Absolutely fascinating Stereo3D view of this Martian landscape.
Many thanks to @PaulHammond51 for finding the right-eye view from the rover's R-Nav Cam.
To get the Stereo3D effect, just let your eyes' line of sight be parallel (not cross-eyed) with left eye in front of left image and right eye in front of right image.
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
ERDAL ARIKAN WAS born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker.
He loved science.
When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four.
This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal; he decided against a career in medicine. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes.
“I like things that have some precision,” he says. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”
Arıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university.
Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to #CalTech, one of the world's top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California.
He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist #Richard#Feynman. It was like being blessed by a saint.
The field was still young, launched in 1948 by #Claude#Shannon, who wrote its seminal paper while he was at Bell Labs;
he would later become a revered MIT professor.
Shannon's achievement was to understand how the hitherto fuzzy concept of information could be quantified, creating a discipline that expanded the view of communication and data storage.
By publishing a general mathematical theory of information
—almost as if Einstein had invented physics and come up with relativity in one swoop
—Shannon set a foundation for the internet, mobile communications, and everything else in the digital age.
The subject fascinated Arıkan, who chose #MIT for graduate studies.
There was one reason: “#Bob#Gallager was there,” he says.
Robert Gallager had written the textbook on information theory. He had also been mentored by Shannon's successor.
In the metrics of the field, that put him two steps from God.
“So I said, if I am going to do information theory,” Arıkan says, “MIT is the place to go.”
By the time Arıkan arrived at MIT, in 1981, Gallager had shifted his focus and was concentrating on how data networks operated.
Arıkan was trembling when he went to Gallager's office for the first time. The professor gave him a paper about packet radio networks.
“I was pushing him to move from strict information theory to looking at network problems,” Gallager says.
“It was becoming very obvious to everyone that sending data from one place to another was not the whole story
—you really had to have a system.”
Major congratulations to a team led by my old research group back at Caltech! NASA has selected UVEX for its next MIDEX mission, set to launch in 2030!
For the non-astronomers: that's a $300 million mission (+launch costs) to survey the sky at ultraviolet wavelengths. Not only is there so much to learn, but, as an added bonus, UV images look dope as hell.
MAUNAKEA, Hawaiʻi - The University is working on the termination of the CSO (Caltech Submillimeter Observatory) sublease, and is preparing for the removal of the Hōkū Keʻa teaching telescope.
A look at a small section of Curiosity's workspace in this composite image assembled from 4 Bayer reconstructed R-MastCam frames that were assembled in MS-ICE. The images are from December 27, 2023 (sol 4049) at site 105/1108 after a short drive/climb a few sols earlier. The rover is located at the head of Gediz Vallis (see map) I've also attached the drive data. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/USGS/fredk)
Our first teach in saw way more attendance than expected. We will have our second event inshallah on November 30, jointly with Socialists of #Caltech and PCC Anti-war club, screening the #Gaza Fights for Freedom documentary about the Great March of Return. This will be right after our #union in formation files the cards to the NLRB. RSVP here: https://forms.gle/Eu1pcVpWZGW78ejb9#LosAngeles#FreePalestine
Did you know there are mysterious blobs deep within the Earth? 🌎🦠😲
In the #1980s, geophysicists discovered two continent-sized blobs of unusual material deep within the Earth, which could be buried relics from an ancient #planet called Theia. New #research from #Caltech provides evidence supporting the theory that the blobs are remnants of #Theia, which collided with #Earth and formed the #Moon. 🌍💥🌝
Hello world! Caltech SJP has come out of dormancy and joined many other institutions of higher education and trade unions in releasing a statement in support of Palestine. In response to the war on Gaza, #Caltech president Rosenbaum sent two emails in support of Jewish students and condemning Hamas "terrorism", while completely neglecting the 75-year siege on Palestine and orders of magnitude more Palestinian lives lost to settler colonial violence. In response to President Rosenbaum's emails and an ill-informed Zionist email by the Jewish student group, we have collectively written a statement in support of Palestine, to inform the Caltech community on this matter. While Zionists can post and organize freely on campus, those supporting Palestine need to work around censorship and doxxing, which greatly delayed the release of this statement. None of us is free, until Palestine is free. Read this statement here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z5_9Xshi9lyj1O3OGRWWFL2A_OZV_QAJ/view#Palestine#FreePalestine#CeaseFireNow#losangeles
A nice drive of ~44 meters for Curiosity on Sol 3880 brings the rover a little closer to a cluster of impact craters. Post drive images, a map and the drive data is attached.
Six Years ago Curiosity Mars Rover checked its wheels. Here's one of the hand-lens images, it just happened to capture the Murray Buttes in the background. The rover is scheduled to have another wheel check soon.
Up! Up! And Finally... Over! Curiosity Rover mission update for Sols 3873-3875. Written by Catherine O'Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick
After the release of the sublime image of the Horsehead Nebula by Euclid, here is a tribute to earlier endeavors, with this beautiful 1977 cover of Science Magazine, featuring a photographic plate by the National Geographic Society - Palomar Observatory Sky Survey
Sending a rover to Mars to do geologic fieldwork inevitably leads to frustration. Collecting a rock sample is one of the simplest things a geologist does on Earth. But a second attempt last week shows how hard it is to do on Mars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPL_k-VOkOM