iso1337

Many of the article titles on Bloomberg etc seem to have turned into clickbait in the last few years. I suppose that’s what works for driving clicks or maybe I have just wised up to it as I grew older.

I remember a 10th or 11th grade English class (US public school) where they brought in a guest journalist. She basically told the class that readers would rather read about the story of a family who went through a tornado rather than stats about how fewer people are dying from tornados... so I suppose things haven’t really changed.

There are no publications, why would anyone trust (eg waste months and months of followup experiments) on your predictions?

Anyone can spit out a DNA sequence, almost no one can guarantee you that it will work (express in your host, perform the reaction you want, etc).

There have been many attempts at this problem before (20n, genome compiler, BNICE, etc). What makes yours different?

Thanks! Super interesting.

I don’t live in the EU, but how does public infrastructure funding work? Are there no funds to invest in infrastructure?

It seems like trading partners would benefit a lot from a more connected Romania.

kleppmann’s book: designing data-intensive applications.

It’s very well written, but maybe doesn’t have as much in the way of exercises.

According to Wikipedia Romania has:

22,247 km (13,824 mi) of railroad tracks

And 807 km of motorways

In contrast the UK (similarly sized, within 2% of area) has 16000 km of railway and

3688 km of highway

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_ne...

I try to not read that much news and instead try to read books.

The quality of the news is decreasing to Facebook/reddit levels and designed to increase engagement by preying on your emotions. It’s much like marketing.

The book Factfulness by Hans Rosling has some good thoughts on this - mostly the world is getting better, but the news has to sell ads, which means telling dramatic stories.

If something is truly important, I’ll find out about it somehow (word of mouth etc).

That’s not to say I don’t skim the headlines once in a while, but let’s face it, it’s not really my job to know what is going on 24/7, so why worry about it?

Lots of photos. It’s so easy to take photos, and with Live Photo’s (or whatever the mini video clips are called), that storage fills up even faster.

Yeah, re-use is always preferable. It often goes against ever-increasing standard of hygiene.

It used to be common to collect used glass bottles and re-use them. That practice still happens in countries like Thailand and Vietnam.

It now costs ~427k/apt to build in SF.

https://www.spur.org/news/2018-05-09/it-all-adds-growing-cos...

I'm not sure what the rule of thumb is for commercial builders, but for real estate investors, a good deal is that 1 months rent = 1% of the price. So.. yeah, I dunno if there's actually that much wiggle room.

It may work if it's a nation-wide policy. But let's say you enact this policy in one city and I'm an investor. What's to stop me from just deploying my capital elsewhere?

PFOA/PFAs are also widely used as DWR (Durable Water Repellant) for clothing.

Even Patagonia still uses chemicals in this class (or did as of 2015): https://www.patagonia.com/blog/2015/03/our-dwr-problem/

More reading here: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/ski-clothing...

Most compostable bio plastics are made of Poly-lactic acid (lactic acid is the stuff that gives that burning feeling in your muscles after a workout) from corn.

PLA can compost in industrial sites, but (edit: add a not here) in normal environments, perhaps that is the reason for your quote marks.

So at least the bulk of the material in the bioware is pretty safe, especially when compared against PFA/PFOAs. That's not to say that it's impossible to mix PLA with some other, unsafe chemicals.

Harris ranch (or whatever big cow op is on I-5).

(36.3057129, -120.2729291)

The solar project is Panoche Valley, I don’t think any satellite pics are new enough to show progress

There’s a map here: https://www.panochevalleysolar.com/project-overview/

I agree that environmental costs of beef production are quite high.

For me, personally, what also matters is the relative ranking of impacts. I did some research into this and here are the top personal contributors to GHG emissions (presumably for a person living in a developed country).

(All figures in tons CO2 per year)

Have one fewer child: 58.6

Live car free: 2.4

One less transatlantic flight: 1.6

Buy green energy: 1.47

EV to car free: 1.15

Plant-based diet: 0.82

etc...

The interesting thing is that based on this analysis, on average our transportation usage far dominates the plant-based diet aspect.

Popular press (with some interesting follow-on thoughts about how most of the emissions are produced by the wealthy). https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/14/1596354...

original paper here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...

1) taxing vacant properties: Vancouver started this, although with the intent of keeping out foreign riff raff. Eg, there may be loopholes for the longtime BC residents who just happen to own a second condo. It will be interesting to see how that plays out over time.

2) then you won’t get any new builds being built. Especially combined with all the regulations on minimum parking sizes, %age of below market units, if you add on permanent rent control, you may well tip over into the point where no developer will risk building because any project is guaranteed to be a loss.

I’m skeptical about the conspiracy claims about how livestock were THE leading cause of GHG and looked up my own sources.

The EPA doesn’t place livestock as the leading cause of GHG.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Livestock are an important source (just not the most important). Documentaries with an obvious angle also purposely edit their footage to cast their villains in an unflattering light.

There’s also a good blog post by the Union of Concerned Scientists about this very claim.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/cowspiracy-movie-review

In California, Sierra Club has apparently been co-opted by NIMBYs who basically use environmentalism as a cover to stop any new development against entrenched interests.

