Space, still the final frontier (Credit: Lance Ulanoff)
EVs and Elon on my mind
When your flashlight or game controller runs out of batteries, you remove and replace the batteries with fresh ones. Electric cars like Teslas and a host of other EVs coming from virtually all the major manufacturers work on the rechargeable method. You park, plugin (for up to an hour) and refresh a depleted battery. This is the way. Just last week I noticed a half dozen new charging stations at my local grocery store (that’s how popular EVs are now).
But did you know that there’s a very small but growing movement to do it differently? Instead of recharging your EV battery, you go to a special robotic station and the dead battery is swapped out for a fully charged one.
I know, that sounds crazy but only because you’re thinking of EVs like regular cars. You could never, say, drop out an empty gas tank for a full one in a car. But batteries on EVs are not integrated with the motors in the same way. They usually sit along the bottom of the vehicle and are connected by power and monitoring cables, which could be designed (maybe they are) as plugins.
There’s not a lot of momentum behind this, but there is some because a battery swap is actually faster than getting a full recharge. I guess we’ll have to see where this goes.
Speaking of seeing where something goes. Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought almost 10% of Twitter (in shares).
Musk has been on Twitter a long time and has a sort of love/hate relationship with it. Now, perhaps, it’s more love. Or not. I’m worried Elon bought the stake to have some real influence on the platform. He’s frustrated that it doesn’t, in his view, support free speech. I beg to differ. It polices extreme speech and misinformation (as all social platforms have to do these days).
I just hope Musk isn’t planning on pressing for a return to the wild west and disinformation of the past (Facebook and Twitter both suffered through this). He is now on the board and is already asking about Editable Tweets. So, the guy has plans.
Twitter is not perfect, but it is open enough for me. People with extremely big voices (millions of followers) like Musk might feel targeted by Twitter’s policing, and maybe they are. After all, they have outsized influence and greater responsibility to get things right.
Anything you dream of
I never thought about what an avocado in the shape of a chair might look like, but now I know.
Researchers at Open AI trained a neural network with words and images and now it can churn out original images based on prompts like the one above and others like “the exact same cat on top as a sketch on the bottom.” The result is five identical cat photos and below each one is a different cat sketch, all of it generated by DALL-E (which is a play on the artist Salvador Dalí).
There are other wild computer-generated creations like “a cube made of a porcupine,” and “a plain white cube looking at its own reflection in a mirror.” There are also more prosaic ones like “a small red block sitting on a large green block.” Each is remarkable, though, because the computer builds these often realistic-looking images based on the sentence and nothing else.
The question, though, is what you do with such a thing. Well, spinning this concept out to its natural conclusion, we might someday see an AI than can construct an entire movie based on a script it’s fed. This won’t happen now and even in the near future, but I’m certain we just stepped onto that path.
The Fina NFT Frontier
There are now Star Trek NFTs–or there were. Paramount and a company known as RECUR released a tranche of Star Trek NFTs, got William Shatner’s blessing (he loves crypto), and then, at $250 apiece, sold out in minutes.
I have mixed feelings about this. Non-Fungible Tokens are fascinating and also an extremely volatile investment. They might become more valuable but if the bottom drops out of the NFT market, Trekkies could be left holding a lot of dead tribbles.
Stay safe
See you soon