ci5er

So... One superbowl ad?

If I forget, within 48 hours please bump me - I do have it around here somewhere! :-)

Besides, we're moving into a weekend; This is the time for clearing off decks.

I did and so much was going on (US politics-wise, and Brexit-wise), I was kind of sloppier than I generally am. I will try to recover and post within a day.

EDIT: Because it was me hypothecating (generating hypotheses), it will be more than one link that may turn out to be unrelated.

Oh. Sorry. I was too embedded in the context of the Chinese-funding of US University/Academic research story. In this context here:

  - "We" == "US Research Programs, funded by the Chinese, but not disclosed according to requirements given to them by the university or the federal grant authorities (whoever they might be for any given program)"

  - "They" == "Whichever Chinese organizations, governmental or otherwise, that fund US researchers, and encourage them to 'under-the-table' provide results/data/samples"

EDIT: For whatever it's worth. I have no problem with US and Chinese researchers collaborating and funding each other. But I do like a bit of disclosure from time-to-time.

EDIT: User pavelrub made a very reasonable comment on this thread that he was amazed at American's ability to conspiracy-monger (my words, not his, but he has since deleted his comment. I hope I am not taking too many liberties with his statement), but he's right. I have no basis (as I said up-thread) to believe any of this. Right now, I am hypothesis-hunting, and probably shouldn't share that mental-process in public, given that 99.9% of them (the broken hypotheses) will turn out to be trash.

Given the rapidity with which the Harvard chemical-biologist was arrested after we received a sample and sequenced it (~36 hours), I think it is possible (possible! not likely!) that we engineered it, and they paid a researcher to give them a copy.

* Some pretty heavy researchers in the US say that it (the virus) was not human-engineered. I find their reasoning spurious, but they know more than I do.

If you say so (and I am not saying that you are wrong), but the cost of mining coal and oil and the cost of digging and refining those Li-whatevers, can not be ignored.

Pease and love

That's interesting. I only "follow" (or whatever they call it) a few people on Quora, and Quora sends me an email of what some of them have said over the last two or three days, and I pop over to see what the opinion is about. And, then, there's already some sort of conversation or fight underway - but usually pretty light.

Generally, I find Quora to be a pretty "ok" place to have a conversation. Better than most of Reddit, for sure. (Reddit does have some fantabulous subs to be sure, but not very many! :-) )

EDIT: HN is good for conversations in threads, although they can veer off track pretty wildly. Reddit can get pretty vitriolic. You could have a conversation, but the participants destroy it. Twitter? Fuggedaboutit. Are there sites I ought to look at where I can have a polite discussion with people that I may or may not agree with on various topics? [FWIW - Before 2008, Reddit itself was pretty close to this, except for maybe /r/politics]

Thermal packaging!

> "Paulestinians"

Ha! Never heard that one. It is by far more clever than any of the half-dozen or so that I did.

I would be shocked if IAFIS didn't have that stored in South Carolina strip-mall hosted database like all the other biometrics they can get from birth, disease, criminal activity, police, federal and military service. The feds do love their biometric data.

Well, yeah, in the sense that a chimp and a human are about 98.5% similar.

But from that point of view, humans are 99.9999% similar.

The other point-of-view is that a male and a female of a species will end up with approximately 50/50 similarity to either parent.

These are different measures coming from different point-of-views. If I were Gengis Khan (and who is to say that I was not!), then I could have impregnated enough women over my days on the steppes, to have, 1000 years late, up to countable percentages of my far-far-far descendents actually detected in tests as being my actual descendents.

Please don't conflate "this dna comparative measure" with "that dna comparative measure". It's all (theoretically) straight forward, and, yes, compounded by empiricism, but these are different measures, regardless.

Seems (to me) to be similar to the Ron Paul bots (fanatics, I should say, because they certainly weren't mechanical war-bots; They seemed like what the right calls NPCs these days, but they were just so ... into it! 24/7! It's actually kind of nice to see groups of new/young people get excited about politics - I think they might learn a lot through the process (maybe)) all over Reddit in 2008 (not just /r/politics, but they were everywhere), esp. since that also included all of the influx of rapidly migrating Diggers.

Maybe it's not the same, but those folks were all in on the Paul Train (or whatever they called it). They were eggcited!

I was at Motorola Tokyo Design Ops, back in the day and the General Magic people and the old Mac people and the Next people were frequently coming through.

I learned the 56K on the NeXT (and it saved my butt when I had to emulate a slow small MCU (together with an FPGA) to build a real-time emulator so our customer (Canon) could complete development in parallel with the US mothership getting their act together for shipping verified silicon). But I didn't spend much time with the i860. I should have. And, over course, their main CPU (68040) was better than the 68020s running on my desktop workstation.

That Magnetic Optic thing, though, it turned a pretty slick design, and a very slick SDK, and an "ok" implementation of Display Postscript into something that just felt like a sluggish brick. And, of course, back in the day, Jobs hated networking because it was "just an umbilical cord back to the mothership".

