Ninjazzon

“Why Do So Many Music Venues Use Ticketmaster?” “What’s It Like to Train to Be a Sushi Chef?” “How Do Martial Artists Break Concrete Blocks?” If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.

A Hong Kong court ordered the liquidation of China Evergrande, the world's most indebted property developer.

Evergrande has assets of about $245 billion, but owes about $300 billion.

Its demise is a "controlled collapse," but still raises systemic risk and will hurt investors, says an analyst.

Every year, millions of migratory birds flock to Arctic Alaska. Hundreds of thousands of caribou use the tundra, rich in plant life, as their calving grounds. Alaska’s North Slope is also rich in other natural resources: oil, gas, minerals. But one important thing is lacking: Rocks. “Yes, gravel is a precious commodity on the North Slope,” said Jeff Currey, an engineer with the state's Department of Transportation and Public Facilities who works in the agency’s Northern Region Materials Section. For decades, Currey said, the state has been searching for gravel all over the North Slope, with limited success.

Gravel is essential for all kinds of long-term development: building projects, road construction, runways and other major infrastructure. “There’s a big need for gravel, and not a lot of it, is really what it comes down to,” said Trent Hubbard, a geologist with the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.

Here is a list of the names we know, from more than 11,500 children killed during Israel’s war on Gaza. Even this is less than half of those killed.

EFF’s team of technologists and computer scientists engineers solutions to the problems of sneaky tracking, inconsistent encryption, and more. Where users face threats to their privacy and security online, EFF’s technology tools are there to defend them.

Founded in 2008, Pinball Map is an open source, crowdsourced worldwide map of public pinball machines.

This is a project aimed at documenting as many pieces of hardware as possible, built entirely by volunteers, who code for the site/add new entries in their free time. We also have a GitLab repository, where you can see the code behind TRW.

Around late 1986, Sega released the “Sega AI Computer”. This is one of Sega’s least well known and rarest systems. Not much is known about this system apart from a small amount of information in Japanese and American flyers and press articles. The information we have is still piecemeal and may be partly inaccurate.

Today we are making public, for the first time: all system roms extracted from the Sega AI Computer, data dumps from 26 my-cards and 14 tapes, many scans and photographs, and in collaboration with MAME developers, an early working MAME driver allowing this computer to be emulated.

The majority of these software titles had zero information about them on the internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of actual software. Considering the elusive nature of this machine, it is possible that some games have never been seen or completed by anyone outside of their original development teams.

We hope that this release will be interesting to obscure game and computer historians and hobbyists alike. We will further amend it over time by releasing extra scans, hopefully improving emulation and publishing/discovering new information.

For the last several quarters we’ve seen a lull in the expansion of the cloud infrastructure market, with lower growth numbers than we’ve been accustomed to seeing in the past. That changed this quarter thanks in large part to interest in generative AI. The new revenue wave began just last year, driven by the ChatGPT hype cycle, but has already pushed cloud infra revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023 to $74 billion, up $12 billion over last year at this time and $5.6 billion over Q3, the largest quarter-over-quarter increase the cloud market has experienced, per Synergy Research.

The cloud infrastructure market for the entire year grew to an eye popping $270 billion, up from $212 billion in 2022. Synergy’s John Dinsdale predicts that the growth we saw in the last year is here to stay, even as the market continues to mature and the law of large numbers takes increasing effect. “Cloud is now a massive market and it takes a lot to move the needle, but AI has done just that. Looking ahead, the law of large numbers means that the cloud market will never return to the growth rates seen prior to 2022, but Synergy does forecast that growth rates will now stabilize, resulting in huge ongoing annual increases in cloud spending,” he said in a statement.

Physicist Richard Feynman wondered what would happen if an S-shaped lawn sprinkler, which rotates as water squirts out, were placed underwater and had its flow direction reversed, so that it sucked water in. Which direction would it rotate? Experiments have given conflicting answers, but now researchers have provided what appears to be a definitive resolution. When sucking water in, the sprinkler reverses its rotational direction, and the motion is unsteady and much slower. The explanation involves the details of fluid flow in the sprinkler geometry.

It turns out that the appendix appears to have two related functions. The first function is supporting the immune system. The appendix has a high concentration of immune tissue, so it's acting to help the immune system fight any bad things in the gut.

The second function that it serves is what we refer to as the safe house. So this was a hypothesis that was put forward by a team from Duke University in 2007. And they argued that the appendix may serve as a safe reservoir for the beneficial gut bacteria that we have.