Dan Frown

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A $2.5 billion robot has been alone on another planet for 13 years and is still doing science. The scale of that sentence gets worse the longer you think about it.

Curiosity landed in August 2012. Obama was president. Instagram had 80 million users. The iPhone 5 hadn’t shipped yet. The rover was designed for a two-year mission and 20 kilometers of driving. It’s now driven 35.5 kilometers, climbed over 327 meters up the side of a mountain, drilled 46 holes into Martian rock, and is currently running its fifth mission extension.

The computer running all of this has 256 MB of RAM and a 200 MHz processor. Your AirPods have more computing power. Every command sent from Earth takes 14 minutes to arrive. Every photo sent back takes the same 14 minutes. When Curiosity drills into a rock, the team in Pasadena won’t know if it worked for half an hour. They’ve been operating on that delay, every single day, for 4,846 Martian sols.

The power source is 10.6 pounds of plutonium-238 generating about 110 watts. Less than a ceiling fan. It will keep producing electricity for decades because the half-life of Pu-238 is 87.7 years. The rover will run out of moving parts before it runs out of power.

And those wheels. Machined from single blocks of aluminum, 0.75 millimeters thick. Half a dime. JPL watched them get shredded by Martian rock starting in 2013, rerouted the entire mission path, taught the rover to drive backwards, and kept going. The wheels look like they lost a fight with a can opener. The rover is still climbing a mountain.

Every iPhone you’ve owned since 2012 is in a landfill. Curiosity is on Mars, 140 million miles from the nearest repair shop, running on a ceiling fan’s worth of nuclear power, sending data through a 14-minute time delay, on shredded wheels, doing geology that rewrites what we know about whether life ever existed somewhere other than Earth.

We built that. With 0.01% of the federal budget.

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

Pay attention.

[MindBranches @MindBranches]

Book Summary: “The Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition”

[Dan Frown @danfrownreal]

We should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously – https://t.co/iSR0CbXgKz via @aeonmag
Damn, I wish Readwise wasn't as expensive. Really good article.

[Jack Whitaker @jackgwhitaker]

I love perplexity's marketing so much

[Ananay @ananayarora]

Full technical breakdown as to why Crowdstrike's update caused a worldwide BSOD – crashing computers at Airports, Banks, Casinos, 911, Hospitals and more. 🧵
(1/n)

[Dan Frown @danfrownreal]

@FoundersPodcast @readwise save

[Kunal Shah @kunalb11]

In India, those who had to stay away from family in their formative years probably do better financially in life.

[Dan Frown @danfrownreal]

'I think there are probably three main modes of approaching [death]," he explained. You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it."
- Peter Thiel on death

[Dan Frown @danfrownreal]

Note to self: Whenever you find something intriguing while reading a book (preferably non-fiction), be sure to apply second order of thinking on it.

[Pranay Pathole @PPathole]

"It really matters if you have a good heart" 💕 — @elonmusk

[Dan Frown @danfrownreal]

@goodreads Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

[Dan Frown @danfrownreal]

This so lit. 🔥🔥

[Arun Maini @Mrwhosetheboss]

#AppleEvent 😂

It's funny, but I'm willing to bet almost all companies will start following Apple and ditching chargers in the boxes by 2022

[Dan Frown @danfrownreal]

@mrdbourke Sounds nothing like a school. I'm in.

[Dhruv Rathee @dhruv_rathee]

-23.9%

Modi hai toh Mumkin Hai!

[Aakash Pimparkar @AakashPimparkar]

"In my culture, death is not the end. It's more of a stepping-off point." -Chadwick Boseman
#WakandaForever ✊🏿RIP LEGEND 🕊