December Update: NVIDIA/Arm, Space, Geography, and More

It's the last Friday of the month so time for the December update. But actually, of course, it is neither the last week of the month nor a Friday. But Cadence is shut down from 24th December to 3rd January. Tomorrow, as is now traditional before a break, I'll have an off-topic post, so this is the last slot for my monthly update post with short items that don't justify a blog post on their own or which are a follow-up to a prior post.

UPDATE: Cadence will not attend the Consumer Electronics Show in-person as originally planned.

NVIDIA and Arm

In my post at the start of the month, Today Is the 40th Anniversary of the BBC Micro...and the Ancestry of Arm, I mentioned the NVIDIA acquisition of Arm. The very next day I posted November Update: Automotive, Graviton 3, Images, New Fab, and More and before the day was over I had to update the update because the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenged the merger, adding to existing challenges from both the European Union (that Britain is no longer a member of) and Britain. In an example of how the legal process is already the punishment, the FCC case says:

The administrative trial is scheduled to begin on Aug. 9, 2022.

So whatever happens there is at least another 9+ months delay.

For more details, here's a Wired article The FTC Sues Nvidia to Block Its Historic Deal With Arm. Subtitle "Regulators say the merger would create a semiconductor chip conglomerate and stifle innovation across the industry". One minor error in the piece:

Arm began as a niche semiconductor designer, offering low-power chips for embedded systems and for portable devices like the Apple Newton and Palm Pilot.

It's true that Arm was spun out of Acorn because Apple wanted a processor for the Newton that was not buried in a subsidiary of Olivetti. See my post Happy 25th Birthday, ARM. But the Palm Pilot was always powered by Motorola microprocessors, not Arm.

Arm's stock has gone up a lot so the original $40B deal is now a $75B deal. With three very slow government agencies challenging it, I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that I don't think this deal is going to happen.

The Webb Telescope

For some reason, when I write posts about space they get a lot of readers and links. Today was going to be a major event.

The James Webb Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Telescope, was scheduled to launch today, December 22nd, at 7.20am EST, a couple of hours before this blog post goes live at 5am PST. But the launch has been delayed to Christmas Eve, December 24th. Maybe just to annoy Randall Munroe, since now his advent calendar would need to go to the 24th like advent calendars normally do, which rather spoils the joke:

Telescopes with large mirrors that have to be launched into space use origami techniques to fold up the mirrors (and the solar panels) for launch. See my post Computational Origami which shows an example of a 100m telescope folded up for launch. This telescope consists of many hexagonal mirrors each independently adjustable, which is how modern telescopes are built (instead of manufacturing a huge heavy mirror). Here's a picture of the Keck Observatory telescope on the top of Hawaii, which was one of the first built this way, for accuracy not for weight since it doesn't need to be launched into space. I was lucky enough to be invited there for a visit by a friend of a friend who is one of the astronomy professors who works there.

The JWT also has an amazing heat shield since it will sit at a Lagrange point on the far side of the sun, which is a place where it should be able to stay for over a decade without requiring much fuel.

Update: The telescope launched successfully...on 25th December.

GCHQ Christmas Quiz

GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA). The initials stand for Government Communications Headquarters. During the Second World War they were located at Bletchley Park, but today they are in Cheltenham in a circular building a bit like the Apple HQ in Cupertino. Every year they create a Christmas puzzle, sometimes intended for other security agencies to solve. This year, it is intended for children. As they put it:

Posting on social media, the spy agency said its latest quiz was aimed at children with an interest in STEM subjects – that’s science, technology, engineering and maths – and offered participants the chance to “discover their inner intelligence officer” by having a go at the seven puzzles, which increase in difficulty, in their Christmas card.

Here is the challenge. In the spirit of "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" see if you can do better than a Brit "in secondary education".

Geography

I wrote an off-topic post about geography a couple of years ago. See my post Off-topic: Geography. One thing in that post is an illustration of just how big Africa is, shown by fitting much of the rest of the world into it. I happened to come across this map recently, which shows how countries look on a Mercator projection (the normal map we are all used to) and how big those countries really are. So anywhere near the equator like Brazil or African nations are not changed much. But look at how big Greenland really is (or isn't), or the Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway. Russia is not nearly as big as it looks since it is so far North. Alaska might be the biggest state in the US—but it's not nearly as large as it looks.

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