Tech Lover’s Weekly (Issue 218): Wine, Cherry Blossoms, Global Warming

Original link: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2022/08/weekly-issue-218.html

Here is a record of weekly tech content worth sharing, published on Friday.

This magazine is open source (GitHub: ruanyf/weekly ), welcome to submit issues, contributions or recommend scientific and technological content.

Weekly discussion forum post “Who’s Hiring? “ , provides a lot of programmer employment information, welcome to visit or post job/internship positions.

cover picture

In an open-air parking lot in New Jersey, USA, all solar greenhouses have been erected, which can not only generate electricity with photovoltaic panels, but also prevent vehicles from being exposed to the sun. This approach is worth promoting. ( via )

Topics of the Week: Wine, Cherry Blossoms, Global Warming

This summer, the temperature has set a record , exceeding 40 degrees in many places.

The high temperature days are very difficult, and there is no outdoor activity at all during the day. Moreover, when I think about the future, it is even more depressing: do I have to spend every summer in the future in such hot weather?

This week, I saw two very interesting and heavy climate analyses that I wanted to share with you. Wine and cherry blossoms, can prove that the earth is really warming.

There are no temperature records in antiquity, but there is one wine region in France that preserves the dates when grapes have been picked each year since 1354.

Grapes usually ripen in late August and early September before picking. If the summer is hotter, the grapes will ripen earlier and the picking date will be earlier.

A scholar has reversed the average temperature of each summer in history from these dates, and the result is the red line in the figure below.

It can be seen that the summer temperature in this area was basically stable before, but after the late 20th century, it began to rise all the way, and is currently at an all-time high.

Another similar study was the bloom date of cherry blossoms . Kyoto was the capital of ancient Japan, and history books record the annual bloom date of cherry blossoms, dating back to 812 AD.

The higher the temperature, the earlier the cherry blossoms will bloom. Historically, the cherry blossoms in Kyoto bloomed from mid-April to May, with an average blooming date of April 17 in the 19th century.

But in the 20th century, the cherry blossoms bloomed earlier and earlier, and the average date has been advanced to April 5th. In 2021, it set a record for early cherry blossoms, which will bloom on March 26, and 2022 will also be the same date.

The advance of the cherry blossom bloom date is synchronized with the rise in the average temperature in Kyoto. Average temperatures in Kyoto have risen by 3.4 degrees Celsius since meteorological records began in the 19th century.

I find these two studies very convincing that the current temperature is significantly higher than the average temperature of the past few hundred years . To make matters worse, they show that the temperature has not stopped rising.

The United Nations estimates that the average global temperature is now 1.2 degrees warmer than before the Industrial Revolution, and by the end of the century, it is likely to be two degrees warmer. At that time, future generations will see that the summer temperature in 2022 is 40 degrees, will they think it is a “cool” summer?

Technology trends

1. Spanish sausage

Last week, a prominent French physicist tweeted a photo he claimed to be the latest Webb telescope to take of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun at about 4.2 light-years.

Thousands of users retweeted the photo.

The next day, the physicist apologized to everyone that it was not a star at all, but a close-up of chorizo ​​on a black background. He felt like a star, so he made a joke with everyone, but he didn’t expect so many people to be fooled. To be honest, it’s really similar. If he doesn’t say it, no one will see it.

2. Moon Lava Tube

Scientists have confirmed the existence of lava tubes, which are underground caves formed when lava cools. The image below is believed to be the entrance to the lunar lava tube, which looks like a deep crater.

Inside these lunar caves, the temperature is always kept at 17 degrees Celsius, regardless of the temperature outside. The lunar surface temperature can reach 127 degrees Celsius during the day and minus 173 degrees Celsius at night.

17 degrees Celsius is very suitable for human survival. Scientists believe that a lunar base can be considered inside a lava tube. Pictured above is a lava tube on Earth.

3. Arm wrestling aid

Arm wrestling requires both parties to be right-handed or left-handed, and if one is right-handed and the other is left-handed, it cannot be done.

In order to solve this problem, video blogger Geng Geng invented the “arm wrestling aid”, and the two sides competed by exerting force on a fake hand. The two prosthetic hands are connected by gears to convert the force in the same direction into the force in the opposite direction.

In order to maintain the stability of the device, two handles are added, which also helps to use the strength of the entire upper body to truly achieve full confrontation. Netizens also provided ideas. If one party is obviously stronger, they can give up some advantages by adjusting the size of the gear or the distance of the prosthetic hand.

