Do Stocks Increase or Decrease After the New Year?
January can be a time for optimism: new year, a clean slate, firm resolutions, endless possibilities. It’s natural to wonder whether that sunny outlook extends to the stock market. Enough people believe it does, and that belief has been elevated to something approaching conventional wisdom. As with a lot of conventional wisdom, though, the truth is debatable.
January Effect
The personal finance press has a catchy nickname for everything, including the belief that stocks will rise after the first of the year. They call it the “January effect.” As markets writer Adam Shell of “USA Today” explains it, one theory holds that investors brimming with optimism pour their money into the stock market, driving prices up. Other investors, hoping to get in on the gains spurred by that fresh cash, hop into the market to ride the wave, and away we go.
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New World Religion: Gods that are Aliens, Robots, Cyborgs and [Rocks of ] Moon or Mars. A Step by Step Guide for a New World Religion!
How to Start a Religion or Kingdom of Moon or Heaven Whatever!
Have you ever felt dissatisfied with existing religions? Have you ever become fed up with the lack of tolerance within many existing religions? If you are inspired to create change, you can start your own religion. It may take a lot of effort to organize your religion and get it officially recognized. If it is something you are moved to do, however, it will be very rewarding to see your work lead to a thriving membership.
Part1:
Planning Your Religion
Step-1
Write a plan.
Starting a religion will require a significant amount of planning. You can start by writing down your ideas about why you want to invent a new religion. Understanding the basic reason for your religion’s existence will be critical if you want it to be successful. You may want to start a religion:
- Because you are dissatisfied with the ones that currently exist.
- Because you are deeply inspired and/or have glimpsed secret knowledge that you would like to share.
- To perform weddings and other ceremonies in your own way.
- As a joke.
- To be critical of other religions.
Step-2
Develop a cosmology. If your religion intends to explain broad questions about the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the future, you will want to develop a cosmology, which explains all of these things. Your religion’s cosmology might describe things like a creation story and projections about the eventual end of things. Be as creative or inspired as your religion calls for.
GTA 5 is better than Cyberpunk 2077
Grand Theft Auto V: The Rise And Fall Of The DIY Self-Driving Car Lab
A few years ago, artificial intelligence researchers discovered that Grand Theft Auto V, the blockbuster 2013 video game, was good for more than stealing cars and causing mayhem on the fictional mean streets of Los Santos. Its realistic graphics and physics engine provide an excellent virtual environment for training self-driving cars. The game’s sprawling urban and rural environments are populated with pedestrians, drivers and animals that dynamically interact with the AI. Training an autonomous car system is all the more efficient when running over a pedestrian doesn’t result in real-life injuries and legal troubles.
The fun didn’t last long, though.
Over the past year, GTA V’s publisher, Take-Two Interactive, has quietly shut down a number of high-profile projects with cease-and-desist letters, according to multiple AI researchers involved in the projects. Take-Two is slamming the breaks on more than just commercial endeavors. Academic researchers have also been dealt with aggressively.
Building a ‘homebrew’ video game console
How it got started
My name is Sérgio Vieira and I’m a Portuguese guy who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I’ve always been nostalgic towards retro-gaming, specifically the third and forth generation consoles. A few years ago I’ve decided to learn more about electronics and try to build my own video game console.
Professionally I work as a software engineer and had no experience with electronics other than occasionally building and upgrading my desktop computer (which doesn’t really count). Even though I had no experience, I said to myself “why not?”, bought a few books, a few electronics kits and started to learn what I felt I needed to learn.
I wanted to build a console that would be similar to those which are nostalgic to me, I wanted something between an NES and a Super Nintendo or between a Sega Master System and a Mega Drive. These video game consoles had a CPU, a custom video chip (in those days it wasn’t called a GPU) and an audio chip either integrated or separate. Games were distributed in cartridges, which were basically hardware extensions with a ROM chip and sometimes other components as well.
The initial plan was to build a console with the following characteristics:
- No emulation, the games/programs had to run on real hardware, not necessarily hardware of the time, but hardware that is just fast enough for the job
- With a dedicated “retro” CPU chip
- With TV output (analog signal)
- Ability to produce sound
- With support for 2 controllers
- Scrolling background and moving sprites
- Ability to support Mario-style platform games (and of course other types of games as well)
- Games/Programs available through an SD Card
The reason I wanted SD card support instead of cartridge support, it’s mainly because it’s a lot more practical to have programs available in an SD card, as it makes it a lot easier to copy files from a PC to it. Having cartridges would mean to make even more hardware and to have a new hardware for each program.
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