I always loved the clever phrasing: "NeXT bought Apple for a negative $430M and 1.5M of Apple Stock Shares in 1997."

Lots. It wasn't catastrophic at the time -- in most cases. (There were a few!)

I remember when HP was trying to test their DC in Germany, they rolled the computers (and the VMs) up, and then back, but the DC locks, well, locked, and the staff couldn't get in to access the computers to resolve any RT logging info spewing out. Fun times.

Many of the Y2K problems were handled annually, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, minutely and secondly well in advance of "the deadline".

Slow the definitional ticks down to be independent of (slowly but increasingly divergent from) Planck time and we can morph it to create as much time as we "need".

What is the proper value of human life? Does it change over time?

And is the budget-wise national-healthcare-system administrator qualified to make that determination for you?

And, if they do not want you to get better while waiting on line (most people do bet better for most things, except, broken legs, without treatment) or want you to die while waiting on line, why are the lines so long?

In any case, even in Singapore, with arguably the best-balanced system in the world, things are complicated, when people's lives are on the line...

https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/pape...

I too, like commenter above, find it fascinating how various concepts are quickly accessible (or not!) for different people. Usually I blame it on the teacher's presentation (for my part, I am completely unable to explain pointers in (say, C) to people who haven't already been able to get it), but sometimes it is also the building blocks that the learner already has in place.

So - maybe a rude question - but had you take Calculus, Differential Equations or Vector Calculus (div, grad and curl and all that) before you started in on this more integrated material?

I'd be interested to also see material talking about the social basis for belief formation. We are primarily emotional and social creatures, and our brains seem to be adapted to forming beliefs that may or may not match the world, but certainly do match what we are socially expected to believe.

I can't speak to regional banks or credit unions, in the US, but the major US national banks ALL have options to be able to be SMS'd, email'd or in-app instantly notified for a wide variety of events on or related to a card (auths, clears, bills due, bills paid, over a balance threshold, overdrawn, etc.) and the ability to freeze the card through the app or web until it is unfrozen. Capital One even has the ability to generate a one-time PAN to be used in Internet purchases.

Ok - thanks. I'm not sure there is a bright-line distinction, then.

I use a set of chat-bot related APIs to implement CLIs for various EHR-related and clinical-related applications (Navigating kajillions of options in EHR menus requires, famously, too many damn clicks. Physicians are intelligent enough to learn simple syntax to avoid all that crap)

I'm probably using the wrong words when I describe it, but when I tell developers in the ecosystem that we have a "chatbot-like" interface, people seem to get it, so I haven't upgraded my nomenclature.

Given the success of Alexa and Siri (and various voice->NLP interfaces in varous settings) - why do you say that chat-bots have failed? (Maybe you are using a different definition than I?)

The handset business is mouse nuts economically and nobody cares at any level of national security what idiot consumers do to themselves.

The "National Security" concern (economically, technologically, capability and integrity-wise) is at the carrier level. Think Cisco, not iPhone.

There is a long and storied reason (going back to the greek city-states) about why direct democracy is a really bad idea.

Ha! This is awesome! I did something similar in 2016, and called it something silly like SaaS-in-Box, but after integrating security, and Blueprints and multi-tenancy and caching, and ... (I do think I ran into some problem with blueprints, actually), ... I finally decided I was inventing Django-on-Flask and that it probably didn't solve as many problems as I originally thought it would.

BUT! That said - I think there is a solution gap here. Keep it up!

Assuming you mean 5V or 3V DC, there will have to be a baseline level, then it will have to be upconverted or downconverted from the wall AC is (to whatever their baseline standard is in DC), then converted back to AC by X-converting then converting to something in AC, then downconverting to DC OR using semiconductors that used to be expensive (don't know if they still are). Seems complicated. Why not just stick with (in the US AC @ 110V - it's not like it isn't wide spread) and let all the device power adapters take care of themselves?

Or, you know, have better silicon components give us SDVC (Software Defined Voltage Control). I'm joking, but I also don't think you will save what you thik you will in TCO - Energy Savings + Device Cost differential.

I could be wrong. I have been before. And I am operating on almost zero sleep for over a day, so odds are, I could be doing to again at greater than my average error rate.

I consult some (maybe a lot). My work product belongs to the client. I am not legally allowed to share.

Some of it I would like to share (and some of it not!), but it really isn't my choice.

(Also - because I am fairly cross-disciplinary, the code for a controller to stand up a 100 ton rig, is not the same as the code to monitor the growth/feed/heat/light for algea in vertical tubes. And neither is likely to be asked of me for projects having to do with creating controllers for missions related to diabetic control or scooping up space debris. The ability to analygize only goes so far.)

That is certainly one hypothesis that has not yet been eliminated.

Yes, now. But I don't know how one would finance the build-out of a public utility like this.