The English word comes from the Latin word revolvere, meaning “to roll back.” That spawned not only “revolve” but also “revolt,” which grows out of the idea of “rolling back” one’s allegiance to a king or institution. Perhaps there is some strange affinity between these two meanings. We see that dualism right from the start, in the most famous initial use of the word in science, by the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. In 1543, Copernicus published his treatise On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, which used the word in its first, scientific meaning. But while Copernicus was using “revolution” in its regular sense, he was proposing a thesis that radically reordered our understanding of the cosmos, moving the Earth from the center of the universe to the periphery. For the way it overturned both astronomy and theology, the shift he set in motion came to be known as the Copernican Revolution. His was a “revolutionary” theory in both senses of the word.
When Sam Houston regained the presidency of the republic in 1841, he tried to relocate the capital back to Houston. A group of his supporters came to Austin in the dead of night to take back the government’s archives. But one of the town’s more devoted female loyalists, an innkeeper named Angelina Eberly, fired a six-pound cannon at the interlopers. Other gun-wielding Austinites recovered the archives and returned them to the General Land Office. Barely, Austin was saved.
(The phrase “Everything is bigger in Texas,” which would become the state’s most popular motto, probably was first uttered in New Orleans in April 1885.)
two important things for product leaders to keep in mind, especially if they wish to embark on a transformation to the product model: first, you have as much ownership as you have credibility; and second, part of your job as a product leader is to change hearts and minds.
Some materials, like quartz crystals, sugar, some ceramics, bone, and even wood, display the piezoelectric effect: pieze being Greek for push. When these materials are squashed or deformed in some way, they generate an internal electrical charge. The opposite is also true; if a voltage is applied to a piezoelectric material, they change shape.
In comparison to the spring-driven escapements that typically beat six times a second, atoms in atomic clocks oscillate over nine billion times a second, providing an incredibly precise and standardized time
Microsoft is also a very large investor in OpenAI and a recent investor in Mistral, another LLM startup. The “$650 million” license fee is essentially a way to circumvent the growing hostility in Washington DC towards “big tech” companies buying “startups.” *This isn’t technically an acquisition, but it is a good way to get all its benefits.* If the DoJ had any real desire to do something meaningful, it would go after Microsoft. Otherwise, we are going to see this innovative technique become very common in Silicon Valley. Smaller public companies have been using this structure regularly for their “acquisitions”.
when you hammer a nail, the compression forces are huge, sending shockwaves through its body, but the duration of the loading is just a fraction of a second. Smash the nail hard enough and it doesn’t have time to buckle. Part of the reason for this is the strange behavior of metals when loaded. The load at which they deform can depend on how quickly that load is applied: the quicker it’s done, the more force a metal can resist without failing.