4. Deepest drilling in Asia

Sinopec announced that it has drilled the deepest well in Asia at a depth of 9,300 meters in the Shunbei Oilfield in the Tarim Basin.

The oilfield is an ultra-deep oilfield. There are currently 41 wells with a vertical depth of more than 8,000 meters, and oil has been successfully produced. The world’s deepest well was drilled by the former Soviet Union at a depth of 12.2 kilometers.

5. The tallest wooden building in the world

In July this year, the Ascent Building in Wisconsin, USA was completed, becoming the world’s tallest wooden structure with a height of 86.6 meters.

Except for the concrete base, elevator and stairs, the building is all wooden. All floors and ceilings are made of wood.

The picture below is a photo of the construction, you can see its complete wooden structure.

If fire and strength problems can be solved, wood can really replace brick buildings, easy to construct, environmentally friendly, and carbon sequestering.

article

1. Lei Jun’s 2022 Annual Speech (Chinese)

On August 11, 2022, the full text of Lei Jun’s keynote speech “Always believe that good things are about to happen”.

2. Disassemble a fast charging cable (Chinese)

The author disassembled a 65W Type-C fast charging cable, and the structure inside is quite complicated.

3. 10 practical writing skills (Chinese)

10 Practical Tips for Writing Good Essays Authors Learned. The original text is a long tweet , which is a summary of some English data. (Contributed by @zonemeen )

4. Is Web Component dead? (English)

Web Component is a component specification natively supported by browsers, and Google has been pushing it. It’s been 10 years since its inception, and this article reviews the history and discusses the promise of this technology.

5. Ways to scale your SaaS business

This is not a technical article, but a business article for SaaS entrepreneurs on how to position and expand their business. The advice given is solid and practical.

6. Live Subtitles for Chrome (English)

The Chrome browser has a built-in real-time subtitle function, which synchronously converts speech into text and displays it on the web page, which is very useful for watching English videos and listening to English podcasts.

The menu “Settings/Advanced/Accessibility/Captions” can turn on this function, see the official documentation of the title link for details.

7. Use an old Android phone as a web server (English)

Many people have old Android phones at home. This article demonstrates how to turn these phones into web servers and set up intranet services.

8. I was wrong, CRDT is the future (English)

This article explains and compares two multi-person real-time synchronization algorithms, CRDT and OT, which are mainly used to enable multiple people to edit documents at the same time.

Emerging Search Engines

Google search hasn’t improved over the years, with more ads and a lot of user information stored, the search experience has gotten worse.

So in recent years, some new search engines have been born and have achieved good results. DuckDuckGo is the most well-known of them.

This year, three new search engines have emerged that deserve attention.

1. Kagi

It offers a paid search service, and a free account can search 50 times a month. It is guaranteed that there are no advertisements, no user information is saved, and the search quality is very good. Not only English search, but also Chinese search results are more accurate.

2. yep

The peculiarity of this search engine is that it guarantees that 90% of advertising revenue will be returned to the creator of the content. Its English search quality is OK, but not Chinese.

3. Neeva

There are no ads, it promises not to save user information, it was created by an ex-Google engineer, and the search quality is pretty good.

tool

1. StemRoller

This tool can separate the vocals and accompaniment of a song to generate separate a cappella and accompaniment tracks. I tried it out and it worked fine.

However, it only supports processing Youtube videos. In addition, the CPU usage is very high, and it takes 10 to 15 minutes to process a song, and GitHub has the source code .

2. Diffsound

A model jointly developed by Tencent and Peking University generates sounds based on text. For example, if you enter “birds and insects chirping during the day”, corresponding sounds will be generated.

3. TWINT

An open source Twitter data scraping analysis tool that does not require registration to use. Another Instagram data capture analysis tool Osintgram .

4. Shottr

A free screen capture software for Mac computers, the performance is very good, it supports scrolling screenshots, and it can also patch images at the pixel level.

5. infinite

An interactive command line component library for Go language, providing common components such as progress, group, mulit select, input text, and confirm. (Contributed by @fzdwx )

6. Temir

A framework for developing command-line tools using Vue.js. (Contributed by @webfansplz )

7. vdoing-template

A template library for Vuepress that directly builds a static blog through GitHub Actions. (Contributed by @eryajf )

8. Melody

A music management tool for individual users, you can search for songs on the Internet, and then download or upload them to the cloud disk with one click. (Contributed by @foamzou )

9. crypto-js-wasm

The wasm version of the hash and encryption algorithm library crypto-js. (Contributed by @PeterAlfredLee )

10. Rainbond

Cloud application management platform to quickly set up, use, and manage containers and K8S clusters. (Contributed by @yangkaa )

resource

1. Knots 3D

This website uses 3D animations to demonstrate step by step how to tie various knots.

