Good morning!  It is Friday.  The 13th.  You have been warned :)

For those who found this post on Facebook, yay.  If you like the links from there to here, or don't, please say so...  Right now survey is running 53% yes and only 13% no, but it's a small sample...

Thanks to Matt Struble for this awesome sunrise series from this morning!  I wasn't up, but seems like I should have been...

Red sky at night, sailor's delight, red sky in morning, sailor take warning ...

<rant>I love the way Apple's iCloud sync finally works, and any pic I take on my iPhone or iPad is automatically synced to my PC.  (I say finally because it was not always so...)  But I hate dislike the way it takes so long.  Why is the polling interval 15 min?  Half the time I end up emailing a specific pic from my phone to my PC because I'm tired of waiting for the auto-sync. </rant>

Have been seriously loving Zwifting.  Three days ago, rode in France (that's Mont St Michel at left).  Two days ago, Japan.  Yesterday, New York central park*.  Meanwhile it was like zero here outside.  If you're a cyclist you should try it, and if you want to do a ride, let me know.  I'm about 2w/kg... 

* BTW love the way the Zwift people have reimagined Central Park with translucent aerial bike paths; great views, and adds some vertical.  NY city planners take note :)

Another thing I'm loving is Feedly.  SharpReader, I hardly knew ye (well, except for the last 20 years :).  Being able to read posts on my iPad and then having them relayed to my PC automatically has been game changing. 

Blog inside baseball - made some changes to my archive.  Hope you like them.  I *still* think this way of archiving old posts is the best I've seen.  Easy to find stuff and easy to browse.  YMMV. 

And so now we have the ThinkPhone, a Lenovo brand extension to the ThinkPad laptop line they bought from IBM.  Kinda cool; I'd be tempted if I was an Android person. 

CNet is experimenting with an AI Assist.  Well, why not?  It might be more insightful and certainly less biased than their human reporters.  And there will still be human editors. 

Medium creates it's own Mastodon instance.  Huh, interesting.  I'm not a Medium follower or user, but seems like this makes sense for those who are. 

BTW haven't been able to figure out how to identify inbound links from Mastodon.  I'm guessing near zero.  If you got here via Mastodon, can you let me know?

Cool!  The James Webb telescope's first confirmed exoplanet is 99 percent the size of Earth.  It's fiendishly hard to find exoplanets, they are not directly "visible", but have to be deduced from their gravitational effects on nearby stars.  The smaller they are the harder they are to find, which is why most exoplanets found to date are gas giants. 

Visual Capitalist: The Most Important Science Headlines of 2022.  Excellent, I love this.  And yes I know you can't read them here, you have to click through :)  Hard to pick the winner - but DeepMind's announcement of AlphaFold might end up being the most important... 

From NASA: why isn't every year the warmest year on record?  They explain, but you get the feeling they are rooting for climate change to be "real".  Weird.  They're a scientific organization, why not just stick to the science?  Yeah I know the answer. 

This is what NASA should be doing: TESS discovers planetary system's second Earth-size world. 

Meanwhile: SpaceX flexes might with simultaneous Starship, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon operations. 

Space is not easy: Virgin Orbit blames launch failure on upper stage anomaly.  The first ten SpaceX launches didn't go perfectly either.  It takes time and lots of hard work.  Glad they are trying and wish them luck! 

At this point no surprise: Tesla beats BMW to become the #1 in luxury sales.  Ten years ago, who woulda thought? 

The pic at right is a BMW EV, highly rated.  A friend of mine just got one - he was a Tesla Model S owner, wanted something new - he likes it a lot but every phrase is a comparison to Tesla.  In my eye it is not pretty.

Sure go ahead and make fun of Elon Musk, but ... SpaceX and Tesla.  And now you think he can't run Twitter?  Stay tuned. 

You've all heard Jeff Beck has passed on...  especially poignant for me was Ottmar Liebert's tribute. "For me he was THE best. His tone, his phrasing, his bending… Damn, he was so good."  It's notable how many great guitarists are singing his praises.  For me he was good but not in the Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie Van Halen, Robin Trower class.  YMMV. 

xkcd hits another one out of the park: Outdated periodic table. 

Okay, so much for a filter pass ... now onward to more CUDA coding!

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