I read the book but don't recall any correlation to the topic of solar system alignment. Spoiler: Era 3 in the novel does speak of space exploration but this is all before the launches of Voyager (though Sputnik had launched by the books release IIRC).
> if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.
> A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.
LVDS implies differential signals and are designed to minimize EMI and can be hard to splice while still maintaining signal integrity. They can support high data rates (ethernet cables also use twisted pair LVDS). Theoretically this should be feasible up to 100s or even 1000s of mbps
Please read through this incredible book review (book is All Things Are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart). It is the kind of philosophy that everyone is looking past. Syntactic vs informational determinacy. LLMs is designed to create copy that is syntactically determinate (it is a complex set of statistics functions). Whereas the best human prose actually is the opposite--it does not converge on syntactic determinacy (see quote below) but instead converges on informational determinacy. The plot resolves as the reader's knowledge grows from abstraction and ignorance to empathy, insight and anticipation.
Semantic information, you see, obeys a contrary calculus to that of physical bits. As it increases in determinacy, so its syntactical form increases in indeterminacy; the more exact and intentionally informed semantic information is, the more aperiodic and syntactically random its physical transmission becomes, and the more it eludes compression. I mean, the text of Anna Karenina is, from a purely quantitative vantage of its alphabetic sequences, utterly random; no algorithm could possibly be generated — at least, none that’s conceivable — that could reproduce it. And yet, at the semantic level, the richness and determinacy of the content of the book increases with each aperiodic arrangement of letters and words into coherent meaning.
Edit: add-on
In other words, it is impossible for an LLM (or monkeys at keyboards [0]) to recreate Tolstoy because of the unique role our minds play in writing. The verb writing hardly appears to apply to an LLM when we consider the function it is actually doing.
The DIY tuning fork clock is very cool. I am hard pressed to understand why accutron doesn't still make and sell tuning-fork watches. I really admire the creative use of resonance frequencies (not dissimilar to quartz watches but cool that you can really see the tuning fork for you watch as opposed to a diminutive quartz crystal).
They have done a re-issue, which Dole has linked to (I'm not going to lie, they do look smashing)
I think the reason why it took so long is a combination of snobbishness (its not "mechanical" enough) and cost of manufacture. I assume that most of the tooling has been lost, and it required a lot of work to re-learn how to make from scratch.
But accutrons wern't that cheap when they launched, so I think they are within 50% of their original price, judging by my half arsed inflation calculations.
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is the book that comes to mind with this article link. 2 years ago my wife and I took the TV off the wall. My kids don't have Bluey or the latest Disney cartoon to keep them company. I am not going back... It has been the most blissful time. Amazing that the TV is not required to lead a thriving life despite what the incessant sales-industrial-complex will tell you.
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