USA gets gold in 4x400 mixed relay at World Championships
I only follow track and field during major sporting events (aka the Olympics) but it's always impressive to see. My heart goes out to the Netherlands and Femke.
From a YouTube comment:
48.82 officially on the final leg for Holmes.
Justin Robinson 44.47 (fastest 1st leg of all the finals competitors)
Rosey Effiong 50.38 (2nd fastest 2nd leg of all the finals competitors)
Matthew Boling 45.13 (6th fastest 3rd leg of all the finals competitors)
Alexis Holmes 48.82 (fastest 4th leg of all the finals competitors)
The current top comment as of posting:
That was crazy. For those who don't know who Alexis Holmes is (yet), she was part of the Kentucky team that set the NCAA 4x400 record with Abby Steiner. She is legit! Get ready to see more.
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India and Russia's very different (so far) moon missions
Russia's Luna-25 crashed into the moon last night.
Russia's unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the Moon after spinning out of control, officials say.
It was Russia's first Moon mission in almost 50 years.
The craft was due to be the first ever to land on the Moon's south pole, but failed after encountering problems as it moved into its pre-landing orbit.
Meanwhile, India's Chandrayaan-3 completed it's final lunar orbit.
Vikram, which carries a rover in its belly, is due to land near the south pole on 23 August.
The lander detached from the propulsion module, which carried it close to the Moon, on Thursday.
The black-and-white images show close-ups of rocks and craters on the Moon's surface. One of the photographs shows the propulsion module too.
If successful, India will be the fourth country to achieve a moon landing with USA, USSR and China.
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AI tool for phone calls with AI
The linked company is a VC-funded start up offering their phone call AI for broad demo availability. Reading the website I was reminded of a project I did back in college.
It was my 3rd year, in my lecture with Ian Bogost (now a semi-well known game academic.) He had us play with a technology which allowed us to call a number and have a programmable back end. The assignment was to make something from that technology.
The coding was, as I recall, fairly rudimentary. Most people made very basic trivia games or things like that. Instead what I did was, I discovered that the system had the ability to make HTTP calls to the broader internet. So mine wasn't a game so much as I made it a system where I could update my location over the phone. This was before iPhones and always-on GPS. So I could call the number and say I was at home, or at work, or at school. During the late night coding session I added a final option, "abducted by aliens."
Super simple, super rudimentary. But it was also a project done over the course of a week, nothing major. And mine was the only one in the lecture which reached outside of the system to the wider Internet. I recall it did have a bug which it always returned an error, even though it would successfully update the location. I hadn't been able to figure it out when I submitted it.
I got an A on it despite the bug. He appreciated the fact that I reached outside the platform.
That would have been probably 2005. Eighteen years later we've moved to serious AI / LLM functionality over the phone with coding capabilities. It's going to be interesting.
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Kris Nova, founder of Hachyderm & Nivenly died
I doubt anyone who comes across my blog will know who Kris is. She founded hachyderm, my Mastodon instance. She had a big personality and big thoughts about technology, social justice, and making the world better.
Based on posts by others, she died during a rock climbing accident.
Today is a sad day.
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FLIP Maritime research vessel set to retire after 60 years
The ship which rotates and sinks the majority of its length is retiring after 60 years.
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Automated Archives for August, 20th 2023
This post was automatically generated
Chess For the Day
Record: 1-0-1
Net Elo Change: +11
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- 1 year ago (5 posts)
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