Why does it matter if it's not for consumer applications? GNSS is used for many more applications (and arguably more critical) than consumer applications (agriculture, mapping & surveying, aeronautics, shipping, etc.)
Also just want to mention that, yes, integration errors accumulate when using intero-receptive sensors but if errors are small enough (white noise, various biases, sample rates, quantization, etc.) from the inertial sensors an odometry solution might be adequate until an extero-receptive sensor can localize the sensor within an external frame.
This can shift the discussion from solving a problem that has no solution (i.e. how do I integrate a signal with white noise without any error) to an engineering problem (i.e. what error parameters allow the odometry to be accurate within x% over some timeframe).
>The end goals of the TIMU program are the demonstration of a single-chip IMU which maintains an accumulated position error of less than 1 nmi/hour with device volume of less than 10 mm3 and power consumption of less than 200 mW.
(My job is related to estimating location of things).
India is very different than Europe. It would be difficult to attribute outcomes between the 2 countries to just this single difference without considering the many other differences.
Absolutely true, but I'm just pointing out that non-competes are not a major precursor for Europe's laggardness in innovation.
If all of the EU's innovation system is sclerotic compared to Illinois or MA or India where non-competes are vindictively enforced, then there is a major issue.
The financialization of everything to extract incremental value is exhausting. I feel its also very detrimental to society when every positive interaction has to involve money.
Go to a theme park: buy a ticket. Then have the option to buy a fast-pass otherwise you will be in line all day. But wait, that only covers certain attractions and other ones need a faster fast-pass. [1]
Food delivery: pay a fee to the delivery network, separate tip for the driver. Then some places will hide a fee by raising the prices of things ordered through the delivery network vs. calling in. Then how much you tip might determine if your food arrives warm or cold. [2]
And so many more examples.
I've started patronizing businesses and products that don't nickel and dime at every step. I guess the easiest thing to do is vote with our wallets.
Hmm, I think the effect would be more localized, and involve a lot of strange forms of matter. My guess is it would be similar to what happened to Anatoli Bugorski when he stuck his head into a proton beam.
That doesn't mean getting hit by this particle would feel like a punch, since what you feel when you get punched is a transfer of momentum rather than a transfer of energy.
Yep but just an easy first approximation since the article didn’t have any numbers on the momentum of the particle. I’m sure if you wanted a really good answer you would need more than momentum and actually need to analyze the products of the collision like another poster suggested.
Also wanted to share this table since energy expressed in eV sounds like big numbers but it’s nice to understand that the definition of the eV is small in our usual definition of energy.
Interesting. I see from your link that this particle had 1/6 of the energy of a lethal dose of x-rays.
I'm guessing I would probably survive, but certainly wouldn't volunteer to get hit with such a particle, and I'm guess that if it went through my brain stem or maybe my heart, there's a good chance it would kill me.
So I'm confused. If some specific relatively small devices (relatively to the size of the Earth) managed to pick up several of these over the years, surely some of these are hitting people? Are people randomly feeling like they got impacted (if not punched, as per a sister comment) out of nowhere? Apologies if this is a ridiculous question; physics was always my weak suit.
If you got hit by one of these then you wouldn't feel anything. The energy is about 50 joules, or about 1/2 of the heat that a human body produces in a second.
Google maps is very eager to re-route around traffic which ends up taking you down back roads (atleast in the US). Which are narrow, not controlled-access, poorly lit, and maybe windy and poorly maintained depending on where you are. And it does all this to save a couple of minutes at best. Everyone is using Google maps and getting the same rerouting suggestion so the backroads get filled and slow down eliminating any benefit.
Apple Maps is much more likely to use the “typical” option which is usually a controlled access freeway which are MUCH safer (in my opinion and I believe the traffic accident rates support it).
Like others have mentioned the entire field of sensor fusion deals with this problem. It is a very challenging problem to solve but it can be solved and it has been successfully used in spacecraft, aircraft, fighter jets, phones, AR/VR systems, and undoubtedly many others.
A basic approach is to have an uncertainty (or estimated uncertainty) for each of the sensing modalities. Then you use the uncertainties to weigh each sensing sample when deriving your estimated quantity (i.e. vehicle velocity for example). Assuming the uncertainties are correct, the resulting estimator can have variance lower than estimators deriving from a single sensor modality. Of course tuning sensor uncertainty values is a difficult problem in sensor fusion (and much more so when distributions are unknown) but it is definitely doable.
Repeating Elon's claim that sensor fusion is impossible/not-doable is entirely wrong. It is a technology that powers many different applications but its definitely not an easy thing to implement well.
I think this is not the correct way of thinking of Moore's law. Like mentioned elsewhere, Moore's law is not so much a law as a self-fulfilling prediction. Semiconductor companies follow Moore's law (or recently an approximation) to stay competitive because their competitors do it and hence Moore's law continues. The cost of not marching along to Moore's law can mean you will get left in the dust (see Intel).
I think a better question to ask is whether the underlying economic factors behind continuous process tech improvements are healthy. Is there enough value-add to the final user by continuous process tech improvements? Are the costs for that improved process tech scaling with the value-add? And is the competitive landscape healthy? While that holds true, companies will keep looking for process tech improvements to give them a competitive edge.
In the 80-90s this was very much true but in recent decades it was to a lesser extent hence why we see consolidation/reduction in the number of foundries, foundry services to amortize the cost of older node-tech, and R&D going to companies/partnerships that can capture the most end user value-add (Apple/TSMC).
Looking forward I think the economics are very healthy with a design-house/foundry service model that we have right now so I would guess that Moore's law (or some approximation) will continue for the next decade. There are a lot of process tech innovation that can lead to better performance that are not necessarily scaling related. In fact, scaling transistors stopped being very useful a while back afaik due to the breakdown of Dennard's scaling.
>"I think a better question to ask is whether the underlying economic factors behind continuous process tech improvements are healthy. Is there enough value-add to the final user by continuous process tech improvements?"
I agree with this and I suppose I just sort of reached for Moore's Law out of habit and maybe a bit of laziness. Thanks for articulating the question more appropriately.
>"Looking forward I think the economics are very healthy with a design-house/foundry service model that we have right now so I would guess that Moore's law (or some approximation) will continue for the next decade."
Also just want to mention that, yes, integration errors accumulate when using intero-receptive sensors but if errors are small enough (white noise, various biases, sample rates, quantization, etc.) from the inertial sensors an odometry solution might be adequate until an extero-receptive sensor can localize the sensor within an external frame.
This can shift the discussion from solving a problem that has no solution (i.e. how do I integrate a signal with white noise without any error) to an engineering problem (i.e. what error parameters allow the odometry to be accurate within x% over some timeframe).
There was interesting work DARPA was sponsoring around the above idea that you can read more about here: https://www.darpa.mil/program/micro-technology-for-positioni...
>The end goals of the TIMU program are the demonstration of a single-chip IMU which maintains an accumulated position error of less than 1 nmi/hour with device volume of less than 10 mm3 and power consumption of less than 200 mW.
(My job is related to estimating location of things).