Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Architecture firm Jones Studio has designed an educational centre in Arizona with the aim of raising awareness about water resources and infrastructure in the region.

The Water Education Center will form part of a Central Arizona Project (CAP) facility north of Phoenix and highlight the “contested topic of water in the west”, according to Jones Studio principal Brian Farling.

Prospective designs show a sloping weathering-steel canopy supported by stone-clad buildings on each side of the 336-mile-long (541 kilometers) canal that brings water from the Colorado River to central Arizona.

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A stuttering economy, rampant inflation and a handful of mass layoffs later, it seems the tables may be turning.

According to Professor Jeremy Siegel, emeritus professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, staff looking over their shoulders at laid off peers may have actually proved useful to the economy.

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Why it matters: While AI algorithms are seemingly everywhere, processing on the most popular platforms require powerful server GPUs to provide customers with their generative services. Arm is introducing a new dedicated chip design, set to provide AI acceleration even in the most affordable IoT devices starting next year.

The Arm Cortex-M52 is the smallest and most cost-efficient processor designed for AI acceleration applications, according to the company. This latest design from the UK-based fabless firm promises to deliver “enhanced” AI capabilities to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, as Arm states, without the need for a separate computing unit.

Paul Williamson, Arm’s SVP and general manager for the company’s IoT business, emphasized the need to bring machine learning optimized processing to “even the smallest and lowest-power” endpoint devices to fully realize the potential of AI in IoT. Despite AI’s ubiquity, Williamson noted, harnessing the “intelligence” from the vast amounts of data flowing through digital devices requires IoT appliances that are smarter and more capable.

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YouTube has had it with you blocking the ads on its platform — and it’s willing to make the experience as miserable as possible until you give up.

As Business Insider reports, the company is encouraging viewers to turn off their ad blockers in their browsers or subscribe to YouTube Premium, which costs a whopping $13.99 a month, by degrading the experience of using the site.

“Ads are a vital lifeline for our creators that helps them run and grow their businesses,” a spokesperson told Insider. “That’s why the use of ad blockers violates YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

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Vernor Vinge is one of the foremost thinkers about the future of artificial intelligence and the potential for a technological singularity to occur in the coming decades. He’s a science fiction writer who’s had a profound impact on a wide range of authors including: William Gibson, Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson and Dan Simmons.

Many of Vinge’s works are brilliant. Among them are some of my all-time favorites in the SF genre. And he’s been recognized with numerous awards, including seven Hugo nominations and five wins, despite writing only eight novels and 24 short stories and novellas over a span of five decades.

In this video, I discuss his early works from the 1960s to the 1980s. His later works from the 1980s onward are the subject of my next video.

0:42 What is a technological singularity?

Continue reading “Vernor Vinge’s Early Science Fiction, 1965–1983; A Quest for Superhuman Intelligence & Singularities” | >

How are we so smart? We seem to be able to make process data with ease, doing tasks in seconds that take supercomputers much longer. Well, one thought is that we fundamentally take advantage of quantum mechanics to perform calculations similar to a quantum computer. This would give us a biologically produced quantum speed up in our brains. Until recently this was just a thought, there is no evidence that this is true. Well, now scientists believe that they may have found evidence of quantum interaction in our brains. Even more importantly, they showed that these quantum interactions are related to our consciousness. In this video, I discuss these latest results.

— References —
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2399-6528/ac94be.
[2] https://phys.org/news/2022-10-brains-quantum.html.
[3] https://scitechdaily.com/shocking-experiment-indicates-our-b…mputation/

— Socials –
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BroadwayPhysics.
Discord: https://discord.gg/SH4xvHQY
Publications: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=f-yIdjMAAAAJ&hl=en&authuser=2

— Equipment —

Continue reading “Are You Secretly A Quantum Computer?” | >

Last year, Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) started sending random data back to Earth, and it took NASA engineers months to figure out why. It turns out the AACS had entered an incorrect mode, but it’s unclear why the mode switch happened in the first place. This software patch is meant to stop the same thing happening to Voyager 2 (and to Voyager 1 again).

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager, explains “this patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible … These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

As Voyager 2 is over 12 billion miles away, it took over 18 hours to send the software patch to the probe on Friday. There is a risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have unintended consequences, so a readout of AACS memory is being carried out to make sure it’s in the right place. If no anomalies are found, the update will be triggered on Oct. 28.

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