You (and seemingly everyone else compiling news-from-2020 lists) forget about the discovery of signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus. Not to be grandiose, but, if true, in 500 years this will likely be the only thing generally remembered about 2020.
...But those results have since come under scrutiny, including from the original discovery team, which, citing a calibration error in one telescope it used, has downgraded the strength of its claim. Although the proponents remain confident of a phosphine detection, other astronomers have suggested that sulfur dioxide, which makes up most clouds on Venus, could have caused a similar absorption, among other critiques. ..."
"By late October 2020, the review of data processing of the data collected by both ALMA used in original publication of September 2020, and later JCMT data, has revealed background interpolation errors resulting in multiple spurious lines, including the spectral feature of phosphine. Re-analysis of data with a proper subtraction of background either does not result in the detection of the phosphine or detects it with concentration of 1ppb, 20 times below original estimate."
I agree. (Edit: to add to this, I've always thought that the third-last episode of Futurama, 'Murder on the Planet Express', was a return to form and reminiscent of the heyday of the show).
On the subject of tv shows, ‘Peep Show’, the British sitcom, also had a very strong final season and final episode.
More disgrace:
"The FAA is also accused of retaliating against whistleblowers, possibly obstructing the Office of the Inspector General’s investigation into the crashes"
I feel bad for the engineers and scientists that work at Boeing. I've worked with some of the brightest people in the aviation industry and I am sure they're internally facepalming at the actions of a few bad individuals.
...inside a system that very intentionally put N people in competition to cheat, thereby ensuring that cheating would happen, and in a manner that could plausibly be blamed on the person who happened to do the cheating rather than the system that knowingly ensured that the cheating would happen.
Have any Boeing engineers publicly left due to this? I remember tons of people leaving well known tech firms just for having Homeland Security / ICE as customers. I couldn't continue to work for a company that exhibited such deprave indifference to human safety.
> A continuation after the initial error is hard to explain other than by deliberate personal moral failure.
No, just denial: Look, it's a safe plane. We know it's a safe plane. Sure, it's not exactly like the earlier model, but those rules are needlessly strict. This plane is better, we know it's better. And pilots aren't idiots. They'll figure it out.
As we all learned, there's no single feature you can point to in the MAX that was a bad engineering decision in isolation. So if you don't want to see bad engineering, you don't have to.
He says in the Computer History Museum talk that (paraphrasing) ALOHANet was eventually connected to ARPANet, making in effect the first connection of the Internet.
Every time I review code and see strncpy, I look closer because it's always used incorrectly. It's always about the terminating 0. Is the 0 there or not? Is the 0 part of n or not? Does the destination have to be n+1 in size for the 0?
I quit using it myself because I could never remember just what the exact protocol was for 0.
Yeah used naively strncpy leaves you an unterminated string. Also like all of them it's up to the caller to predetermine if they will fail if called. So instead of having the checks in one place inside the string function. You have them scattered all over the code if at all.
I think I read somewhere the provenience of strncpy was to copy strings into a fixed length field which is why it has the deranged behavior of not terminating the string. Think file systems where the max file name is 8 characters. Or compilers that truncated variable names at 31.
Nature at least used to publish a single-page science fiction story at the back of every issue. They still publish online, though they've dropped it from the print edition.
A nit pick, I guess, but it’s a square, not a cube.
The edges are interesting. I wonder what part of the image processing results in the irregularity. Some kind of interpolation, I’d guess, but that’s pure speculation.
I don't think the edges are all that interesting. The stair-stepped appearance is just what you inevitably get when you rotate a square in low resolution without antialiasing.
Now that you point it out, that seems to be the case. The fuzziness around the edges (the east and north especially) threw me off, though that could probably be put down to compression in the image that was used as the source for the crop.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02785-5