The sheer distance is mind-boggling. Each light year is roughly 6 Trillion miles. this thing is 55 million x 6 trillion miles away. If I did my math right, that is 330 quintillion miles away and we took a picture of it.
I'd love to see this work. No more sitting on top of a huge bomb to break free from earth. The world’s largest airplane — a Stratolaunch behemoth with two fuselages and six Boeing 747 engines — made its first test flight on Saturday in California. The mega jet carried out its maiden voyage over the Mojave desert. https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/worlds-largest-plane-makes-first-test-flight/
Yeah....I thing they should do all the testing in England before they unleash it upon the Colonies. You guys are over populated anyways.
More good news... The joys of springs: how Kenya could steam beyond fossil fuel Engineers are tapping the Rift Valley’s subterranean energy to power an expanding economy A faint smell of sulphur, a shrill hiss of gas and a Rift Valley panorama punctuated by 30 pillars of steam mark the frontline of renewable energy growth in Kenya. This is the boundary between Hell’s Gate national park and the geothermal plants that are increasingly powering one of east Africa’s fastest-growing economies. Giraffes wander close to the giant pipes that snake across the landscape, a reminder this is also a border between an old model of development reliant on foreign safaris and a new drive to leapfrog the fossil-fuel phase of growth. In recent years, Kenya has been a frontrunner in expanding access to electricity. Since 2010, the proportion of the 44 million population with power has reportedly surged from one in five to three in five. This is largely thanks largely to steam from the subterranean depths. ... After a slow start, Kenya has embraced this technology with gusto. Engineers boast that the recently expanded Olkaria IV plant, on the edge of the national park, is now the biggest single-site geothermal facility in the world, with a capacity of 280 megawatts. Kenya is already the ninth biggest geothermal-producing nation in the world and will rise further when the new 165 MW Olkaria V facility opens in July. I particularly like the line about them 'leapfrogging the fossil-fuel phase of growth'.
Just watched this about tesla's existing autopilot... I hope the new one works better than that because that looks well dodgy atm. I'm also not sure how it's going to cope with roundabouts because they're almost an art-form. To be fair, that's not so much advanced driving as crap road design.
If autonomous driving systems can't handle roundabouts (or rotaries, in the NE US, or traffic circles, in most of the rest of the US) correctly, they'll still fit right in over here, since most Americans can't handle them correctly either.
The thing about the tesla was it looked like didn't seem to think it was allowed to use it's brakes so just steamed towards hazards and THEN slammed them on at the last minute. I'm guessing that's where the neural network part comes in because, like anybody, (or any 'thing' in this case), they/it needs to be taught how to 'read' the road. Otherwise it just keeps blithely ploughing ahead despite it being obvious to a human observer that it will need to slow down soon.
If handling of circles is an oversight of the Tesla folks, it's not surprising to me, since as I understand it all their work is being done in the western US. They're pretty uncommon out there. Hell, except for the Boston area and (to a lesser extent) DC, they're pretty uncommon everywhere in the U.S. Most people suck at them here because of how very rarely they're confronted with them.
They are actually becoming quite popular in central Ohio and Indiana. And if people can't understand how to read road signs they need to have their license suspended.
Well, maybe... my old man was a driving instructor so I'm a bit picky about this stuff. Reading the road, balance, braking, positioning and what you might call the 'art' of driving is something I grew up on. Just watching another one, though and this was more troubling.. "We weren't able to use autopilot there because the red light changed and it didn't notice it" Hmmm... yeah, that IS a bit troubling. ATM it seems fine as long as it's driving along an almost straight road with no other cars, pedestrians, bends, junctions or other 'difficulties'. The main problem is it seems to want to go to fast a lot of the time. It seems to have hazard 'blindness' as it's called so it only recognises a hazard when it's about to crash into something, not as the situation develops in front of it.