Their answer was nearly always about the daily cooking of rice up to 3 times a day which at that time was still often performed using a kamado. A very fortuitous chance meeting then happened between Yamada and Yoshitada Minami who came looking for work with Yamada. Minami had the engineering knowledge to make an automated electric rice cooker work but his wife knew how to cook the rice perfectly and did that on a traditional kamado everyday to feed their six children.
To stall the project Minami took out a loan using their family home as collateral while Fumiko studied the existing rice cookers on the market. Fumiko endlessly tested prototype after prototype, cooking rice on the roof, in the sun, in the cold, and in the heat. Preventing the pot from releasing heat during cooking was challenging. However, Yamada remembered that in Hokkaido state where the winters are brutal the cooking pots there were heavily insulated.
Their final product therefore had a two layered wall. One inside and the other coered in three layers of iron. Yamada went on the road to demonstrate the effectiveness of how the rice cooker not only prepared the rice but also how it could perfectly make takikomi gohan , a finicky rice dish with a soy-based sauce that often burned. The culinary masses got hooked and within the year, Toshiba was producing , rice cookers every month!
The next year, Matsushita Electric, now better known as Panasonic, jumped into the fight. The companies employees were horrified that Toshiba had beaten them with this miraculous gadget.
It was therefore seen as a disgrace that such a convenient home appliance as the rice cooker should have come from Toshiba, a manufacturer that was better known for producing industrial machines. That man was Tatsunosuke Sakamoto and he was very passionate about rice cookers. He had a dream of a market for international demand of such gadgets. To get ahead of the Toshiba competition Matshushita needed to make a rice cooker with only one pot.
This would use less metal and result in a cheaper device. In , the first rice cookers that could keep rice warm after it was cooked went on sale, as did some models with timers.
This meant that people could eat freshly cooked rice for breakfast simply by setting the timer the previous night, and they could keep the rice hot and tasty even after it was cooked. Next, in an effort to make rice from rice cookers more delicious, makers introduced computer-controlled rice cookers, which regulated the temperature inside the cooker using a tiny computer.
These were first introduced in Hi-tech Rice Cookers. From the beginning, the company indicated that it intended to open the CPU's source code—the hardware description language that describes the structure and behavior of the CPU core's electronic circuits.
It has now done so… with little fanfare. Its Yitian server system on a chip SoC , manufactured by Taiwan's TSMC, will have a total of Arm-based cores, with 60 billion integrated transistors and a top clock speed of 3.
Alibaba said it is the first server processor compatible with the latest Armv9 architecture. Alibaba said the SoC achieved a score of in SPECint a standard benchmark for measuring CPU integer processing power , surpassing that of the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor based on Armv8 by 20 percent in performance and 50 percent in energy efficiency. The company also announced the development of proprietary servers, under the brand name Panjiu , developed for the next-generation of cloud-native infrastructure.
By separating computing from storage, the servers are optimized for both general-purpose and specialized AI computing, as well as high-performance storage. The company vowed to provide more services and support for RISC-V development tools, software development kits, and customized cores in the future. Consultant Gwennap suggests that Alibaba's Arm and RISC-V efforts are experiments more than commercial endeavors, noting that Alibaba is still using x86 Intel chips for the vast majority of its internal use.
Alibaba's new Arm-based server chip will be used in Alibaba datacenters to provide cloud services to customers.. The company will continue to offer Intel-based services, so it's up to customers to choose Arm over xbased chips.
When Amazon did something similar a few years ago, there was little uptake for the Arm-based chips. But true semiconductor independence will require China to develop its own extreme ultraviolet lithography machines , required to etch microscopic circuits on silicon. SMIC , China's main chip foundry, can't provide anything smaller than 14 nm.
SMIC claims to have mastered the 3nm chip process in the lab and is trying to buy the EUV lithography machines necessary for production from ASML, the Dutch company that currently has a monopoly on the critical equipment. But the United States is intent on blocking the sale. But getting that technology out of the lab and into a machine remains many years away. Japanese startup working towards autonomous robots that can do useful work inside and outside the space station.
