Very cool and very powerful technology, it'll be interesting to see how fiber sensing progresses, especially with how much undersea fiber already exists. For subsea power cables, is there a parallel fiber dedicated just for DAS monitoring? Do these get bundled in with data fiber runs as well? I've been curious how well DAS can work over actively lit / in-service fiber.
On the cables I worked on they would use a separate fibre, but power cables tended to overspec the number of fibers massively so was never an issue. Some even have two bundles of fibers.
A supplier played whale song they recorded from cables, and said they repackage and sell the same product to defense contractors.
These hydrophones are a bit more expensive (~$1k per deployment) but still very accessible compared to how much it usually costs. And the goal is to bring the cost down to the ~$100 range (so $5 is very impressive!):
All the data is being saved (used for scientific research & ML training), with some of the hydrophones going back to 2017, and yes it's quite difficult to listen to and review so much audio. Better tools like the hydrophone explorer UI are much needed (been working on something similar).
One of the things that's surprised me the most is how difficult to keep hydrophones up and running. I can sympathize with both the technical and social challenges—underwater is not a friendly environment for electronics, and it can be difficult to get permission to deploy hydrophones. But it's incredibly rewarding when it works and you capture some cool sounds.
For anyone interested, all the code is open source and acoustic data is freely available:
Requirements are pretty flexible, but the inspiration is largely iNaturalist, and also this very cool project put together by Google Creative Lab back in 2019 https://patternradio.withgoogle.com/
> When General Magic finally shipped in 1994 — under the threat of Apple’s Newton — they hadn’t made the Pocket Crystal that Porat first dreamed of in 1989. Instead, they released something they called the Sony Magic Link. It weighed 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and was priced at US$800 (US$1560 in 2022 dollars). It offered futuristic features like a touchscreen, downloadable apps and animated emojis — the first of its kind. Fadell thought it would be revolutionary — people could now carry a personal computer with them wherever they went. But nobody bought it. In the end only three to four thousand Magic Link devices were sold, and mostly to family and friends.
> There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives
Absolutely, we all need to filter the overwhelming amount of information we're faced with. The part that seems terrifying is that occasionally our filters can line up in such a way as to pick up what's just pure noise and escalate it into an enormous positive feedback loop.
And of course there's a whole discussion about how those filters are shaped (by the media we consume, authorities we decide to trust, direct experience) and how that's changed over time.
One of the host hotels for Dragon Con in Atlanta is the Marriott Marquis, which until several years ago had a very iconic carpet that has been since been replaced with something boring.
Many people who spent many hours staring at the old carpet while in line for panels missed it very much and founded the Cult of the Carpet[0]. It has "priests" that wear robes with the pattern, you can buy bags and t-shirts with the pattern, etc. My favorite is the guy who painted his storm trooper armor with the pattern.
If you'd like to join the "Cult of Marriott Carpet", here's a handy link with tilable patterns (1, 4 (2x2), 9 (3x3), 16 (4x4), 25 (5x5), 36 (6x6) premade), reference photos, and fabric sample tests of the pattern on 4 fabrics for costumes (Cotton Poplin, Basic Cotton, Silk Crepe de Chine, Organic Cotton Sateen)
We're building open source tools to listen underwater, focused on monitoring endangered orcas (killer whales) along the west coast of North America. We operate a network of hydrophones that anyone can listen to live (https://live.orcasound.net/). We have a community of over 6,000 citizen scientists who use our tools to help us detect orcas & other marine life. Short-term our goal is to help conservation, long term we want to contribute to scientific research (orca behavior & communication).
It's an incredibly broad project that ranges from:
SUV is a poor term, nowadays it's largely used to refer to crossovers/CUVs, which have unibody car chassis and are really just station wagons with some extra clearance. The nomenclature may be a lost battle at this point, but the rise of CUVs (which are certainly cars, not body-on-frame trucks) is what killed minivans and sedans.
I like Obsidian too, but the one thing it really can't do that Notion does well is collaboration. And surprisingly I haven't seen any good plugins that solve this problem (to be fair it's not an easy problem).
I have some months ago messed around with writing a plugin that allows collaborative editing in some sense.
Basically, I realized that my notes are in nextcloud and nextcloud already has a collaborative markdown editor based on Y.js.
So my goal was to open a file from nextcloud in obsidian as a participant to the collaborative editor session of that file. Right now I'm a bit busy with exams but it was working pretty well and I may finish it sometime.
I found it really interesting he frames privacy, surveillance, and power through the lens of information asymmetries.