The good thing (at least wrt to the posted s article) is that the majority of people like to save money, and solar offers a way to save money. So the forces of economics and good policy at the state level will make more solar and storage projects happen.

Ironically, environmental groups sued the project and forced it to be 1/3 the original size.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-project-r...

Driving down I-5, the smells and sights from some of the cattle operations along the highway are truly horrifying.

Harris Ranch just has a bunch of cows standing around in mud (or actually probably their own poop).

TurboTax

Indeed, you can look at this sirtuin boondoggle

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2011/09/22/th...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2011/12/13/th...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirtris_Pharmaceuticals

Famous professor from Harvard discovers possible route to elongating lifespan and then spends 1bn+ in funding to pursue that idea. I haven’t kept up with that story since then, so it’s possible that someone might be able to use it as a therapeutic target.

Usually the cost of doing the experiments precludes large sample sizes.

And you would be shocked at the lack of statistical education amongst biologists. Often many them freely admit that they chose biology because they like science but are terrible at math.

Part of the answer here comes down to the size of the effect.

If the effect size is large, then you can be pretty sloppy with your statistics - in some ways it doesn’t matter because it’s almost a qualitative/binary difference.

Obviously statistics becomes much more important when the effect size shrinks and you are squinting at some data trying to see if a 20% difference is real or not.

Due to the poor foundations in biosciences (everything from the assays themselves, lack of assay replication, errors in interpretation) engineering/optimizing something can be fiendishly hard.

I don’t think the author has the causality correct here, at least for biosciences. The statistical problems existed long before omics, big data, etc.

Most of the graduate programs don’t require students to take statistics, or if they do, it’s very cursory. Furthermore, students often learn very little about assay design - they end up thinking that non-linear responses are linear and do things like divide assay signals to get ratios (two sins here: assuming the assay response intercepts at 0 and that it’s linear).

So at least for the biosciences, it’s been a shitshow for a while.

Sounds interesting. You should also post to bogleheads if you haven’t already.

Seems like those professors should be recorded and then put on YouTube. They could inspire and reach many more people that way!

It’s funny because the marketing from Universities often highlight the professional value of a degree, essentially casting it as a “choose the best career ROI” decision. That and the high tuition naturally result in these sorts of outcomes.

As a former STEM major I never took liberal arts classes after high school, even though I enjoy history. I now get my inspiration and delight through Great Lecture courses and other content on YouTube.

Often, the best teachers are not at a research-intensive university anyways. Because, guess what, those professors are too busy writing books, working on their research, tooting their horns, to care much about teaching the next wave of undergrads.

Great details!

Makes you think that we should really be getting rid of gas pipelines and making electric-only houses. Maybe you wouldn’t even need to get rid of the pipeline during decommissioning? Just turn off the source and drain the network.

Unfortunately, gas is so cheap right now and also many prefer cooking with gas.

Okay by me as long as you’re willing to pay more.

One could argue that the state of the art is now benchling. But I have similar thoughts on the economics of building software to researchers.

The domain is complex, the customers require a high level of correctness, and features are often implemented to try things out in the lab and then abandoned once it's a dead-end in the real world. Oh, and most academics don't have money to pay for software, nor do they respect the software engineering process.

eh, it still took ~56 real-world attempts to get two functional designs. That's not even quantifying how strongly they fluoresce, and other qualitative/quantitative aspects (eg, how good of a GFP were these proteins). It's very impressive, and the Baker lab has done amazing stuff, but we are a long ways off from rational design.

From the paper: "Synthetic genes encoding the 56 designs were obtained and the proteins were expressed in E. coli. Thirty-eight of the proteins were wellexpressed and soluble; SEC and far-ultraviolet CD spectroscopy showed that 20 were monomeric β-sheet proteins (Supplementary Table 3). Four of the oligomer-forming designs became monomeric upon incorporation of a disulfide bond between the N-terminal 3–10 helix and the barrel β-strands. The crystal structure of one of the monomeric designs (b10) was solved to 2.1 Å, and was found to be very close to the design model (0.57 Å backbone r.m.s.d., Fig. 3c)."

"Two of the 20 monomeric designs—b11 and b32—were found to activate DFHBI fluorescence by 12- and 8-fold with binding dissociation constants (KD) values of 12.8 and 49.8 μM, respectively (Extended Data Fig. 6f)"

What I remember from Japan are ramen restaurants where you buy tokens from a vending machine before you go into the restaurant. Seemed pretty efficient and those places kept simple ramen at around $6-$8 per bowl in Osaka. You would then go into the restaurant and hand in your token (IIRC it was colored to denote the dish you ordered).

Some ideas:

European style: Higher prices, shorter hours.

Japanese style: more automation, vending machines for everything.

Anecdotally, I haven’t seen those issues you mention with retail.

Fundamentally the problem is that the price people are willing to pay won’t support the required number of people at such “high” wages. Either the price has to go up or the experience has to become cheaper.

Or you just fly overseas to Mexico and enjoy much cheaper labor at Cancun or Cabos. Every time I look at resorts in Hawaii I conclude that I should just go to Mexico instead.