Detecting large venusquakes from autonomous "air"ships
258 karma · joined July 10, 2017
But aside from that, there are lots of thoughts about art, artistic development, traits of painters, self-doubt, etc in this book (Highsmith was a painter herself). Hence I might consider a re-read, because I didn't get everything.
As a non-fiction book I am currently reading 'The Man from the Future' by science-writer Ananyo Bhattacharya. The book is a biography of Hungarian-American mathematical genius John von Neumann. It has a long chapter on how JvN developed quantum mechanics, together with other researchers, of course. Bhattacharya goes to great lengths to explain the maths and the thinking behind QM in nonmathematical terms (without equations) but still very competently.
(200 trillion cost) / (200 million structures predicted) = 1 million per structure.
That reflects the personnel cost (5 Yr PHP scholarship, PostDoc/Prof mentorship; inverstment+depreciation for the lab equipment). All this to crystallize 1 structure and characterize its folding behavior.
I don't know if this calculation is too simplistic, just coming up with something.
The substances were newly discovered, and in the 1970s/80 nobody on Earth has ever used that human growth hormone on children or young adults. So, I guess the medical staff simply, systematically, tried a whole range of concentrations on their athletes. Those who then performed best in training were promoted to the Olympic team. Those who received too little were removed from the national team.
And those who received too high concentrations? They had their adolescent bodies messed up, but were simply neglected afterwards. A very cynical program indeed.
Witty language, and just the right amount of complexity.
Although the number of pages is high, these books were produced with incredible attention to detail.
Now the political agenda is (and has been for more than 20 years) to promote renewables. For baseline demand (that renewables cannot reliably provide) Germany is betting on Biogas and better storage mechanisms.
The current administration is left-leaning. The Green Party was founded in the 1980s by environmentalists which made it their mission to get rid of nuclear.
I'd say that the public knows that these types of energy supply have problemens too. And the debate is ongoing.
German multinationals (in the energy sector such as Siemens, Wintershall) have removed it from their strategies because Nuclear technologies inefficient and bear a lot of risks. New reactor types don't work as promised.
Government does not want Nuclear Energy because it needs enormous amounts of subsidies, and still there are regular cost overruns just as enormous. And Consortias still demand price guarantees. Worldwide the number of operational reactors is decreasing anyway. Nuclear reactors need a lot of protection (physical security) . Instead a decentralised infrastructure is envisioned.
The German general public does not want nuclear waste, and not even nuclear transports across the country. It's a form of NIMBYism, but the point is valid.
The German anti-nuclear movement is very old, covers 2-3 generations.
Germany is densely populated and the prospect of entire countries becoming inhabitable after a single disaster of a nuclear power plant is feared and despised by many people.
There exists an interesting XKCD comic "Surface Area", about a giant patchwork quilt, comprised of all solid surfaces in the Solar System. To visualize that the combined surface area of all solid bodies (in the Solar System) is surprisingly small.
Earth and Venus had a major share on that quilt, and the combined surface areas of all other planets, dwarf planets, big moons and small moons were surprisingly small.
To make this easier to understand, substitute "Dune book" with "Gutenberg Bible" or, even better, "historic, ultrarare, pre-medieval parchment of a Bible translation".
The new owners of that Bible probably do not think (and do not intend to promote the idea) that they now own the property rights for "the" Bible, or for all Bibles, or for any Bible - except for that particular instance of the Bible.
Rather they now own that parchment, with all its decorated pages, handwriting, scripts, gemstones, peculiar translations, and compilation of Gospels and Letters.
These content, drawings and illustrations inside that Bible are really unique, unless the monks decided to draw everything ( or even more often.)
This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world, for the greater good.
It is difficult to overcome loneliness because the entire society is affected by several megatrends which enhance loneliness, perhaps even leading to positive feedback.
In no particular order:
On economical level, neoliberalism and privatization encourages loneliness.
On community (City) level, urban planning is designed to make inner cities more inhabitable, at least the common spaces (again by privatization, surveillance, optimizng cities for traffic flows, the need to have a car, increasingly long commutes requiring people to spend more time alone). Urban Living spaces are unaffordable requiring people to work more. Rural areas are also affected. This has lots of consequences for loneliness.
On workplace level, remote work, outsourcing; more and more jobs hat require constant screen-staring; modern management methods and the digital whip, union busting and many other innovations increase loneliness.
On individual level, stress, e.g. from constant pressure at work, and too high performance levels expected, increase sickness and then loneliness. Aging societies and decades of accumulations of unhealthy lifestyles do their part.
Long-Covid is a mass-disabling event leading to more loneliness.
You get the idea. I could go on. And I don't have a recipe to "overcome loneliness".
It's like overcoming wetness. It is impossible - when everyone is swimming in a sea of loneliness.
A work from the early 20th century, mathematics, logic.
I think some expert called Bertrand Russell's and A.N. Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica" initiative a "bizarre" piece of work, when seen from the perspective of a programming language designer.
I can't make a qualified statement about this, as I am neither a mathematician nor a language designer. And I cannot find the exact quote on the internet, sorry. Just saying.
In code? See for yourself :
https://www.principiarewrite.com/ or https://github.com/LogicalAtomist/principia/blob/master/PL.v
For starters, TYPOscript has very odd semantics for terms like "Object", "datatype", "register", and so on. You can have lines of code like "page = ", or "page < ".
Typoscipt was designed in the late 1990s, then by an autodidact or very young CS student(s). I don't know exactly, and I don't want to blame anyone. (nothing personal).
However, as a consequence, as a TYPO3 user I have countless files in my work-related directories that have a ".ts" filename extension - now used by TypeScript a well designed language for which rich toolsets exist.
So when I open a TYPOscript .ts file, practically every word on every line has these red squiggly lines from the linter ... very scary.
TYPOscript has its strengths, though.
It's just a paper, but still I'd recommend it, because it was highly influential. It was indeed so influential that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Really_Teach...
In the paper he argues that
- the computer industy has been progressing with exponential growth 1948-1988,
- will continue to do so for decades (he was right in that)
- this rate of progress is unprecedented, and the human brain is unfit to deal with such growth, thus
- the only way to deal with such enormous mount of power is: Mathematics, because proofs are rigorous. (I'm simplifying a bit here.)
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/escape-to-berli...
Nice! Next time when I encounter an "Enter license key:" dialog, I'll simply try some simple registration codes first.
I'll start with clever variations of the value "1", e.g. 00001, 00010, 00100 ...
A lot of densely-written stuff to read through before coming to the heart of the matter.
Perhaps he was thinking about doing something like this himself.
Well, maybe Perl 5's backwards-compatibility can be marketed, (or will emerge anyway, without any marketing), as a key advantage.
"These 20 year old Perl 5 scripts still run without any modifications on the new machine. Amazing!..."
There are not many languages that have this property of long-term stability. One of them is R , see recent Blogpost "Ode to R stability" by Dirk Eddelbüttel, one of the R authorities (and Debian Maintainer)
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/03/20/#ode_to_r_stabi...
Same question: Are in-between branch comparisons possible in dolt? Which "diff" subcommands to you plan to support in the future?