They constructed a parking lot and paved heaven. It might be a stretch to call that “paradise,” especially because it’s in New Jersey, but there are some folks who are very concerned over plans to reconstruct the location of the original “Big Bang Antenna.” The antenna, which has been referred to simply as “The Horn Antenna” since Bell Labs constructed it in 1959 and placed it atop a hill in Holmdel, New Jersey, was first intended to explore long-distance microwave communications.
However, the antenna gained notoriety in science when Bell Labs researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson unintentionally used it to find cosmic background radiation (CBR) in 1964. The township committee has only authorized a study to see if the location should be renovated so far.
But the fact that the site is one of the highest points in Monmouth County with sweeping views of Manhattan has some people wondering what’s really on tap for the site. A petition to save the antenna currently has about 3,400 signatures, so you might want to check that out — after all, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Eliza rides again? Maybe a little bit, at least judging by the current fascination with ChatGPT. The AI chatbot went live on November 30 with a “research release” that’s free to use, at least for now. People are using it for everything from getting help with coding questions to writing poetry, with mixed results. One Hackaday writer, who shall remain nameless, even used ChatGPT to write an article about a specific project on Reddit “in the style of Hackaday.” Relax, it wasn’t published — we just looked it over internally on Discord. While it sounded convincing enough superficially, the article was hot garbage as far as facts and specifics about the project. We could be a little biased about that, though. We also spotted an “interview” with ChatGPT over on IEEE Spectrum, which supposedly captures answers to questions put to the chatbot. Honestly, it reads a little like the interview with HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Also in ChatGPT news, it looks like the chatbot is getting a little too chatty for the likes of Stack Overflow. The platform has wielded the ban hammer on content generated by ChatGPT, which has become a popular way for people to pad out their stats. SO’s ban, which is characterized as “temporary,” is based on the fact that while ChatGPT-generated answers are often factually incorrect, they can look pretty legit. We’re honestly not sure exactly how this differs from human-generated answers, or how SO’s mods will tell the difference. So naturally, we asked ChatGPT to clarify:
Feel better?
And finally, a couple of weeks ago we featured a really interesting in-depth video tour of a 1,000,000-watt FM supertower. There was a ton of eye candy in that one, from the hardline coax to the massive copper pipes used in the tower’s massive fleet of combiners. Now, Jeff Geerling and his dad have dropped a follow-up video that has a little more detail on that “1,000,000-watt” figure. The details are sure to entertain any RF geek, as is the somewhat terrifying look at what that much RF can do if something goes wrong.
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