dudeonthenet

Yeah, imagine passing by a field with about a hundred of those while they're dropping the blocks.

Rustaceans? Would recruiting agencies go for that in job ads?

"Are you a top rustacean and looking for a challenge in AI and Big Data and want to work in an international team with young and dynamic rustaceans? "

Homegrown tomatoes here in Romania are pretty tasty, maybe even indistinguishable from the ones you'd find in Italy. Especially the ones that people in the country side grow in their gardens and, even more so, the late summer, early fall breeds of tomatoes. When you cut one open, you literally want to shove your face in it.

Here's what they look like: http://www.desteptarea.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/rosii-p...

Note: 6 LEI (RON) is 1.2 GBP, but can find them as cheap as 0.8 GBP, depending on the city, market or seller.

The problem is that I don't think we produce enough of them for export as they're only grown naturally, they don't last more than a few days, even when in the fridge, and they are seasonal. Households tipically pick them as they ripen for immediate consumption, sell any surplus on the local markets and, by the end of the season, harvest them for around 10 gallons of tomato juice for winter.

The countryside folk also lack the education to seriously market them, lack the money to produce in larger quantities, etc. Which leads to supermarkets being chock full of import tomatoes though (we also have the Dutch ones) :/

Hah.. beat me to it :) I was about to recommend Permutation City while seeing your comment. That was an intense book, to say the least.

It's also worth making the distinction between the movie and the impressive short story that the movie is based on, which the article completely fails to mention: Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life [1]

I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover.

Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himself did a wonderful job with the screenplay, while managing to convey the main ideas and emotion of the book, there are quite a few details about the process of translating Heptapod A and B that didn't make it into the movie, details which would have painted a more complete picture of the situation for the interviewed professor of linguistics that was interviewed in this article.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your...

Sorry, what I meant to say was a redundant IMU that could be read in specific cases like this one.

What i'm wondering is why is it that when the Inertial Measurement Unit erroneous information was fed into the navigation system, and resulted in a negative estimated altitude, didn't the mars lander also have an accelerometer that could tell "hey, we're still accelerating, we're not stationary" and thus attempt some form of recovery of the navigation system.. perhaps reset the IMU or something? Reread data from the IMU after a certain delay?

I'm also quite confident that even before commencing entry, they had some idea from simulations as to how much the descent should take. Surely there's something wrong f you read negative altitude after just half the time required for landing.

Thanks for the link, I'll take a look

I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question:

When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global, decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the basic, atomic unit of computation that the network (or other blockchain technologies) can perform. If we think of regular computers, then no matter in which language an application ( i dislike the word 'app' :) is written in, eventually we end up talking about the x86 instruction set, the microcode that makes up each instruction, and, finally, the actual transistors logic that run them.

I somehow feel this is important to ask because we have to take into account the energy efficiency of computation. For example, if we think about the x86 ADD instruction, there is an approximately fixed amount of energy it dissipates when it is performed. ( This is a pretty interesting subject in intself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle )

What would be an equivalent ADD instruction or other basic unit of computation on the Ethereum computer and how expensive would it be? If it involves one or several distributed blockchain operations, then it seems to me that this model would be neither energy efficient, nor performant, especially if we take into account the distributed factor, which means that such an operation would be very costly since getting one bit of information from one end to the other requires an arbitrary number of routers along its path, and those consume energy to operate.

So I guess what I'm trying to ask is if this is practical in any useful way.