elevensies

A microphone records amplitude of sound waves over time, i.e. the air pressure -- that's the dimension.

If I'm understanding correctly, this could be used for cloning if you could select two nuclei with non-overlapping chromosomes from a single person's sperm/eggs ... much easier to clone a man due the limits of egg extraction.

back of the envelope:

- each gamete has 1 of 2 choices for 23 chromosomes.

- you need to find any two non-overlapping

- probability of non-overlap is 0.5^23 for any pair

- number of pairs equals (n choose 2) where n is number of gametes = n!/ (2 * (n - 2)!) = 0.5 * n * (n-1) = 0.5 * (n^2 - n)

- to get a 50/50 chance of finding the right gametes: 0.5 = 0.5^23 * 0.5 * (n^2 - n), which is equivalent to: 0 = 0.5^23 * (n^2 -n) - 1

- solved via wolfram alpha, you would need to screen 2897 nuclei non-destructively to get a 50% chance of being able to generate a clone.

I'm not aware if this is possible or not. But obviously if you can just replace chromosomes in-nucleus that is easier than screening, but if you can do that you don't really need this whole process since you can just replace the nucleus after IVF. If you could harvest a sex cell and do meiosis in a test tube, that would also get you your nuclei right away as well -- from 10 seconds of googling, I don't think we have this yet.

I think when they screen zygotes they do it after some replication has happened, so the math really works against you if you need to combine sperm+egg pre-screen because you don't get the birthday paradox effect if you have to commit to your pairings beforehand, you'd need to huge egg supply as well.

With only one tanker, you can launch the tanker first and then launch the transporter, so it isn't any faster than launching a tanker and transporter simultaneously.

To go any faster you'd need more tankers as well. I don't forsee the tanker having commercial value short-term, so this would still increase the cost. With two tankers though, you can just have a full tanker waiting in orbit which is the fastest possibility, so there is no need of extra boosters in that case.

I agree with the premise of multiple boosters though. I wonder if a spacecraft could be made that could do both commercial earth orbit satellite missions, and serve as a tanker. This could finance a larger number of tankers. I think you'd need a 3rd stage on top of the tanker in this case to get the satellite in position. [EDIT: I mean either carry the extra fuel, or carry a 3rd stage + satellite, not both at the same time.]

That is true, if it succeeded for a while and then failed it could produce a casualty count on the order of Gulf War 1. Not doing it could result in civilisation extinction via nuclear war or asteroid strike. I still favour doing it, but I see how reasonable people could disagree.

I believe Elon said it would take 40-100 years for the population to reach that point, and he is saying that there will be a return mechanism, and a probably an extreme labour shortage which favours a strong bargaining position for both the entrees and the Mars local population. Ideally I'd like to see the return ticket + life support until the next return flight provided as part of the entrance fee to minimise risk, but there is still the problem of enforcing the contract.

[EDIT: I don't consider this a "fair" argument so I left it out, but as an aside, if minimising pain is your goal then mass sterilisation is the optimal strategy IMO -- there is no reason to continue the human race which will certainly produce millions of people in pain -- and if you have another goal which requires human existence to fulfil, then decreasing our extinction probability should be a huge priority]

Does Mars colonisation increase the chances of Earth becoming (more of) a corporate dystopia? If not, then if there is a chance of a Mars colony which supports your values what are you losing by the attempt? [edit: this is awkwardly phrased ... it is like a free roulette shot, it may or may not pay off, but if it's "free" the net value is positive.]

And I also think if colonisation ever was big enough to absorb a significant (i.e. 5%+) portion of Earth gross product (i.e. the sum of GDPs) then it could also improve life on Earth by improving the effective ROI of the capital deployed elsewhere.

The goal is to maximize re-use in order to minimize cost, for a tanker to fuel a tanker in orbit you'd need two tankers. So 1 booster + 1 transporter + 1 tanker, vs. 1 booster + 1 transporter + 2 tankers. If the trip takes 100 days, adding 3 weeks is 20% longer, and you might get it 20% cheaper by saving one spacecraft ... I can see it going either way.

(I'm not who you responded to,) It is a known tactic of the Chinese government. This book has a good overview of their intelligence apparatus: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Intelligence-Operations-Nicho... . This isn't an abstract concern, it is something that has happened thousands of times, for political and industrial espionage and political repression.

Here is a rationale for multi-master from James Hamilton's "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services".

Designing for automation, however, involves significant service-model constraints. For example, some of the large services today depend upon database systems with asynchronous replication to a secondary, back-up server. Failing over to the secondary after the primary isn't able to service requests loses some customer data due to replicating asynchronously. However, not failing over to the secondary leads to service downtime for those users whose data is stored on the failed database server. Automating the decision to fail over is hard in this case since its dependent upon human judgment and accurately estimating the amount of data loss compared to the likely length of the down time. A system designed for automation pays the latency and throughput cost of synchronous replication. And, having done that, failover becomes a simple decision: if the primary is down, route requests to the secondary. This approach is much more amenable to automation and is considerably less error prone.

NSFW due to testicle.

JWZ has some referrer detection so you might want to open it in a private tab to get around.

Interesting, I take 3 or 6 mg per night about an hour before sleep, I've never experienced that but it does make my dreams more vivid and memorable and I wake up from the occasional nightmare as well.

Melatonin has made it possible for me to sleep much more consistently which has been a huge help, since I saw Gwern's post on it a while ago.

