Category: Engineering

The Industries Disrupted by U.S. Entrepreneur Steve Jobs and U.S. Inventor Thomas Edison

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Steve Jobs affected and subsequently disrupted the computer industry, the motion picture industry, the music industry, and the telecommunucations industry, all within a single lifespan. This achievement places Jobs at the status of a world renowned icon, a person like Thomas Edison who affected all of the same industries as well, swapping only the computer industry for the electric industry. Edison invented the incandescent light bulb for the electric industry, the phonograph for the music industry, and the motion picture camera for the film industry, and improved the telegraph and telephone for the telecommunications industry. Jobs developed the Macintosh computer for the computer industry, the animation studio Pixar for the film industry, the iPod and iTunes for the music industry, and the iPhone for the telecommunications industry

The Original Version of the Statue of Liberty

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The Statue of Liberty was provided as a gift to the U.S. from the French public to celebrate the U.S. French alliance during the Revolutionary War. This gift however was not originally designed for the U.S., as its sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (pronounced “fred-reek ah-goost bar-told-ee”) had traveled to Egypt to pitch the idea of an enormous woman like the Statue of Liberty, standing at the entrance of the Suez Canal. This original design was to be veiled to comply with then Egyptian values, and holding a lantern representing Egypt carrying the light of progress into Asia. Initially the Egyptian government liked this idea but because the cost was exorbitantly high, plans were eventually scrapped. Bartholdi redesigned his concept to depict a Roman goddess which is more European and therefore palatable to the U.S. conscious. In addition to this, Bartholdi also wanted to ensure that this new design represented freedom, not progress, to reflect American sentiment during this period

The Peculiarity of Isotopes Xenon 129, Xenon 132, and Krypton 80 Upon Mars

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Scientific study of Mars has revealed the existence of the isotope xenon 129 present within the almost non-existent Martian atmosphere. This has puzzled scientists as there are a limited number of understood methods to achieve such an outcome. The first method is via cosmic radiation, specifically galactic cosmic rays and/or solar cosmic rays striking elements like barium or bromine upon the Martian surface which can cause neutron capture, leading to the formation of xenon 129 naturally. This is because Mars has a very thin atmosphere and lacks a global magnetic field, which means it is less protected from cosmic radiation in comparison to the Earth. The second method is to detonate nuclear weaponry upon Mars which has left scientists dumbfounded as to how such an event could occur without third party intervention. Because of this, the majority of scientists believe the former method to be the causation, however there are scientists who take issue with this theory, mainly due to the high ratios of xenon 129, xenon 132, and krypton 80 within the Martian atmosphere which can be a byproduct of the fast neutron fission of uranium and plutonium weaponry, with all 3 of these isotopes able to be created by generating nuclear energy as well, the topography of Mars itself as vast glass like smooth regions exist which strikingly resemble the Trinity nuclear weaponry test detonation site in New Mexico, United States of America, as well as the high concentration of specific isotopes within specific regions (e.g. high levels of krypton 80 in the Cydonia region of Mars etc.)

How Antique Books are Forged and How to Detect Replica Antique Book Forgeries

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Modern day forgers are able to replicate rare books printed using a mechanical printing press by using photopolymer plates, a process which involves taking a high resolution photograph of a page which was printed using a printing press and allowing computer software to create a three dimensional printed image of that photograph with depth for each letter present. This method produces pages which have an imprint mark as if pressed by a printing press but its fatal flaw is that it also provides depth to small lines around the margin of text which are picked up during the printing process. These lines should have no depth as they are merely extra ink which has been caught during the printing process but with photopolymer replicas, because the software used to extract three dimensional characters reads every single bit of ink as a marker to place depth, these lines appear to have depth within forgeries which is an immediate red flag in terms of authenticity as originals have no reason to possess depth. These incidental inking lines around the margin of the page are referred to as “shoulder inking”, and if they possess depth of any degree, it is a strong indication that the piece is a modern day forgery

The 3 Conditions Required to Diagnose a Patient as Brain Dead

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3 conditions are necessary for a patient to reach prior to being categorized as brain dead which include being within a persistent comatose state which does not respond to pain stimuli (e.g. nail bed pressure, sternal rub, pressure upon the orbital rim of the face etc.), possessing absent brain stem reflexes (e.g. pupillary light reflex, oculocephalic reflex, coughing gag reflex etc.), and possessing a lack of spontaneous respiration, if a patient is unable to breathe upon their own accord. If a patient possesses all 3 of these metrics, they are considered brain dead and legally deceased within the U.S.. If tests are inconclusive, ancillary examinations can be provided to determine definitively whether or not a person is brain dead (e.g. electroencephalograph, transcranial doppler ultrasound, diagnostic cerebral angiogram etc.) as well as other tests which can be performed

