The most affordable iPhone features the powerful A15 Bionic, 5G, better battery life, improved durability, and a new camera system with advanced features like Smart HDR 4, Photographic Styles, and Deep Fusion.
asciiMol: Curses based ASCII molecule viewer for linux terminals
A basic molecule viewer written in Python, using curses; Thus, meant for linux terminals.
This is an alpha version, featuring:
- Opening default cartesian .xyz files
- Displaying one-letter atom labels
- Orthographic view
- Navigation
- Zoom, Rotation, Auto-Rotation
- Bond detection and display
A Chip To Bridge The Usb 2 – Usb 3 Divide
On Twitter, [whitequark] has found and highlighted an intriguing design – a breakout board for the VL670, accompanied by an extensive yet very easy to digest write-up about its usefulness and inner workings. The VL670 is a chip that addresses a surprising problem – converting USB 2.0 signals into USB 3.0.
If you have a USB 2.0 device and a host with only USB 3.0 signals available, this chip is for you. It might be puzzling – why is this even needed? It’s about the little-known dark secret of USB3, that anyone can deduce if they ever have to deal with a 9-pin USB 3.0 connector where one of the three differential pairs doesn’t quite make contact.
Parallel Grouped Aggregation in DuckDB
TL;DR: DuckDB has a fully parallelized aggregate hash table that can efficiently aggregate over millions of groups.
Grouped aggregations are a core data analysis command. It is particularly important for large-scale data analysis (“OLAP”) because it is useful for computing statistical summaries of huge tables. DuckDB contains a highly optimized parallel aggregation capability for fast and scalable summarization.
Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles
Several Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) encountered by military, commercial, and civilian aircraft have been reported to be structured craft that exhibit ‘impossible’ flight characteristics. We consider a handful of well-documented encounters, including the 2004 encounters with the Nimitz Carrier Group off the coast of California, and estimate lower bounds on the accelerations exhibited by the craft during the observed maneuvers. Estimated accelerations range from almost 100g to 1000s of gs with no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies. In accordance with observations, the estimated parameters describing the behavior of these craft are both anomalous and surprising. The extreme estimated flight characteristics reveal that these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth. In many cases, the number and quality of witnesses, the variety of roles they played in the encounters, and the equipment used to track and record the craft favor the latter hypothesis that these are indeed technologically advanced craft. The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel, i.e., if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time.
Goosh: The unofficial Google shell
This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page.
Goosh is powered by google custom search.
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s cloud debut comes with upsides for devs
Microsoft is announcing the debut of Asobo Studios’ Microsoft Flight Simulator on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming–an announcement that wouldn’t normally catch our eye but for one additional fact.
In addition to launching the game on its subscription platform, Microsoft is debuting a series of new APIs for game developers working on games that use cloud computing to offload storage and processing to external servers. It’s a move that Microsoft says can help make more “cloud-aware” games that take advantage of cloud-computing technology be playable with cloud computing tech.
CPython, C standards, and IEEE 754
Perhaps February was “compiler modernization” month. The Linux kernel recently decided to move to the C11 standard for its code; Python has just undergone a similar process for determining which flavor of C to use for building its CPython reference implementation. A calculation in the CPython interpreter went awry when built with a pre-release version of the upcoming GCC 12; that regression led down a path that ended up with the adoption of C11 for CPython as well.
A bug that was fixed in early February started the ball rolling for Python. Victor Stinner encountered a GCC regression that caused CPython not to get the expected IEEE 754 floating-point NaN (not a number) value in a calculation. An LWN article sheds some light on NaNs (and how they are used in Python) for those who need a bit more background. The calculation was using the HUGE_VAL constant, which is defined as an ISO C constant with a value of positive infinity; the code set the value of the internal Py_NAN constant used by the interpreter to HUGE_VAL*0, which should, indeed, evaluate to a NaN. Multiplying infinity by any number is defined to be a NaN for IEEE 754.
Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp as ‘Fortnite’ Maker Expands Into Music
Video-game developer Epic Games announced that it has bought Bandcamp, the online music store and community geared around independent musicians.
The Writers Who Translated Goethe into English Became Some of the Best Writers in English
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is the central figure in the German literary canon. Poet, novelist, playwright, and scientist, he is to the German language what William Shakespeare is to English-speaking cultures, only more so. The fact that such a protean, polymathic, and “great” figure emerged on the doorstep of the modern world, rather than in a faraway era, makes Goethe feel less mythical, more like a contemporary, and more like one of us. Indeed, Goethe spoke and wrote in what is recognizably modern German instead of a language that may sometimes require guidance to fully grasp, even for native speakers, as is the case when students approach Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English for the first time.
Random 101 