> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance
not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%.
This is where you picture an expanding wireless sphere of transmission from a point source and since the surface area of this sphere grows by the square of the distance you get this "power attenuates by the square of the distance" rule.
This of course doesn't apply to power over a 2D cable.
"Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet" by Varun Sivaram [0] is a good source on ways to improve renewable energy from infrastructure design changes. He talks about the HVDC longitude runs that would improve transfer of electricity to areas that may be cloudy where it is sunny during peak.
My point of view with Tesla vs Edison is that they were both right and wrong under select circumstances.
I was thinking the same thing. Programmed ColdFusion for over a decade and loved the language, however I moved onto .NET, the PHP and now Rails. ColdFusion was a wonderful language, but the frameworks weren't there and the market share wasn't there either. Ironically enough, one of my clients still uses it for their application and we actually began talks about moving them over to Rails.
OpenLaszlo was an eariler, more powerful, more fun, open source alternative to FLEX. It's obsolete now that Flash is dead, but I really got in the "zone" with it.
OpenLaszlo used XML with embedded JavaScript in a way that let you extend XML by defining your own tags in XML+JavaScript. I've done a lot of work with it, and once you make your peace with XML (which seemed like a prudent thing to do at the time), it's a really productive enjoyable way to program! But that's more thanks to the design of OpenLaszlo itself, rather than XML.
OpenLaszlo (which was released in 2001) inspired Adobe Flex (which was released in 2004), but Flex missed the point of several of the most important aspects of OpenLaszlo (first and foremost being cross platform and not locking you into Flash, which was the entire point of Flex, but also the declarative constraints and "Instance First Development" and the "Instance Substitution Principal", as defined by Oliver Steele).
The mantle of constraint based programming (but not Instance First Development) has been recently taken up by "Reactive Programming" craze (which is great, but would be better with a more homoiconic language that supported Instance First Development and the Instance Substitution Principle, which are different but complementary features with a lot of synergy). The term "Reactive Programming" describes a popular old idea: what spreadsheets had been doing for decades.
OpenLaszlo and Garnet (a research user interface system written by Brad Myers at CMU in Common Lisp) were exploring applying automatic constraints to user interface programming. Garnet started in the early 1990's. Before that, Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad explored constraints in 1963, and inspired the Visual Geometry Project in the mid 1980's and The Geometer's Sketchpad in 1995.
>Declarative Programming: Declarative programming is an elegant way of writing code that describes what to do, instead of how to do it. OpenLaszlo supports declarative programming in many ways: using XML to declare JavaScript classes, create object instances, configure them with automatic constraints, and bind them to XML datasets. Declarative programming dovetails and synergizes with other important OpenLaszlo techniques including objects, prototypes, events, constraints, data binding and instance first development.
>Garnet is an advanced user interface development environment written in Common Lisp, developed by Brad Meyers (the author of the article). I worked for Brad on the Garnet project at the CMU CS department back in 1992-3.
More about TCL/Tk, OpenLaszlo, Garnet, constraint programming, history of constraints: Coco KVO, Objective Smalltalk constraints, Sutherland, Sketchpad, Geometers Sketchpad, Knowledge Representation frames, push vs pull constraints, etc:
These two stories are hard to rectify unless the Google licensing deal is a lump sum of several billion dollars. Which feels borderline impossible. Even Microsoft didn’t do that with open AI and the AI trade is cooking very fast.
did they try to Google "how to make LSD"? several widely available guides. Tired of LLMs being seen as "risky" for doing the same thing search engines and blogs have been doing for two decades.
mRNA vaccines are about getting mRNA into just a few non-specific cells which then instructs the cell to produce Corona Virus Spike Protein. This gets identified by the immune system which then makes antibodies targeting the spike protein.
So the mRNA only needs to get taken up by a few cells to produce an immune response.
The HIV CRISPR-Cas technique needs to target several orders of magnitude more cells in the body, and is performing a far more complicated procedure than simple transcription like with an mRNA vaccine.
