Favorites December 25th 2022
www.tugboattoday.com
This is an interesting map on the centralization of cities. Italy shares a lot of similarities with Germany in that it was a bunch of smaller states that unified around the mid-19th century, and thanks to that they have a lot of high population cities, rather than one megacity.
Makes it somewhat surprising that France has such a strong regional train network, where are the trains going? Maybe Italy?
One of the most incredible technical achievements in engineering I've witnessed has been the steady rise in OPRs that engineers have squeezed out of compressors in jet engines. See the graph below.
The author of this tweet isn't actually sure how this has been achieved, but he linked to this absolutely wild thread which indicates that modern turbine blades are made from a single metallic crystalline structure.
Threads
• Thread attempting to estimate how powerful GPT-4 will be given what we know about how it's being trained and how previous training scaled. TL;DR: crazy powerful, and likely available March 2023
• Thread of famous photos and the cameras used to take them. No new photos were famous enough for any digital cameras to be listed.