Analogs of the Christian Bible’s Epic of Noah’s Ark

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In London, England in 2014, Dr. Irving Finkel, one of, if not the worlds most foremost authoritive upon cuneiform writing, published a book entitled “The Ark Before Noah” which states that a 3700 year old Sumerian tablet translated by Finkel depicts the Christian biblical story of Noah and the flood which drowned the world. This tablet is at the very least 1000 years older than that of the Biblical epic. In the Christina Bible, Noah is warned of a cataclysmic flood by God. A similar story exists in ancient Indian Vedic texts in which King Manu was forewarned by Lord Vishnu in the form a fish, of a great flood impending, with Manu constructing a large boat and ultimately surviving. In the Babylonian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, the protagonist Utnapishtim (pronounced “ut-nah-pish-tim”) is advised of an impending flood by the god Enki (pronounced “en-kee”). In ancient Aztec culture, a sacred male and female couple hide within a hollow tree with corn while holding steady as the deluge of a great flood envelops the Earth. Ancient Celtic, Norse, and Chinese mythology also account similar stories in which a great flood occurs and only some survive. The common denominator between all of these stories is intervention by a force which knew ahead of time of the impending cataclysm

The Advent of Post It Notes

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Post It notes were invented by a chemical engineer whose bookmark fell off his hymn book while singing in church. The inventor, Arthur Fry, created an adhesive which worked like a basketballs skin in that some adhesive touches the object it’s stuck to, but not very much so it’s continually sticky dependant of how it lands each time

The Etymology of “ChatGPT” and How Artificial Intelligence Models are Developed

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OpenAI’s artificial intelligence “ChatGPT” is named as such because of the acronym “GPT” which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”. The generative pre-trained transformer provides the characteristics of any large language model like ChatGPT. The term “generative” refers to an artificial intelligences “ability to generate new content which is similar to the data sets it was trained upon”. The term “pre-trained” refers to the “practice of artificial intelligence models being fine tuned for specific tasks, a pre-training phase in which the large language model learns from a vast amount of text data which helps the model understand language patterns and contexts”. The term “transformer” refers to the transformer architecture which is a “neural network design that relies upon a mechanism referred to as “attention” to weigh the influence of different parts of the input data”. This transformer architecture is particularly effective for tasks which involve understanding the context of language (e.g. language translation or answering questions etc.) which is why artificial intelligence models are able to understand human language in a deep and complex way

The Carrington Event of 1859

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On September 1st and September 2nd in 1859 the Carrington Event occurred. English Astronomer Richard Carrington was reviewing an image of the sun when he noticed a bright flash upon the imagery. Carrington did not know what this anomaly was but soon learned first hand as approximately 20 hours later, chaos ensued. 200,000 kilometers of telegraph wire across the world collapsed, plugged in electrical items began to arc and produce power even when unplugged, batteries recharged without a power source, compass needles went haywire, and the Aurora Borealis could be viewed all across the world, in places which would never normally bare witness to such an event (e.g. Cuba and India etc.). This incident will inevitably occur again which is why the U.S. government is constructing the Thirty Meter Telescope upon Mauna Kea at an altitude of 10,000‘ and the reason the Parker Solar Probe was sent to the sun in 2018. Mauna Kea means “white mountain” in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian language. The rational of the U.S. government is that the Carrington Event affected the world greatly when electricity was in its infancy, therefore how much greater would it affect the modern world with the knowledge that many objects during the modern day are connected to the internet and/or are electrical in some capacity. The Carrington Event is the first mass coronal ejection reported in history

The Earliest Discovered Sewing Tools for Surgery and Textiles

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The earliest discovered eyed needles designed for surgery are from 30,000 B.C. This specific artifact was discovered within a cave located in Aurignacia, France. Additionally, other ancient needles have been uncovered within the region of Altai Krai, Russia, specialist needles without an eye but with a split head designed to grip the thread. These tools which are crafted from bird bone by the Denisovans, date back to 40,000 B.C. – 30,000 B.C. Both discoveries indicate that early human beings had developed sophisticated tools and techniques for sewing, tools which could have been used for many tasks ranging from textile repairs to complex tasks like surgery