2. Duolingo Cantonese courses

Duolingo’s latest free Cantonese course.

3. UISET

A website that collects free UI resources (illustrations, icons, colors, etc.), and new resources can be submitted through the GitHub repository . (Contributed by @bimohxh )

4. Origami globe

This website provides A4 templates to download, print them out, and glue them into globes.

picture

1. Invisible house

There is a house in London that has mirrors all over the street.

The huge mirrors reflect the streetscape, making it hard to realize that there is a house inside.

The mirror is one-way, passersby can’t see inside, but the homeowner can see outside, and sometimes someone can see someone arranging their hair or clothes in front of the mirror.

2. Huge desktop environment

On Twitter, foreign netizens showed off some huge desktop environments.

A netizen said that no matter how big the desktop is, it can’t compare to the VR desktop.

3. Pangu Central Mountains

In ancient times, the land of the earth was all on the same continent.

Today, the Scottish Mountains in the United Kingdom, the Appalachian Mountains in the United States, the Little Atlas Mountains in Morocco in Africa, and the Greenland Mountains were once the same mountain range, called the Pangu Central Mountains .

abstract

1. How to make the elevator faster

A beautiful new office building opened in the city center and quickly sold out office space on all floors.

After the tenants moved in, they were very satisfied with everything else, except for one issue: the elevator was too slow.

They complained that they spent so much money to rent an office, but every time they took the elevator to the upper floor, it was a waste of time. They asked the elevator to speed up.

The building owner quickly contacted the elevator company, hoping to upgrade the elevator as soon as possible. But the elevator company said that the only way to do it is to change the elevator model, which would require dismantling the building and rebuilding it at a cost of no less than $100 million. Other elevator companies have the same offer.

One day, however, an independent building contractor came along who said it could be solved for as little as $10 million. The desperate owner decided to let him try it.

The contractor spent $500,000 to install large mirrors on every wall of the elevator, which had originally been covered with only decorative panels and marble.

The magic happened, the tenant complaints stopped, no more complaints about the elevator being slow. As a result, the contractor made a huge profit of $9.5 million.

The secret here is that the contractor correctly realized that the problem wasn’t that the elevator was slow, but that people were getting bored during the ride (before smartphones were around).

Since I have no way to make the elevator faster, I have to find a way to reduce people’s boredom. What’s one thing people never get tired of? That is looking at yourself in the mirror.

speech

1,

Sometimes, I sit in front of the computer and want to write something. It’s very frustrating to sit for an hour in front of a blank text editor and not be able to write anything.

Later, I figured it out and reminded myself that it’s okay if I can’t write it, it’s creating time and space for good writing to happen.

“Staring at the Blank Page”

2,

To make a plan is to implement it. The sole purpose of the plan is to ensure better results.

The plan itself has no value if it is not implemented. If you know exactly how to get the results, there is no need to plan at all.

“Planning is for Doing”

3.

Many years ago, Drupal was the most popular content management system in the world, you could do anything with it, and there was always a plugin that provided the functionality you needed.

But it was this that became its fatal wound. After a few years, every project based on it became overly complex and expensive to maintain.

“Drupal is dying”

4.

The coming decades will be an era of disorder: conflicting superpowers, rising social inequality, slow economic growth, generational squabbles, deteriorating ecosystems, and hardship for large populations.

— Deutsche Bank 2020 research report, quoted in Playing Dice with the Universe

5.

Twenty years ago, there was only one option for databases, and that was relational databases. Today, the average large enterprise uses seven different databases.

For example, Snowflake for data warehousing, Clickhouse for ad hoc analytics, Timescale for time series data, Elastic for search data, Postgres for transactions, Redis for caching, Cassandra for complex workloads, and Dgraph for relational data.

“Welcome to the New Database Era”

this week in history

2021 (Issue 170): The triumph of software subscriptions

2020 (Issue 119): Rainfall and the Insurance Game

2019 (Issue 68): Focus on the growth of ability, rather than pay

2018 (Issue 17): Global warming is doomed

thanks

The domestic software FlowUs provides a personal column service (see the weekly column ), which integrates “document + table + network disk”, which is suitable for multiple purposes of knowledge base, data management, and file storage.

(Finish)

document information

  • Copyright statement: Free to reprint – non-commercial – non-derivative – keep attribution ( Creative Commons 3.0 license )
  • Date of publication: August 12, 2022

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