We’re a decade from self-driving cars. When I write self-driving I mean a car that drives you around while you sleep, which is level-4 and level-5. Since I think we have 10 years until that, in the meantime let’s talk about level 1, 2 and 3 in a granular way.
Continue reading “On self-driving cars”
#ToMarsAndBack
In 2021 pieces of Mars will land safely on earth as part of Mars 2020. The Mars 2020 rover collects samples and leaves them in canisters on the surface. The lander deploys a fetch rover to collect the samples and deposit them in an ascent vehicle, which blasts into Mars orbit. There, a return orbiter collects the samples for transport back to Earth.
Video- The Nine Gravity Assists That Bring Our Satellite to Orbit Around Mercury
The BepiColombo mission launched in October 2018 will enter orbit around Mercury on December 5, 2025. Here’s an incredible animation of its 9 gravity assists past Earth (once), Venus (twice) and Mercury (six times).
Video– Visualizing how much fuel a Saturn 5 used per second in terms of elephants
The Saturn V rocket got to the moon burning 20 tones of fuel per second. An African elephant weighs roughly 5 tons. So roughly 4 elephants worth of fuel per second. Amazing video illustration:
SpaceX Falcon 9: How Elon Musk’s Rocket Is Winning the Reusability Race
This wonderful illustration from July 2019 National Geographic explains one of Elon Musk’s greatest space innovations – rocket reuse.
Continue reading “SpaceX Falcon 9: How Elon Musk’s Rocket Is Winning the Reusability Race”
Video– First year of life for six Swainson’s Hawks
This mapped graphical visualization of six Swainson’s Hawks from Data is Beautiful caught my attention.
Via reddit
Continue reading “Video– First year of life for six Swainson’s Hawks”
Video– 3D animation of my route on Mount Everest
3D model and animation by Jeremy White via NYT.
In-depth– Spend analysis of 6 years 686 rides and $12,041 spent on Uber
What I learned from my Uber data
I save $703/month using Uber versus owning 2 cars (🚙🏎). I’ve spent $12,041 on 686 Ubers over 6 years. By comparison, car ownership cost $11,783 per year, most of it depreciation. What could $703/month buy you? Well, four years of $703/month and you’ll save enough to climb Mount Everest 🏔 unguided. Or you could buy a shiny new laptop every 3 months. More details below. Continue reading “In-depth– Spend analysis of 6 years 686 rides and $12,041 spent on Uber”
Mars mission will take 6 years roundtrip including prep
Photo credit National Geographic Magazine, November 2016.
eBay Adds to Machine Learning Hype
Earlier this week I blogged about 5 simple questions you can ask to determine AI hype.
Today I saw something with more hype than I would expect from a respected tech company. “eBay determines this price through a machine learned model of the product’s sales prices within the last 90 days.”
In my opinion this price prediction is not machine learning. It’s just math. It’s not a machine learned anything. It fails 1-5 of Stephen’s tests.
