Agree. I also find this photo to be very profound. Generations of people lived and died and we will never see their faces. After this it’s like a great veil was lifted on the human story.
I wonder in our digital age how long our images will endure. Will the vast quantities of images we have now have disappeared entirely 200 years from now and the photographic period be the only enduring image record? It’s interesting to think about.
While your comment is true today. It doesn’t support the GP’s claim that Japan was near a nuclear weapon at the end of WW2 and only lacked the will to do so.
Remember when software was eating the world? The gravy train ran out on commodity hardware and now we are paying the price for almost 3 decades of underinvestment.
According to Claude, NL only has 5500-6000 signaled intersections and of those approximately 900-1450 are of the type you are suggesting (iVRI). The benefit is also higher in NL due to the density and amount of cyclists. iVRI is also not latency sensitive and so installation costs are low as signaling can traverse the regular cellular network.
In the US, we have many more lights due to the road layout (grid). There are more than 3200 signaled intersections in my county in California alone despite being 1/14th of the land area of the NL.
The robot also estimates that there are 300,000 signaled intersections in the US. We honestly don't know how many there are because they are all operated by different agencies.
For US arterial roads iVRI has limited benefit. So the focus in the US has been on V2X development which focuses more on crash avoidance and has much higher installation costs due to latency requirements. In the end there's a lot of low hanging fruit here in the US if signals could just be retimed.
NL has one procurement entity. In the US there is no single coordinating entity to standardize traffic lights. Each state standardizes its own lights and then each municipality handles its own procurement.
I don't know the numbers, but I live in NL and I can't recall the last time I encountered a traffic light that just runs on a timer; as far as I know just about all traffic lights have some awareness of traffic.
Lowering the number of traffic lights in and of itself is a good idea. Overpasses and (turbo)roundabouts, clever right of way, better road hierarchy; there are lots of alternatives that may provide better throughput and more safety for a given intersection.
The Netherlands as a country with 18M inhabitants is best compared to a big city with the surrounding metro area.
Wow this is awesome! I’ve been using ChatGPT to create TikZ diagrams because honestly it’s not trivial to create TikZ diagrams and they look really good when done well. However it can be challenging to get ChatGPT to tweak the diagrams. My knowledge of TikZ syntax and behavior isn’t always sophisticated enough to get the outcome I want. So this thing looks like an answer for that. Looking forward to trying this.
Incidentally I am using ChatGPT to create Latex documents for my blog and then they get rendered server side. The workflow works really well.
I had a great time at UR in the early 90’s because they had the most computing hardware per interested student in the country. I was able to relatively quickly work my way up to access to pretty much any system the school owned that I wanted, including the Cray at the LLE.
It’s ironic what you wrote because it was Carl Sagan who first developed the theory to explain the Venusian climate.
I met Carl Sagan and he was not a person who dumbed down anything. He had a profound impact on planetary science on top of inspiring many including myself to pursue physics.
I think the fact that we are all still talking about Carl 30 years after his death is strong evidence of his impact.
We are still in a regime where the growth of logical qubits is far below the point of any practical computing utility let alone at a level capable of breaking existing codes. While it’s correct to be proactive at the security end, if you take the current rate of improvement in logical qubits and project it forward you’ll get something beyond 2040. I built a probabilistic model of logical qubit improvement and the median ends up being further out (probably should publish this somewhere). I’d like to point out that I’m not purely negative; I was surprised to calculate we can make enough He-II to make it all go!
Of course such a model cannot predict a fundamental breakthrough nor can it predict whether there is some kind of fundamental limit to the size of such a quantum system before we have coherence collapse. This is an interesting question for quantum mechanics however.
In summary, quantum computing feels analogous to fusion, a technology that’s always 20 years away.
I wonder in our digital age how long our images will endure. Will the vast quantities of images we have now have disappeared entirely 200 years from now and the photographic period be the only enduring image record? It’s interesting to think about.
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