Books of the Month 📚 : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Books of the Month 📚 / jurvetson
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示 2.1 |
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| 説明 | I am SO excited about these arrivals; gotta decide how to prioritize them.I just finished Airless Wilds (2021), the new release on the development of the Lunar Rover, “the crowning accomplishment of America’s manned space program.” And that segues to the pre-release of Chris Hadfield’s Apollo Murders (Oct 2021), woven with his first-hand perspective and polymathic heroics. I have already read about a number of my work artifacts in the opening pages: the F-4 Phantom ejection seat, LLTV thruster, and spy periscope from the Soviet Almaz (military space station).I am looking forward to Hager’s Alchemy of Air (2008), the story of “the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life-and-death importance for the largest number of people. Put simply, this discovery is keeping alive half the people on earth.” We need fixed nitrogen, available to our organic chemistries. It is the limiting factor for the growth of all food. While nitrogen gas is about 80% of our atmosphere, not one atom of it is available for our use when tightly bound by the triple bond of N2 gas. It is sequestered all around us. In nature, N2 is liberated to atomic nitrogen in small amounts by lightning strikes and nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Hager argues that if we reverted to relying on just those natural sources, billions of people would die of starvation in short order. He tells the story of the Haber-Bosch process to catalyze the production of ammonia (NH3) from N2 and H2 gas. It is the stuff we’re made of. From CO2, O2, H2 and N2 — “you could say we are air made solid.”I have been a closet fan of Cal Tech’s Carver Mead and his seminal book on Analog VLSI and Neural Systems (1989). The circuit diagrams remind me of my VLSI texts from the mid 80’s. But Mead was a fan of analog computing, a closer mimic of the brain and the deep learning AI of today. So, I am curious to see how much of this he foretold. I started a PhD in neural nets in 1989, but left in 1990, so this would have been essential reading. He opens with “the viewpoint described in this book is the result of my conviction that the nervous system of even a very simple animal contains computing paradigms that are orders of magnitude more effective than are those found in systems made by humans. After many years of study, I have become confident that the powerful organizing principles found in the nervous system can be realized in our most commonly available technology — silicon integrated circuits. It is clear to me that we will develop silicon neural systems, and that learning how to design them is one of the great intellectual quests of all time. We are witnessing the birth of a new discipline.” Indeed! “We are not limited by the constraints in our fabrication technology; we are limited by the paucity of our understanding. The efficient mapping of a system onto its implementation medium is the essence of the design problem.” Ah yes, the medium is the message. :) This approach is experiencing a revival in the latest analog ML chips from Mythic and the future roadmap from IBM. And for fun, Andy Weir’s latest astro-abandonment adventure, Hail Mary (2021). I did an interview with him about The Martian and handed him his first touch of Martian rock.And the D&D Foil Covers Edition (2018), because Dungeon Master nostalgia. |
| 撮影日 | 2021-08-17 17:15:38 |
| 撮影者 | jurvetson , Los Altos, USA |
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| カメラ | iPhone 12 Pro Max , Apple |
| 露出 | 0.011 sec (1/88) |
| 開放F値 | f/1.6 |