This is my off the cuff opinion, I won't really try to substantiate it or anything.

Hacker News has a moderation policy and mod team that gives the discussion some very desirable characteristics:

- a sort of professional level of conversation is maintained. Roughly equivalent to a casual conversation with a co-worker, over lunch, is sort of the overall tone.

- general rejection of memes and shitposting as being against the purpose of the site -- the point is real discussion an exchange of information, not low effort karma generation

- Paul Graham's essay about different levels of disagreement: generally people attempt to discuss the core ideas of the posts and not just hammer away to trivilaties

Most of the programming related subreddits don't have anything like the overall tone, cohesiveness, or moderator activity/discipline of Hacker News. There are some subreddits that I would say are as good as Hacker News for discussions about their chosen topic, for example, http://reddit.com/r/spacex . But the overall programming subreddits are not equal to this.

Lynching is an epithet for Social Justice, and vice-versa.

This is a typical short squeeze. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_squeeze ) [ With the caveat that I'm far from an expert on this, I just have a collection of documents of many failed corners and very few successful corners. ]

The short sellers are anyone with a negative outlook on the stock. For example, some hedge funds do 50% buying, 50% short selling, so in theory they are neutral to overall market conditions.

The brokers in this case have been permitted to lend out the stock to earn extra money, the short sellers are ordinary customers of the brokers, the short sellers don't necessarily have any special relationship with the brokers.

The market maker would be buying as much as selling, and not holding any position over extended time, so they don't influence this event.

In theory, the short sellers have to pay up to meet their obligations.

Seeing Hulk Hogan force Gawker into bankruptcy has been so satisfying. After all the sanctimonious nattering after the huge iCloud celebrity nudes leak, and then all the hand-wringing while Gawker gets punished for getting waist deep in the exact same thing has been galling. But after dozens of think-pieces about the troubling implications, bankruptcy court grinds on, impervious.

Interesting thanks. 13.3" is just under the size of US Letter or A4 paper.

The economic system we live in is Capitalism, and if you want to maximize your control of your outcomes you need to be a Capitalist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

My guess is Assange thinks that Hillary Clinton wants to torture him. For him it is victory or death, he has nothing to lose.

It is a political question for the organization that wants to maintain power in a certain area. Assad's ability to control Raqqa is a political question. Google's ability to identify who is in control of Raqqa, much less so.

If Google negotiates the border location with the governments, according to the governments political needs, that is Google's choice -- Google can do this to try to maximally satisfy the governments. This is politically complicated.

If Google wants to maximally satisfy the practical needs of the people who are actually going to the locations on the map -- all they need to do is identify the sovereign power. Exerting control is politically complicated, but this is not what Google needs to do, Google only needs to identify.

What I'm trying to say is, if you are going to visit a certain location, the territory belongs to whoever controls it -- and that is who you need to reckon with.

China (PRC) says that Taiwan is a province of China, but they don't control it. If you show up at the Taipei airport with a entry visa from the PRC, you will find that out.

A similar but more extreme example, Google Maps says Raqqa is part of Syria, but due to the war that isn't exactly accurate at the moment.

Determining which organization rightfully owns which territory is political.

Determining which organization actually controls which territory isn't political though maybe not any easier.

If Google's responsibility is to the vanity of governments, then it is very political.

If Google's responsibility is to accurately represent the situation on the ground to their users, then it may not be easy but it isn't all that political.

Oh, in that case, I don't see any mention of it either, or in the paper, http://li.mit.edu/Archive/Papers/16/Zhu16KushimaNatureEnergy...

(multiple estimates since they don't exactly line up squarely)

...

[PDF] http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/platinum/my...

On page 4, it says 2014 global consumption of Ir was 6100kg. (3rd last para).

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium

Wikipedia article para 2 says global consumption and production is three tonnes.

...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-19/iridium-cl...

This (2014) article estimates global production as 129,000 ounces to 322,000 ounces, which is about 3500 kg to 9000 kg.

Cyprus did it not that long ago. They forced a loss on bank customers, although in a way that targeted non-citizens.

It is an article on a personal blog. Really I find this post to be very cogent and well written, even extremely-so by personal blog post standards.

Edit: (tongue in cheek) maybe you can find something more in line with your expectations here: https://www.google.ca/search?tbm=isch&q=physics+comic+strips

If privacy is not a concern, you can just publish a list of your liabilities at a given time. Each account holder can then verify the their own listing, calculate the total, and compare to the proven reserves.

There are more sophisticated schemes that allow you to check the amount in your account, and verify that your account was included in the total, without seeing the size of other accounts: https://iwilcox.me.uk/2014/proving-bitcoin-reserves .

It would protect against what happened with MtGox -- if, after losing some but not all customer funds, they tried to keep running the site to make back the money. It would protect you from putting money into a site that is already bankrupt.

I've just run across this the other day, it is a set of guidelines for securing cryptocurrencies: https://cryptoconsortium.org/standards/CCSS . It is about the core crypto asset concerns, not about how to protect a web server.

Here is a report which uses the guideline to assess a company's posture after a hack: https://www.scribd.com/doc/309591980/ShapeShift-Postmortem (sorry about the scribd link, haven't been able to find pdf.)

Here is a narrative description of the hack that the above report is about: http://moneyandstate.com/looting-of-the-fox/

my guess: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Personal_computers_(...

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