The Tech of Terminator 2 & NASA Probes the Sun

December 21, 2021 No. 12

Highlights this week: 🎄short xmas edition! 😎 the tech of terminator 2, 🌞 nasa probes the sun, and 🤖 8’-tall traffic robots

🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: Incredible story about (ex) Apple Engineers sneaking into the facility to work on unofficial projects

⚡️ Analog Insights: Flight delays 💲⏱

The total cost of flight delays is the sum of costs to airlines, passengers, lost demand, and indirect costs. The bulk of the costs are incurred by passengers as time lost due to schedule buffer, delayed flights, flight cancellations, and missed connections. Read the entire report here.

Startup News 🚀💰:

Prellis Biologics, a company developing the tools to create 3D-printed organs, announced a $14.5 million Series B round led by Celesta Capital.
ForwardX Robotics, a Beijing-headquartered company that makes autonomous mobile robots (AMR), has raised $31M in a Series C round led by Taikang Life Insurance.
Dedrone, an SF-based drone defense startup, raised $30.5 million in Series C funding led by public safety firm Axon.
eLeapPower, a technologies company for zero-emission electric vehicles, announced $21 Million in Series A funding led by a consortium of pension funds and BDC Capital's Cleantech Practice.
Sustaera Inc., a startup that sucks planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air, raised $10 million from a Series A funding round led by climate funds backed by Bill Gates and billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham.
Exponent Energy has secured $5 million in its pre-series A round of funding. The round was led by YourNest VC.

Interesting Links 🔗:

Alaska is a testbed for FAA innovation due to its harsh conditions. The first airport weather cameras were piloted there, and now the FAA is installing a new system to provide Alaska pilots with weather information: the Visual Weather Observation System (VWOS) which uses live imaging to complete the picture provided by the standard audio/text stream.
8’ tall robots manage traffic in Kinshasa, Congo.
An oral history of the tech of Terminator 2. “I think on my first overnight take for dailies I consumed several extra CPUs in the render room that we had downstairs. They were basically jammed with 240 VGX and 340 VGX SGI machines, along with other older SGI boxes. But as a result I think someone else’s shot didn’t finish that morning. I think around that time maybe it was Brian Knepp or someone else on the software team wrote PA (processor allocator) which was a nice simple GUI that allowed you to allocate or release CPUs from your allotment for your overnight renders”.
NASA sent a probe into the sun’s atmosphere.
Though exoskeletons are exciting and they allow some of us to carry one with physical activities despite handicaps, they appear to require quite a bit of brain power. In effect, though they may help you move, they require a lot of mental effort which can be distracting.
A charmingly old-school breakdown of christmas lights electricity usage.
I recently went to get some keys copied, and was pleasantly surprised by the elegantly simple machine used to get the job done – something I never really noticed before.