MidWeek Briefing #9
Good Wednesday evening! We've gone back to the moon! I'm so excited about the Odysseus mission! We're inching closer to stable fusion using AI! Engineer's Week was last week and a short essay follows. Let's dig into this week's MidWeek Briefing!
The Odysseus mission to the moon
In bittersweet news, the privately developed lunar lander named Odysseus successfully made it to the moon and touched down. That's the sweet news, the bitter news is that it came to a rest on its side, preventing it from unfurling all its solar panels. The sad news is that by the time you read this, it will have lost power and gone silent.
Eric Berger
However, for reasons that Altemus did not entirely explain, the lander came down a bit faster than anticipated—6 mph (2.7 m/s) instead of 2 mph (0.9 m/s). Still, this pace, about the same as a moderate walk, was within the tolerances of the vehicle's landing legs and structures to withstand. The problem is that the vehicle also had a lateral motion of about 2 mph, when it was supposed to come straight down.
I'm tickled pink that we're going back to the moon!
Jamming Reggae music with AI and Pi
Coming from the "this is likely very illegal but kind of interesting file", Maker and developer Roni Bandini built a device using a Raspberry Pi to jam his neighbor's incessant loud reggae music. He labeled the various music classes and then used AI to train on them and jam only music he found unappealing.
Ash Hill
It's worth noting that this project was mostly made in jest as an experiment. The legality of recreating this project varies depending on where you live, so be sure to double-check local ordinances before you try this one out at home. Bandini also explains that you have to be really close to the Bluetooth speaker for it to work, and this won't work with every kind of Bluetooth speaker.
This reminds me of this Florida man; funny but highly illegal.
Russian Hackers shift to the cloud
Strong cybersecurity is always the best policy in today's world but also staying abreast of how hackers evolve their methods and techniques. The US and its Allies are issuing a dire warning that Russian Hackers are starting to target people's cloud services.
As the Five Eyes agencies found, APT29 hackers are now gaining access to their targets' cloud environments using access service account credentials compromised in brute forcing or password spraying attacks.
The article briefly mentions it but cleaning up dead and dormant accounts is a good idea to reduce the attack surface these hackers search for. Ask your IT admin what their cybersecurity policy is today and do your part!
AI is enabling fusion reactions
A new study published in Nature highlights the good side of AI for once. Achieving stable fusion is hard to do, especially keeping plasma under control! Scientists have about 300 milliseconds to adjust things before the fusion reaction goes cold and that's too fast for humans to react to. Enter AI or rather low latency inferencing.
Dr. Katie Spalding
“By learning from past experiments, rather than incorporating information from physics-based models, the AI could develop a final control policy that supported a stable, high-powered plasma regime in real time, at a real reactor,” said research leader Egemen Kolemen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).
It feels like we're getting closer to an energy breakthrough. How I would love to power the world with fusion energy and possibly use that technology to explore the stars one day. It's an exciting time to be alive, don't you agree?
Engineer's Week
Last week was Engineer's Week (E-Week), a week that celebrates Engineers and how their work impacts the world every day. I'm proud to be an Engineer ever since I walked on stage and received my diploma. I ended up working in the Civil Engineering industry for over 20 years before I made a move to the AI industry.
One old colleague once spoke to a group of children on E-Week and noted that everything they saw around them, the lights, the floor, the building, and the car they drove in to get here, was once thought of by an Engineer. Every single detail was thought about, designed, redesigned, tested, and built because someone thought of it. His talk inspired me to keep spreading his message, as I do here today.
I owe my success in life to the critical thinking I learned in Engineering school and industry. It's a rewarding career for anyone, of any gender, and of any color. We need more of you in the STEM fields because it's so exciting right now. Whether it's in AI, lunar missions, or building better cities, we need every single child who dreams of big things and wants to make them a reality.
Sometimes our legacy is not the things we've built but the help and support we gave to the next generation of Engineers.
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