Hacker News Reader

cryginon The Exploding Whale remastered: 50th anniversary of legendary Oregon event

Not all whale carcasses float -- some sink like a stone (and some sink, only to later rise again).

cryginon Study: Severe Covid-19 Cases Don't Respond to Hydroxychloroquine+Azithromycin

Generally speaking, a criticism of a study that focuses only on something like this is uninteresting -- while it _may_ be a valid criticism, it is not always (many valid studies have very small samples!), and so stating it unsupported is actually more like evidence that you don't know how to critically evaluate a study. As Zeynep Tufekci said: 'Anybody immediately responds to a correlation with “but correlation does not imply causation” probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t have much to say, throw around smart sounding cocktail phrase.'

cryginon How Is Python 2 Supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux After 2020?

As an alternative viewpoint, it's bizarre that we can't support these things. Mathematics textbooks from 400 years ago are relatively intelligible, and those from 100 years ago are easily readable. But with computer science, a domain which consists entirely of problems we ourselves invented, we've wedged ourselves into a situation where we are apparently so bad at computer language design (let alone systems engineering/systems architecture) that something surviving for a decade is frankly notable.

cryginon Capital One Cyber Staff Raised Concerns Before Hack

To use your analogy no surgeon is allowed to cut until he or she does have a solid grounding in biology.

I take it you're unfamiliar with the content of the MCAT exam, which is a prerequisite to admission to American medical schools.

cryginon Nutrient deficiencies in rice grown under higher carbon dioxide

Simply purchase your single-generation seed from Monsanto at exploitative prices, and you can continue to subsist without major nutritional deficiencies.

cryginon A Look at Overnight Stays at US National Parks

I've always been curious about this -- mine is also counter-clockwise, but with January 1 down around the 7 o'clock position. I've always assumed I imported that from a calendar with aligned seasons (like with the peak of summer at July/August being at the top of the circle), but no real idea of where it originated.

cryginon Forget Silicon Valley, It Still Pays More to Be a Doctor in America

Three years of residency will make you a GP, on the very low end of the MD salary range. Specialists typically have a 4-5 year residency with 1-2 years of fellowship following.

cryginon Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

Perhaps more critically, we've burned most of the easily-accessible fossil fuels, which means that if we drop below a critical threshold we won't be able to reboot from scratch because there will be insufficient high-energy-density material available.

cryginon A “bike platform” that temporarily swaps one car parking space for ten bicycles

Drivers getting angry for a few minutes kills more people than all the named acts of protest combined.

cryginon Thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities (2016)

They're not going to be so nice when they're at the other end of a four-billion-person refugee crisis in a few decades.

cryginon The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap

In addition to the sibling comment's point that externalities of energy production are unevenly distributed, the difference between an old machine and a new machine is that in the manufacture of the old machine the energy/pollution/labor have already long since been expended, and the amortization of that expenditure across more years of use is likely to compete well against even a very efficient newly manufactured piece of equipment. This is most dramatic in e.g. the purchase of cars, where it's typically more environmentally friendly to drive an older, even significantly less efficient car, than to purchase a new car.

cryginon The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap

I would assume that they're being downvoted not for their claim (which I would not agree with, though I would love to see that graph), but for missing the point of the comment they responded to which points out that even if older hardware consumes more electricity, it may still be less environmentally harmful than purchasing new hardware which required many resources to manufacture.

cryginon “Once-in-a-Hundred Year” Sightings of Bamboo Blossoms Reported in Japan

I recently learned about beech masting in NZ, which has a similar (but much more frequent) blooming cycle based on the difference between successive summer temperatures: https://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/publications/newsletters/...

"According to their ‘delta T’ (ΔT) model, the likelihood of masts by several species, including beech and tussocks, is positively correlated with the difference between average summer temperatures in successive years: a high positive value of ΔT (i.e. last summer warmer than the preceding summer) corresponds to a high likelihood of a mast in the coming year."

I'd always imagined that these types of events involved pheromone-type signaling, but this is kind of a cool way to do distributed consensus based on external signaling.

cryginon As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

Sarah Taber explained the complexity of this aspect of dietary environmentalism better than I ever could in this thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/100636377572388864...

tl;dr: the effectiveness of vegetarian diets is dependent on local conditions. Vegetarianism in a globalized world relies on fossil-fuel-based transport or farming techniques.

cryginon Two Chinese Stalagmites Are a 'Holy Grail' for Accurate Radiocarbon Dating

I worked on this with Minze Stuiver -- the goal was to eliminate reliance on man-made artifacts of potentially ambiguous date. About the project: http://depts.washington.edu/qil/aboutqil.html

Datasets: http://depts.washington.edu/qil/datasets/

cryginon Two Chinese Stalagmites Are a 'Holy Grail' for Accurate Radiocarbon Dating

The C14 timeline is calibrated from radiocarbon years to calendar years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibration_of_radiocarbon_dat...

cryginon Comcast aware of nationwide outage impacting its internet, video and voice users

Reducing overall turnout is very specific-party-favoring in the US.

cryginon Infant Deaths Fall Sharply in Africa with Routine Antibiotics

This is not really the best way to cognate about mutation at the bacterial scale. A better way of putting it is that every possible simple mutation is happening right now. If a mutation were truly neutral, it would already be fairly present in the population. It is possible that a complex mutation could emerge with these properties, but the likelihood is much less that the likelihood of many other things that would screw us more.

