【推荐1】Compulsive or snobby — What’s your reading style?

What books will you be reading over the holiday season? And how will you read them?     1     The Atlantic magazine recently published a list:

The Book Snob (书呆子)

You only read books that are well reviewed by distinguished critics. You wouldn’t care to read something on a best-seller list released by Amazon or a bookstore.     2    .

The Steady Reader

You buy a book and you read it. You buy another and you read it too.     3    . You read it, and then you return it and you get another, which you read. You go through each book methodically until you finish it.

    4    

You stick to the authors you like and read them exclusively, whatever they write, good or bad. You loved The Da Vinci Code and wonder when Dan Brown is going to release a new book. (Good news-this summer!)

The Compulsive Reader

Wherever you go, whatever you do, there’s a book with you. It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as there are pages with words on them.

    5    . But if, unfortunately, you’re an Anti-Reader (who never reads books besides textbooks) because they’re too long and you’re too busy, we urge you to pick up a book — start from a short one — and open it. We hope the beauty of words can inspire you to change your mind, because a life without books is truly a sad one.

【推荐2】In looking through your social media, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed pictures accompanied by texts. The pictures are likely made possible by a text-to-image program called DALL-E. For example, Twitter user posted a tweet with the text, “To be or not to be, rabbi holding avocado, marble sculpture.” Then a matching picture appears below.

The AI models come from Google’s Imagen software as well as OpenAI. a start-up backed by Microsoft. On its website, OpenAI calls DALL-E “a new Al system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.” But most of what’s happening in this area is coming from a relatively small group of people sharing their pictures. That’s because Google and OpenAI have not made the technology broadly available to the public.

The text-to-picture services identify the most important parts of a user’s text and then guess the best way to picture those terms. There’s generally a text box, a button to start the generation process and an area below to display images. To indicate the source. Google and OpenAI add watermarks in the bottom right comer of images from DALL-E and Imagen.

Engineers trained the models on various collections of words and pictures from the web. OpenAI recognizes the potential for harm that could come from a model. To avoid the risk, employees removed violent content from training data, and there are filters（筛选）stopping DALL-E from producing images if users submit（提交）violent or illegal content.

Boris Dayma, a developer from Texas spelled out the problems in an explanation of their software. Despite the risks, Dhariwal, a research scientist at OpenAI, said it could open up creative opportunities for individuals and could help with commercial applications for dressing up websites. Results should continue to improve over time.

【推荐3】The sporty all-electric car from the Netherlands resembles a BMW coupe, but is unique: It captures more carbon than it emits.

“Our end goal is to create a more sustainable future,” said Jens Lahaije, finance manager for TU/ecomotive, the Eindhoven University of Technology student team that created the car.

Called ZEM, for zero emission mobility, the two-seater houses a Cleantron lithium-ion (锂离子) battery pack, and most of its parts are 3D-printed from recycled plastics, Lahaije said. The target is to minimize carbon dioxide emitted during the car’s full lifespan, from manufacturing to recycling, he added.

Battery electric vehicles emit virtually no CO₂ during operation compared with fuel vehicles, but battery cell production can create so much pollution that it can take EVs (Electric Vehicles) tens of thousands of miles to achieve “carbon parity (相等)” with comparable fossil-fueled models.

“Direct air capture is a fairly new method of cleaning the air by capturing CO₂ into a filter (过滤器). We have made use of this innovative technology and implemented this in our car. The idea is very simple: while we’re driving, air will move through our self-designed filters and the CO₂ will be captured and stored.”

ZEM uses two filters that can capture up to 2 kilograms of CO₂ over 20,000 miles of driving, the Eindhoven team estimated. They imagine a future when filters can be emptied at charging stations.

The students are showing their vehicle on a US promotional tour to universities and companies from the East Coast to Silicon Valley.

【推荐2】There’s physics to having your ducklings in a row. By paddling in an orderly line behind their mother, baby ducks can take a ride on the waves in her wake. That saves the ducklings’ energy, researchers report in the December 10th issue of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Earlier measurements of duckling metabolism showed that the youngsters saved energy when swimming behind a leader, but the physics behind that savings wasn’t known. Using computer simulations of waterfowl waves, Zhiming Yuan, an expert of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and his colleagues found that a duckling cruising in just the right spot behind its mother gets an assist.

When a duckling swims on its own, it kicks up waves in its wake, using up some energy that would otherwise send it moving ahead. That wave drag resists the duckling’s move. But ducklings in the sweet spot experience 158 percent less wave drag than when swimming alone, the researchers calculated, meaning the duckling gets a push instead.

Like good partners, the ducklings share with one another. Each duckling in the line passes along waves to those behind, so all the baby ducks get a free ride.

But to get the benefit, the youngsters need to keep up with their mom. If they fall out of position, swimming gets harder. That’s fair punishment for ducklings that dawdle.