new299

Parent of applicant but not grandparents, at least in my case.

:(

Weirdly this never came up for me (and I'm in a similar situation). I suspect what documents are ask for varies a lot by who is assessing the application.

Hope it all works out!

For the benefit of anyone else doing this in Japan, these are the documents I had to submit. It will be different depending on circumstance, in particular I think the author may also be born outside the UK which may require other/more documents.

Anyway I had to submit:

Certified copy of my birth certificate, order from the UK general register office.

Original (not photocopy) of Japanese family register and translation.

Certificate of acceptance of notification of birth, original and translation.

Original Marriage certificate and translation.

Colour photocopy of every page of my childs Japanese passport.

Copy photocopy of the passport of an American or British citizen who confirms that child is mine.

The process is pretty unclear, and in general you seem to have to just keep submitting documents until they are satisfied.

You mention SD Cards.

The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk.

VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers.

Then there's the MSX standard...

Japanese industry is no doubt somewhat different and may have its issues. But I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint... some external factor is often required to force large companies to cooperate. Those factors may be more common outside Japan, but I don't see that the fundamental issues are very different.

Essentially all medium to high-end ham radio brands are Japanese. Cheap Chinese radios only dominate at the low end, and often have emission issues. I doubt the Japanese manufacturers are interested in competing here...

Chinese radios do not dominate in Japan, I suspect almost nobody in Japan uses a non-domestic radio. Possibly the primary reason being that they generally have not passed the local emission certifications (which is annoyingly required for all ham radios).

I don't see the incompatible microphone thing as an issue unique to Japan. Pretty much every 1980s computer had weird propriety interfaces. I suspect it was competition that forced them to standardize. You can find similar issues more recently (Apple/Lightening port, Dell/IBM laptop chargers, docking stations etc.)

If you want to point to issue with ham radio in Japan, I'd go with the certification issue, which helps lock non-domestic players out of the market...

The number of negative comments here seems odd to me.

If you actually want practical and safe self driving cars widely deployed it seems obvious that instrumenting roads and making them a better platform for self-driving vehicles is an important part of this process.

To me this work seems like a part of the process of evolving roads from a Ad-Hoc and poorly documented system involving a lot of human guess work into a more robust and reliable platform for self-driving and human driven cars.

I wonder to what extent companies consider the reputational damage these kinds of enforcement actions cause. I recently came across this when googling for information on a small Biotech startup:

https://udrp.adr.eu/decisions/detail?id=65fab3e46fc02956a010...

Will probably be the first thing I remember when I hear their name.

Can a future GPS replacement or extension use signed transmissions to help address this?

Anyone have a link to the work he cites?

No pencils use “lead”. It’s just called lead because the original material used looks similar to lead ore.

See manufacturing section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil

llama.cpp is not CPU only…

WWVB also broadcasts on 60KHz and a number of other frequencies. WWV (time signal on different frequency) was started a few years before the one you mention. Though I’m not sure it’s really worth arguing about… not sure who was the first radio time signal.

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

This was a great post, the cooling effect of litigation on posting single frames of a streamed ident (which seems to be clearly fair use). Is kind of sad to see (can’t fault the author for it really).

No, but creating these reagents is a lot of work.

Principally create new flowcells coated with an oligo lawn would be difficult. Not impossible… but a non-trivial project…

I’ve done this:

https://aseq.substack.com/p/bringing-up-an-old-ebay-miseq

Your issues are that you will still need to purchase reagents from the sequencing instrument vendor. They will try and push you toward a service contract.

Each kit will cost ~$600 (cheapest kit) an old Illumina sequencer which you can still buy reagents for will cost at least $5000.

Doing a whole genome this way would be expensive… I’d guess $10K to $20K perhaps? You’d need a lot of kits… or one of the high spec sequencers (NextSeq 550 etc).

Alternatively you could look at getting a nanopore sequencer. This will be cheap but the data quality is different (and may not be comparable/require high coverage for certain applications). I’d guess you could do a (30x) whole genome for <$10K all inc here?

Fascinating, thank you!

I find it interesting that the boundaries are defined by a combination of physical land features and other property boundaries.

I guess this means that there's the error could potentially accumulate when you reference against property boundaries. Then you come up against some physical reference and have to resolve the inconsistency somehow.

I think it depends, this one didn't as IIRC we got last seasons model as it was cheaper.

They also break... ours lasted 2 years and then one of the rivets popped out.

Generally I believe you are allowed to use a different bag, it's just... uncommon.

I bought a pile of LoRa/Meshtastic stuff and tried to research it and figure out if I could easily use something like APRS to log my location and plot it on a map.

