2026-04-22 15:42:41
Shri Khalpada of PerThirtySix explains how GPS works using a set of small interactive globes.
The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.
So geometry is useful. Imagine that.
Tags: GPS, PerThirtySix, satellites, Shri Khalpada
2026-04-22 04:43:30
OpenAI announced their generative model ChatGPT Images 2.0. One of the new features is that you can generate more than a single image in a prompt, which means you don’t have to generate images one-by-one and stitch them together on your own.
So now everyone can generate research posters like the one above with a quick prompt. Blessed day. Although, the robots are going to eventually do all the work for us anyways, so I’m not sure what the point is.
2026-04-21 15:37:57
Mortality varies widely by geography and demographic group. It has also changed over time with improvements in medicine or availability of resources. Our World in Data shows the differences with a treemap. Use the dropdown menus to select groups and a slider to shift time.
For low-income countries:
[N]on-communicable diseases account for 43% of deaths; that’s a much smaller share than in the world as a whole (75%). That’s not because death rates of these diseases are lower in poorer countries; adjusting for age, they’re actually higher than they are in rich countries.
The difference is that death rates from infections, injuries, and child and maternal mortality are far higher. One in three die from infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, meningitis, and tuberculosis.
Maybe the hardest number in this dataset to sit with is that one in ten deaths is a newborn or a mother leaving children behind.
Tags: mortality, Our World in Data
2026-04-21 06:00:31
The administration wants to build a 250-foot tall arch in Washington. That’s a pretty big arch. To show how big that is, Marco Hernandez and Anushka Patil, for the New York Times, used illustrations of the proposal against existing arches and structures.
Tags: arch, buildings, New York Times, scale
2026-04-20 18:31:14
Using inference with what you ask, how you write, and your phrasing, a complete profile is built from just a few sentences. For the Straits Times, Amanda Shendruk and Youjin Shen use a concrete example to demonstrate.
I like the build-up in this piece. It starts with a chat, and then highlights line-by-line and word-by-word to build a complete user profile that most people never think about.
Back in my day, companies used to collect data about you in more obvious ways, such as suggesting you fill out profiles or tracking clicks across various sites. They’d convince college kids to share links on their AIM away message. Later, people would be convinced that voice assistants like Alexa and Siri were eavesdropping to serve hyper-targeted ads.
Well no more. These days, a chatbot will do.
Tags: chatbot, privacy, Straits Times
2026-04-18 07:02:03
The Strait of Hormuz might be “completely open” for ships to pass through, depending on the source and the timing. Hard to say from anecdotes. But at least we can see what’s been going on through data. For the New York Times, Josh Holder, Adina Renner, and Blacki Migliozzi mapped routes before the war started and after and charted events over the past month.
Tags: Iran, New York Times, ships, Strait of Hormuz