Late last year, Japanese robotics startup GITAI sent their S1 robotic arm up to the International Space Station as part of a commercial airlock extension module to test out some useful space-based autonomy. Everything moves pretty slowly on the ISS, so it wasn't until last month that NASA astronauts installed the S1 arm and GITAI was able to put the system through its paces —or rather, sit in comfy chairs on Earth and watch the arm do most of its tasks by itself, because that's the dream, right?
So what's next for commercial autonomous robotics in space? One of the advantages of working in space is that it's a highly structured environment. Microgravity can be somewhat unpredictable, but you have a very good idea of the characteristics of objects and even of lighting because everything that's up there is excessively well defined.
So, stuff like using a two-finger gripper for relatively high precision tasks is totally possible, because the variation that the system has to deal with is low.
Of course, things can always go wrong, so GITAI also tested teleop procedures from Houston to make sure that having humans in the loop was also an effective way of completing tasks. Since full autonomy is vastly more difficult than almost full autonomy, occasional teleop is probably going to be critical for space robots of all kinds.
GITAI will apply the general-purpose autonomous space robotics technology, know-how, and experience acquired through this tech demo to develop extra-vehicular robotics EVR that can execute docking, repair, and maintenance tasks for On-Orbit Servicing OOS or conduct various activities for lunar exploration and lunar base construction. I'm sure you did many tests with the system on the ground before sending it to the ISS.
How was operating the robot on the ISS different from the testing you had done on Earth? The convenient appliance became a cultural mainstay, offering safely cooked, delicious rice while rendering the more dangerous, inconsistent kamado obsolete. Competition between brands meant rice cookers would continue to improve. For example, "in , the first rice cookers that could keep rice warm after it was cooked went on sale, as did some models with timers.
Rice cooker technology continues to march into the future, cooking rice faster while bringing out the best taste. Old machines relied on simple mechanical settings, ignoring factors that are now considered like air pressure, weight, temperature and planetary alignment okay, maybe not the last one.
Technological advancements have even made direct heating obsolete. Induction heating or "IH" for those in-the-know became the industry standard. Here's how an IH cooker works. An electric current is passed through coils around the pot.
This produces a magnetic field, which in turn produces an electric current in the pot's metal. Metal heats up when an electric current runs through it, so the entire pot quickly rises to a high temperature and cooks the rice evenly. The next wave of machines incorporated computer chips and fuzzy logic.
As Jessika Toothman explains,. Fuzzy logic has to do with mathematical sets, or groups of items known as elements. In most mathematical sets, an element either belongs to the set or it doesn't. For example, a sparrow would belong to a set of birds, but a bat wouldn't.
In fuzzy logic, though, elements can belong to sets in varying degrees. So since a bat has wings, it might belong to a set of birds — but only to a certain extent. Fuzzy logic is basically a way to program machines so they look at the world in a more human way, with degrees of truth. Fuzzy logic allows rice cooker to make "judgement calls" based on collected data and rewards its owners with consistently delicious rice, despite life's variables.
So what does the future of rice cookers hold? Perhaps we only have to look to sci-fi films, like The Terminator , Space Odyssey or Rojin Z for scary but delectable predictions. For example, Jordan Shapiro of Forbes contacted Zojirushi, the premier rice cooker producer, about their new lines of A.
He reported,. Zojirushi tells me that its rice cooker learns from each cooking experience so as to adjust to your cooking idiosyncrasies. I didn't ask, so I'm not sure what rice cooking behaviors it "learns" from, but I imagine it could adjust to variables that may stay constant for each particular user: i. I'm hoping for a "smart" rice cooker I could control with a phone app.
Or at least a talking rice cooker, similar to HAL from Space Odyssey that could create well balanced meals on its own. Please eat before it gets cold. Rice cookers come in various shapes and sizes. Choose a model that best fits your lifestyle. If you're single, the smaller the better, no need for a family-sized behemoth.
But if you have a family or plan on hosting parties, go big! Even the cooking pots vary. Some have chemically treated, nonstick surfaces to make cleaning easy. Aluminum is also a popular option. But if you want to avoid those surfaces, for their purported health detriments, go with a more natural option like steel or clay. Of course, some rice cookers boast more features than others.
Even those made strictly for cooking rice often feature multiple rice cooking settings. Making brown rice? Hit "brown. Hit the special button. A clock and timer add to a cooker's convenience.
Other models even feature digital screens for detailed options and settings. Why mention it twice?
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