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NextApex4: Earthworms are awesome!

iPhone 15, fifteen percent less rotational inertia, Earthworms are awesome, GPS, MIT@GPT, Kernel Map

Author

Vincent Pulling
October 01, 2023

Apologies on my reticence, there has been nothing noteworthy enough for NextApex until:

Earthworms contribute to 6.5% of global grain production

Earthworms contribute to 6.5% of global grain production

Earthworms are important drivers of global food production, contributing to approximately 6.5% of grain yield and 2.3% of legumes produced worldwide each year, according to new work published by Colorado State University scientists in the journal Nature Communications.

"This is the first effort that I'm aware of that's trying to take one piece of soil biodiversity and say, 'OK, this is the value of it; this is what it's giving us on a global scale,'" said Steven Fonte, leader of the study.

phys.org/news/2023-09-earthworms-contribute-global-grain-production.html

When the address is wrong, is Global Positioning to blame, or a database on some search engine somewhere? GPS.gov is pissed people keep conflating the two! lmao

This talk with professor mark at MIT has a great quote,

“When my students are asking me for where to look for work, I say, look where there is more data than theory.” He says this in support of researching knowledge representations of the internal neural nets of AI systems.


“When my students are asking me for where to look for work, I say, look where there is more data than theory.”

Personally, I find that ChatGPT is changing my own workflow as a software developer and engineer. It is quite helpful in many regards, but now I have to get creative about how I ask things, how I posit them, how much of the previous context I can preserve between long back-and-forths.

Interactive map of Linux kernel

Some maniac made a very good interactive display mapping out the various columns of the Linux architecture. “Layers”

makelinux.github.io/kernel/map

This image was submitted as “drawn by AI” and the copyright office said “nope” — as we covered in the first NextApex, human engagement, effort, and creativity are to some degree (the line is determined case-by-case) required for copyright, copyrights.

News that did not make the main cut:

  1. iPhone 15 Pro
    10% lighter but
    15% lower O rotational inertia O because of edge mass
    http://leancrew.com/all-this/2023/09/iphone-15-pro-facts-and-estimates
    = Less spinny spinny.

  2. Pedantic Scientists pedantically figure out how to technically “write underwater” by spilling a bunch of ink into the water and using a bead that attracts ink to leave a mark. I’m not impressed but I’m glad they’re not making tools of death so, consider it a win. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/09/scientists-figured-out-how-to-write-in-water/