When news broke that Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo radio telescope was going to be demolished, it sent the scientific comm

…Those benchmarks and tests can maybe help us figure out what we need, but maybe also hurt us into thinking we can just squeak buy under the line of what we’ll eventually require.

I can’t help but feel like another baton has been passed — for years, NSF had been seeking private investment to keep the facility running, as it had long fallen into a state of disrepair. Now, the ascendent lights in space exploration are fewer public institutions and more private corporations like SpaceX — designed to serve the bottom line and interests of a CEO rather than a public.

But Arecibo soon grew into a larger and hugely important instrument for the study of space. It spent the bulk of its lifespan helmed by the NSF, and dedicated to astronomy — it is famously tuned to listen to the universe for signs of alien activity, but also to scan for comets and asteroids. It became a symbol of our pursuit of space science, our dedication to understanding the universe — it was featured in films and TV shows like Contact, the Bond film GoldenEye, the horror flick Species, and The X-Files, as a beacon of that symbology. Its hugeness of scale and futuristic aesthetic epitomized our forward-lookingness. And it was a cultural touchstone and an inspiration to the Puerto Ricans it shared an island with.

…It really is called future-proofing for a reason. So unlike a lot of things where I will tell you that if you need higher-end machines, if you need pro-level specs, you’ll know it. In this specific case, I’m doing the exact opposite.

Like many large-scale projects of the time, Arecibo began as a project for the U.S. military. Conceived and headed up by Cornell University professor William E. Gordon in 1960, the original aim was to study the ionosphere to better understand radar detection. (It was also used for intelligence purposes — the National Security Agency used Arecibo to intercept radar signals sent by Soviets on the Arctic Coast during the Cold War.)

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time, you can attend all the events for your kids or make time to get yourself in top shape. You can do whatever it is that is your version of a successful life. Tim traveled the world, made a podcast, and dove into martial arts. What dream did you define?

Arecibo’s decommissioning marks yet another sign that we’re well into a twilight era for a certain mode of undertaking ambitious scientific investigation and space exploration, the sort carried out by public organizations like the National Science Foundation, who, with shrinking budgets and clipped wings, owned the massive telescope until making its fateful decision on Thursday.

Rene’s premise is that computer RAM has always been a major performance bottleneck, so it must also be true for M1 Macs. He provides no meaningful analysis, relying on the fact that since this is the way we’ve always done things (buying computers with as much RAM as possible), we should continue to follow this pattern with Apple silicon Macs. By that logic, doctors should still be applying leeches (which, fun fact, were used in Western medicine until at least the 1950s).

Rene Ritchie’s YouTube video 8GB vs 16GB for M1 Mac — The TRUTH About RAM! takes 10 minutes to say that virtually everyone should pay the $200 upgrade price for 16GB of RAM when buying a new M1 Mac. From the video:

In their The NEW M1 Macs — Should You Get The 8GB or 16GB Version? video, Created Labs puts an 8GB M1 Macbook Air through a series of tests including 4K video editing and rendering, productivity application, multitasking, gaming, and photo editing:

For this demonstration, I will plot systolic(BPXDI1) vs systolic(BPXSY1) blood pressure. The little twist will be I will plot them in different colors for different marital statuses. It will be interesting to see if the marital status has any effect on blood pressure.

While Renee seems to think benchmarks hurt more than they help, they show a significant difference in RAM results between the M1 Macs and prior models. A search for “Mac mini (Late 2018)” on the Geekbench website shows 8GB multi-core scores reaching 5270, while 16GB scores top out at 6187, a 17% performance increase. The best M1 Mac mini scores are almost identical across RAM sizes, with a score of 7730 for 8GB and 7729 for 16GB. While these benchmarks clearly don’t tell the whole story, they do provide evidence that the memory in Apple silicon behaves differently than the combination of external DRAM and graphics memory it replaces.

Arecibo Observatory, a Great Eye on the Cosmos, Is Going Dark The radio telescope in Puerto Rico has to come down before it collapses. One of the great icons of human curiosity, the…www.nytimes.com

When I heard word of its closure, my first thought was of the excellent Ted Chiang speculative fiction story, “The Great Silence,” about a Puerto Rican parrot who lives near Arecibo, and who laments that while humans have built this vast apparatus to scan the universe for intelligent life it might listen to, they are deaf to the intelligent life speaking to it right here. The parrot doesn’t blame the humans for neglecting its kind, though — they are not driving the birds extinct out of malice, but ignorance, after all — and argues that any species capable of erecting Arecibo must be capable of greatness, even if it is not capable of recognizing the bounty of life on its own doorstep.

When I heard word of its closure, my first thought was of the excellent Ted Chiang speculative fiction story, “The Great Silence,” about a Puerto Rican parrot who lives near Arecibo, and who laments that while humans have built this vast apparatus to scan the universe for intelligent life it might listen to, they are deaf to the intelligent life speaking to it right here. The parrot doesn’t blame the humans for neglecting its kind, though — they are not driving the birds extinct out of malice, but ignorance, after all — and argues that any species capable of erecting Arecibo must be capable of greatness, even if it is not capable of recognizing the bounty of life on its own doorstep.