All that aside, these antibiotic regimes have been carefully designed by people who have already thought very hard about these problems. The single-dose model is designed to produce a significant response with a non-durable mutative result in the population. There's an awful lot of literature about the design process for third-world medication (see e.g. tuberculosis treatment) if you're curious.

cryginon Jupiter is deep

It's a relatively common phenomenon in hydrodynamics (specifically, the formation of large separated cyclones in unstable flow), and the best explanation is delightful -- Onsager's "The Little Vortices Who Wanted To Play" (a letter to Linus Pauling, reproduced on page 33 of this PDF: http://bactra.org/sloth/eyink-and-sreenivasan-on-onsager-on-... ).

cryginon How to Clone Mineral Water (2012)

Burton salts (as used for homebrewing, to match the mineral content of the water of Burton-on-Trent: https://www.morebeer.com/products/burton-salts-brewing-1-lb.... ) are a pretty close match to San Pellegrino at 1.2g/L. You want the salts to be dissolved in the water before carbonating it. And of course, this might not work well if you have highly mineralized tap water to start with.

cryginon CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work

I saw it done with a stacked pair of dishwasher drawers (e.g.: https://www.remodelista.com/posts/appliances-dishwasher-draw... ) in a small apartment in Switzerland recently, with "clean" and "dirty" magnets that got swapped around -- there was no other dish storage. Pretty great.

My other favorite is the Italian dish drainer (a few examples here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/759138080911631519 ) -- basically the cabinet above the sink is a dish drainer with an open bottom.

cryginon Robert Scoble and Me

The scariest thought to me is a corollary to that idea of looking at the scary incompetence of journalism regarding a subject you understand, and realizing that most topic-specific writing is in the same boat -- right now, we are all looking up to and aggrandizing people who similarly don't produce/work, and not realizing it. A good reminder to think about the people you follow and what they've really done.

cryginon Can the Internet Be Archived? (2015)

Imagine our understanding of evolutionary biology if we had access to the entire corpus of failed mutations, the whole nondeterministic tree instead of the single surviving branch. This is that for the marketplace of ideas.

cryginon Baby Bird from Time of Dinosaurs Found Fossilized in Amber

Yes, they evolved later (generally under non-mammalian island biogeographies which produced evolutionary pressures which meant that being large and foraging nocturnally had benefit over retaining flight).

This happens all the time -- imagine the evolutionary pressures on proto-cetaceans. Now imagine writing a comment discounting the benefits of land-dwelling because some paths returned to the sea.

cryginon Video Solves Mystery of How Narwhals Use Their Tusks

then you have to explain why the females' lack of the tusk is not selectively disadvantageous.

No -- sexually dimorphic characteristics cannot be in competition.

cryginon Juicero May Be Feeling the Squeeze

Huh, I wonder if this was just with certain juice bags, or if they generally pulverize the materials in the bags to make it easier to squeeze. I can easily see this for berries, citrus, etc, but it seems less likely for beets, kale, and other hardier vegetables.

Regardless, their actual market has always been restaurants and offices that want to have juice without a mess or someone who knows how to make it, and that seems less impacted, if perhaps less appealing to their investors.

cryginon 2-for-1 Executive Order's Effect on Fisheries Management

...and it's down. Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IQfOUB...

"All fisheries that take place in federal waters require regulatory action to open and close season, set catch limits, modify conservation and management measures, or adjust participation eligibility requirements... In many cases, multiple regulations must be enacted each year for a single fishery and that is a good thing – American fishermen depend on active, science-based management to ensure that their individual operations and their industry are economically and environmentally sustainable."

cryginon Study finds more extreme storms ahead for California

An interesting read on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm

cryginon The Building Blocks of Japanese Cuisine

Here's an example of one study which found that other minerals play a role in the salty taste perception itself, and also discusses the non-salty volatile flavors present in different sea salts: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-459X.2010....

cryginon The Building Blocks of Japanese Cuisine

The point of fancy salts is that they're not just NaCl -- sea salts, in particular, have a lot of other trace minerals with their own flavors (to say nothing of the texture -- generally not so important in flavoring a dish as in finishing).