 5 MB disk drives that were larger than my washing machine. IIRC it had 64 MB of memory and that 32 MB were available to the user. The printers were really, really fast and someone had wired a speaker to some part of the CPU so one could differentiate sounds and sometimes discern what tasks it was doing.

Later that semester a time sharing system was set up and I switched to using a teletype for input and then used it for class but the FORTRAN was a little different, I taught myself BASIC at that time as well.

One other thing I remembered was that most of the students, I think they were actually in the School of Business, had a really hard time 'getting it'. I used to compose my homework while the instructor was answering their questions.

It was 'spaghetti' programming at its worst.

Circular runways have been discussed in two posts on Quora (www.quora.com) which have yet to be merged.

Nah, according to the text of the article it's powering neither the State of Hawaii nor the Island of Hawaii but provide some of the power to Kauai which will reduce its use of oil.