Mannerisms

To contain nuclear fusion reactions which occur at temperatures of the order of 350 million deg.F,  intense magnetic fields  are required. So, 64 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of October 26th 1950. The story continued: Experience up to now  has shown that to produce and sustain such fields requires enormous amounts of power and an extremely ...

Last week, Germany sent an advance team of 20 soldiers to Lithuania, laying the groundwork for the recently discussed establishment of a permanent brigade in the country. The brigade will support the already existing so-called NATO Enhanced Forward Presence in Lithuania, which rotates its personnel regularly and was made up of soldiers from Germany, Belgium, Czechia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway ...

The running of my Department will be coming under scrutiny when the horny handed sons of toil (a.k.a. the Islington metropolitan elite) take over and I intend to make it a model of technocratic excellence which will demand my re-appointment as Secretary of State, Ed confides to his diary I call in the Permanent Secretary. “Is the Department doing anything ...

Shanghai-based foundry SMIC has identified 463 fabless chip firms in China and says the demand for more is enormous. “We have identified 463 fabless semiconductor companies in mainland China, 120 of them are really promising,” Richard Chang, Founder, CEO and president of SMIC, told the IEE/FSA International Semiconductor Executive Forum in London in September 2004. “We’ve built five fabs there ...

The  price of air travel has fallen sharply since the 1950s, and the number of available seats has doubled in just 15 years between 2004 and 2019 as no-frills airlines like EasyJet, Ryanair, etc. entered the market with their bare-bones service and attainable price brackets. However, the impact of budget airlines reverberated far beyond ticket prices. Their fast-paced expansion and ...

This may be the cleverest person ever to have lived with an IQ of 250-300 (Einstein’s was 160). He could read the New York Times when he was 18 months old and went to Harvard when he was 11 – the youngest person ever to go there. He was a mathematical prodigy and linguist – speaking 25 languages.When he was ...

The current wave of AI investment began with the release of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, a direct-to-consumer application based on the GPT language model. Critics see this type of artificial intelligence as little more than “stochastic parrots” that put together words and sentences according to statistical probabilities. AI evangelists, on the other hand, champion ChatGPT as the first big step towards a ...

Bringing in AI to re-structure organisations can be a positive or a negative influence depending on the attitudes of employers. For instance it makes sense to establish a programme of familiarisation with AI tools among staff so that they can deal with more complex issues leaving their more mundane tasks to automation. This could work in two ways: Positively to ...

Thanks to IDC for this one – the top five tablet makers last year. Top Five Tablet Companies, Worldwide Shipments, Market Share, and Year-Over-Year Growth, Calendar Year 2023 (Preliminary results, combined company view for the current quarter only, shipments in millions) Company 2023 Unit Shipments 2023 Market Share 2022 Unit Shipments 2022 Market Share Year-Over-Year Growth 1. Apple 48.5 37.8% ...

Someone somewhere seems to have got an almighty rocket up the fundamental orifice. A month ago, on March 7, the Washington political news site, The Hill, published an article entitled ‘DEI killed the Chips Act’  alleging that diversity and inclusion issues were preventing Chips Act money being disbursed to major chipmakers. “The world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns ...

This was, 63 years ago, an ad from Electronics Weekly’s edition of February 1st 1961:

As seen in data by the Council on Foreign Relations, Europe is generally the region with the highest concentration of female-led and repeatedly female-led nations. All the countries which have had three or more female leaders (with the exceptions of Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand and India) are in Europe. The country which has had the most females at the ...

My latest proposal to the Cabinet to ameliorate the anticipated drubbing at the election is a Small Claims Court for Internet harms, Ed confides to his diary. Clearly a lot of people, mainly youngsters, are having mental health issues due to Internet content. You’re never going to stop youngsters using it, so the only way is to stop, or at least ...

Robots are becoming all the rage again with Elon Musk’s Optimus general purpose humanoid robot and all the investor enthusiasm for FigureAI. 20 years ago one of the industry’s visionaries was predicting this:- Robots will take over from the PC as the market and technology driver for the semiconductor industry, according to Dr Tsugio Makimoto, chief technology officer for Sony. ...

India has applied to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) for two new licenses to explore parts of the Indian Ocean sea bed for minerals, If they are granted, India would hold four contracts, making it the country with the second highest number of active contracts for deep sea  mining exploration projects. China has five contracts according to ISA data  making ...

There was once a scientist, whose obituary was published before he died. One of the phrases in the obituary called him a ‘merchant of death’. Horrified by this, he decided he had to do something to be remembered in a different light. Whereupon he founded an institution which has established him ever since as a revered benefactor of humanity. Moral: ...

I am told that Russian hackers have been detected taking both sides of internet debates on issues espoused by the Wokerati like gender identification. Why? Well the general thrust of what the Russkies were up to was to wind up participants on both sides of the argument. So the conclusion is that they want to get peoples’ passions excited. Why? ...

Aging populations, rapidly changing technological demands and, in some cases, the inability of education institutions to keep up have led to staff shortages felt by companies all over the world. Staffing firm Manpower published its latest Global Talent Shortage report earlier this year and compared with an edition covering the year 2017, it shows that the problem has only become ...

Thanks to TrendForce for this one – the Top Ten best selling EVs:  

Now about halfwayq through reading ‘Project Hail Mary’ by Andy Weir, I am appreciating the attractions of novels written by engineers. Engineers’ novels seems to be to be more dense than the normal run of the mill novels perhaps because engineers seem to believe in making words count, and there is more to absorb in a sentence written by an ...