inasio

Next, intergalactic weaponization ala 3-body problem

Vidocq is a character in the awesome Sandman Slim books. Gets a bit of the backstory with some supernatural elements thrown in, good stuff.

The cool thing here is that you cannot shield from a neutrino beam, except by not being there

There are many very simple heuristics for solving 3-SAT, some even with analytical convergence estimates. A simple random walk (Algorithm P in Knuth's Satisfiability fascicle), which iterates through the clauses and flips a variable at random if it encounters a violated clause, will do the trick too

I find it weird that the README for a fancy plotting library doesn't have a single plot in it, other than some ASCII art

Alzheimer's as a (transmittable) prion disease is the stuff of nightmares (prion disease == incurable)

Anecdotal local evidence to exhibit 3:

There are a few go-kart places here, I hadn't been there for a few years, and now I learned that they all switched to electrical. Much quieter, no fumes, works great indoors

Reminder that HPV in men has a similar association to oral/anal cancer, and this vaccine (ideally the quadrivalent version) prevents it too [0]. HPV vaccine campaigns often emphasize vaccinating only girls, but boys should be vaccinated too.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/1...

The Yucatan peninsula in Mexico is very interesting here, completely empty of waterways which would make one think it's a dessert area per other similar areas of the map, yet it's a very lush tropical jungle. A ton of water yet all of it runs underground, cenotes [0] are (mostly) undergound sinkholes, amazing to swim in

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenote

Does anyone know anything about James Radford (James Radford - Jim Radford developed Special Purpose Devices that solved intractable analytic problems, often by enhancing the performance of supercomputers by a factor of hundreds)?

I found that super interesting but couldn't find anything online about him, not even the era (Cold War, 911, recent). If anyone has any links or literature about things he did I would very much appreciate it.

If you watch the whole video, it ends with Mathias asking for help understanding why a straight tube would also lift when sucking air in. There's a short companion video that provides the answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3scTRJCm7w

Million-to-one chances are a running theme in a few of his books, but aiming specifically for it as in Guards, Guards! is one of the better awesome things in the Discworld

I imagine someone like idlewords replying that on the contrary, we should expedite shipping celebrities and billionaires to the moon, ideally while still alive

I just rode a BYD taxi (Uber) in Mexico city, I believe it was the BYD D1. Super comfortable, tons of leg space, minivan-style door. The driver claimed that after 100K kms the range was still within 1% of baseline.

In another universe Google's head of crisis PR grabs the red phone and calls the Wolf. Mr Wolf becomes point for this crisis, two hours later they get Tim Burke a beta account on the new 20 Gbps internet service, a decommissioned GCP storage pod with 300 TB on RAID 10, as well as the option to keep his data on his original plan if he so wishes.

It may not be as hard as you imagine, see e.g., Manhattan a few weeks ago:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/nyc-s-big...

This is very reminiscent of the Prenda law saga: https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/

I now this is hacker news, but for a second I wondered about fake chips as in fish and chips

This could be pretty exciting. For all the talk about quantum advantage, the number of quantum algorithms that have exponential speedup is super small; as the blog mentions it's essentially Shor's prime factoring and quantum simulations.

I was really hoping to find concrete details of what the experiment that they proposed to validate or refute their theory is. I hope it's something achievable, or at least not ridiculously far from what we can currently measure

I'm not sure if the point here is to suggest that marble/granite solid slabs are better, personally perhaps due to rockclimbing experience it pisses me off that there is no pushback on people buying slices off a mountain to put in their kitchen, when there are reasonable alternatives, even very nice ones.

No kidding about cicadas being loud. We were in the south of France earlier this year and it's incredible how much of the soundscape is dominated by the cicadas. I have no idea if it was just a couple or a couple billion, but it seemed to just come from everywhere above us

Note that they also had to drill vents into the laptop and use the speakers as outlets.

Possibly also specific to the Pacific NW area, Vancouver and the surrounding islands have the largest ferry fleet in the world, yet practically all of the boats carry up to hundreds of vehicles and hundreds/thousands of passengers. Something like this would replace, optimistically, one passenger ferry (Vancouver to North Vancouver), and perhaps a handful of water taxis.

I think they're super cool (I also love moth hydrofoils), but I'm not sure they're going to replace much given the current infrastructure. Perhaps though new use cases will happen because of them

Yeah, no. This is not Starwars or samurai anime, commonly found red cedar or Doug firs go from one to many feet wide

In Vancouver there are gas stations specific for boats, I heard from an attendant at one of them that occasionally yachts stop by and fill in $50,000 worth of gas (and pay cash according to him).

Hydrofoils in theory would cut a very significant chunk of that, even if still on gas-powered boats. Given that the technology has been around for many decades, I suspect there's got to be a showstopper that prevents its adoption (vulnerable to floating logs?), and I suspect simply making them electric won't alleviate that

It's basically Ohm's law V = RI, or in this case I = CV (conductance times voltage), on a lattice of wires. On many analog devices setting the values (write) can be very time consuming, although the read operation can indeed be fast and super low energy. Unclear if this is the case here.

Launch license secured!

One point that I heard William Gibson make about cyberpunk as a dystopia is that it depends on your point of reference. There are many places in the world where a cyberpunk dystopia would be a welcome change

I expected something more like squeezing the cards with NIF lasers (and alchemy) into diamond lattices encoding the information and then hacking it alongside phone storage