Back in Paris, where temperatures are nice but blue skies are some kind of mythological animal, it seems. Anyway, at least I did not have a lot of trouble with the allergies and the dirty air this time. Quite packed week at work (and it will probably get worse in the coming months), but still found some cool stuff to share. Let’s start:
A GPS that would work in the cool regions of the planet
Even though GPS coverage is wonderful in almost all superficial locations of Earth, it stops working extremely fast when you submerge just a little bit in a lake or at sea. A few years ago I tried to track a couple open sea swims with a sports-watch, and couldn’t manage to get very accurate results. The same holds for biologists trying to study sea animal migrations, which go much much deeper, thus making it even harder for radio waves to reach tracking devices. For a long time now, people have been working on some kind of alternative, and last week I saw a cool article on the topic on The Economist. The basic idea is to use sound waves, which travel for long distances in water, and to get advantage of the layered nature of the ocean due to salinity and temperature gradients.
GPS for the oceans, on The Economist
Sofar and DARPA look to standardize ocean monitoring gadgets with Bristlemouth, on TechCrunch
A successful businessman
A million people wrote about this for the past couple weeks, so I will not extend much. While I think that having Twitter on the hands of a single person is probably better than having it governed by dozens of shareholders which know nothing about the platform, Elon Musk is not even in the top 1000 people I would list for the position. A man whose parents got rich by mining emeralds in Africa, which allowed him to make a fortune by buying other people companies (like PayPal) or selling stuff that was done by others decades before (electric cars, rocket science). A man who says that wants to return free speech to the platform, while its companies fire people who show defective products. A man that publishes papers on topics clearly outside of his expertise area where he is the only signing author, just because he founded the company. «The most successful businessman on Earth», who thinks that charging for tweets is a good business model for Twitter. A man that does not know how content moderation works at all, who calls someone a pedophile when he shows he is wrong. A man that manipulates the stock market and the crypto economy on a regular basis by tweeting memes. A man who says he wants to eliminate bots from Twitter, but took advantage of them to create a surreal narrative around Tesla and a cult around his figure. And the list goes on and on. Dark times ahead for the platform, I fear.
Musk told banks he will rein in Twitter pay, make money from tweets, on Reuters
Tesla fired an employee after he posted driverless tech reviews on YouTube, on CNBC
Opinion | Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter, on The New York Times
Running Twitter Is Going to Disappoint Elon Musk, on The Atlantic
Elon Musk Is Being Accused of Breaking the Law While Buying Twitter Stock, on Time
The never ending story
It’s been over two months now that the invasion started and things seem to be slowing down, which means that the conflict might enter a new stagnation phase that could last for years. Russia attacked Kyiv while UN diplomats were on the city. The US wants to spend 33 additional billion USD on the conflict, and UK is mobilising troops on Europe.
How Not to Invade a Nation, on Foreign Affairs
Why Russia’s rocket attack on Kyiv is seen as an insult to the U.N., on NPR
Ukraine war in maps: Tracking the Russian invasion, on BBC
UK to send 8,000 soldiers to eastern Europe on expanded exercises, on The Guardian
Biden Seeks Another $33 Billion To Help Ukraine Fend Off Russia, on Huffpost
Kirby got 30
And people showed some love al around the internet. I forgot if I talked about it, but latest game on the Switch is 🔥🔥🔥
And that’s it for the week. Stay safe!
Featured image from @lolipop_lord
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