Shouldn't it be the other way around if the population is increasing? Every minute one is born = 1440 born/day, every minute and a sixteenth ~= 1335 dead/day for a net population increase of 105/day.
The last time I played with NFTs it was about $50 USD just in processing fees to mint the token; not sure if that has changed since then. So it's not necessarily the case that the author is making a bunch of money off of this project; they might actually be just passing along costs.
Author here. Gas costs have actually come down a lot over the past few years. It only costs me a few dollars to run the transaction. It's more that scheduling, setting up, conducting, and tearing down each burn session is a huge pain in the ass. So if I can burn 10 bills an hour, then I'd clear maybe $450 an hour after gas, which doesn't feel crazy for providing boutique financial services.
My impression is that all of the Yamanote line stations are above ground -- I'd have expected it to be possible to have "one button plays the right sound at each station" if you used a standard phone's GPS to figure out which station you were at.
Commuter trains always knows where they are by various means. Braking distances for trains is airplane scaled, and so knowing where they are programmatically with accuracy on both trains and at central control stations is important for safety.
That's not actually true. True, with computerised technology it might be more convenient to implement it that way and it also allows some additional optimisations and bonus features, but it's not an absolute requirement.
At a minimum that's acceptable enough even by modern-ish safety standards, the signalling system only needs to know which sections of track are occupied and which are free, and it only needs to know that at the granularity of individual block sections between subsequent signals. It also doesn't necessarily need to know about the identity of the train, even though in practice you'll want to track that, too, for the convenience of the signallers.
The train in turn doesn't need to know where exactly it is – in terms of safety, it's enough knowing the local speed limit and the state of any upcoming signals, but for that, it doesn't need to know where it is in relation to the outside world. The classic implementation is simply fixed trackside infrastructure telling the onboard safety systems all they need to know.
Historically, any demands for knowing where the train is exactly in relation to the outside world were rather driven by automated passenger information systems and the like rather than the safety-critical parts of the signalling system.
Not only you don't need a GNSS to determine a fixed in place railroad station but actually you don't want to use a GNSS to do that.
A simple radio beacon working on ~400MHz is more than enough to solve this difficult technical obstacle.
Of course, this is totally ignoring what the trains do already know where they are because they need to display the current/next stations on the passenger information displays.
There _was_ an outlet for this during the era of Windows hegemony: the object and embed tags. You had your choice of ActiveX, Java, or Shockwave/Flash in the 90s to write applications that you could then embed in the web browser.
We stopped using these for a variety of reasons: they were difficult to make secure or cross-platform, GMail made building apps in JavaScript fashionable, and the iPhone (which explicitly would not support ActiveX/Java/Flash).
For context, early 2023 would put the earthquake in question just after the first big layoffs at Google (see their 2023Q2 Earnings Release). And this would have probably been considered "legacy google assistant" stuff, not "new-top-priority AI" stuff.
Pastmaps might be what you're thinking of? They have an archive of the maps that the United States Geological Survey used to serve as their Historical Topographic Map Collection.
Pick the area you want to look at, select a historical topo map, and click the Show button. Then you can use the Transparency slider to see the topo map overlaid on a current street map.
You can discover some interesting things this way. For example, I used to live on Hawthorne Avenue in Palo Alto (CA). The 1897 topo map shows that this street was originally a railroad spur line off the main Southern Pacific track (now used by Caltrain and freight). This spur line turned left onto what is now Middlefield and then turned right to serve the Catholic University (now St. Patrick's Seminary).
Thanks for occupying my past few hours (great USGS link!).
It's crazy to me how many errors are on these official maps (even in to present day, e.g.: roads that don't actually exist), particularly the newer maps creating connections between roadways which don't actually exist (I imagine this is image-recognition errors, when former human techs used to actually field verify everything).