Seemed much harder than the process of setting up an APRS iGate and viewing my location on aprs.fi

I'd like to try again sometime though, but feel like I need a good getting started guide to motivate me!

I assume you kind of start with boundaries defined by physical features "between this river and than hill" or similar. Then you get a secondary level defined based on this. So "X meters from the top of this hill".

And I assume now property boundaries are kind of based on a mixture of all of this? But there's a trend toward WGS84 coordinates or similar?

I also assume along the way measurement mistakes have been reasonably common or situations where those "stable" features in the landscape turned out to be not so stable.

Resolving all these issues must be a nightmare and while I've been vaguely aware of this history of surveying it now seems like it must be quite fascinating and I should try and read more about it.

This was wonderful!

Do you have more posts about how you went about buying the land?

The surveying aspect is super interesting, including the fact that your neighbor had such an imprecise knowledge of their boundaries.

I wonder what the history of surveying looks like... I assume as mapping precision increased there must have been many many cases where structures were found to lie on neighboring properties.

The lawsuit implies that inhalers are a special case, where the normal FDA rules don’t apply. By adding new patents covering inhalers the manufacturer triggers FDA rules preventing the FDA from approving a generic, or so the lawsuit implies:

Because of the complexities of producing drug-device combinations like inhalers, the Food and Drug Administration employs a special set of regulatory requirements when approving generic inhalers.

Specifically, when a brand-name manufacturer lists a patent for a product with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the FDA is prohibited from approving the generic version of that product until the patent protection expires or is challenged and overturned.

I didn’t really understand this comment so I dig into it a bit more. Here is my current understanding…

In the US to market a generic you need to show that it’s the same as an existing approved product currently on the market.

To avoid genetics being produced companies withdraw products where patent coverage has expired. They then release a new product which is substantially the same and has no or minor benefits, but is covered by patents.

Because the old product is no longer on the market, the FDA will not approve a generic. Even though the exact same product /was/ on the market.

This seems like a weird interaction between patents and the FDA rules which wouldn’t occur in the same way elsewhere (seems like the FDA rules kind of suck to me at first glance).

There’s more information in the lawsuit here:

https://casefilingsalert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/GSK-...

I have a google account. I know the password. I have access to the recovery email.

I however don't have access to the associated phone number. Google won't let me log in...

Wang Labs seems to be getting a lot of attention these days. I’m guessing it was one of the following too videos highlighting the company that surfaced this? (Both videos are great if you’ve not seen them).

Background on Wang here: https://youtu.be/MgDZQy0nN-Y

And a short series of videos on bringing up a Wang Writer: https://youtu.be/QoEhyQ0SXUE

Theoretically it's not too difficult to build an interface to the linear CCD used in these devices. I put together an interface here:

https://41j.com/blog/2020/01/notes-on-using-a-ilx511-linear-...

And put together gerbers here: https://41j.com/blog/2020/02/ilx511-ccd-interface-r2/

Plan was to eventually design a new board for these spectrometers. But obviously never got round to completing the project (and probably never will).

It's so cool to see this on HN. I think this is one of the B&W Tek units that came from the NuSkin device which was err... of debatable scientific merit. It appeared on Dr Oz at one point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfizniDX3pQ

Loads of these appeared on eBay as well as the complete Nu Skin units with identifying logos removed they used to go for about $15 which was a bargain. I think I picked up 5 or 6. Wrote up my note here:

https://everydaything.substack.com/p/b-and-w-optical-spectro...

Pre-mastered MDs are pressed and the format is physically similar to CDs. I would be interesting to put this disc under an optical microscope, I assume it would look similar to a regular pre-mastered disc but perhaps it's actually a recordable MD (which look very different) or some kind of R&D experiment.

I took a bunch of optical images of MDs and other formats here for reference:

https://everydaything.substack.com/p/a-pre-mastered-minidisc

This can be done non-destructively with an inexpensive epi-illuminated microscope.

Temperature based sex determination was new to me, so I went searching for more information. This book chapter describes the mechanism:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9989/

But left me wondering what the advantage of such mechanisms might be. Elsewhere in the same book they state:

"One advantage is that it probably gives the species the benefits of sexual reproduction without tying the species to a 1:1 sex ratio. In crocodiles, in which temperature extremes produce females while moderate temperatures produce males, the sex ratio may be as great as 10 females to each male (Woodward and Murray 1993). The major disadvantage of temperature-dependent sex determination may be its narrowing of the temperature limits within which a species can exist. This means that thermal pollution (either locally or due to global warming) could conceivably eliminate a species in a given area (Janzen and Paukstis 1991).

Ferguson and Joanen (1982) speculate that dinosaurs may have had temperature-dependent sex determination and that their sudden demise may have been caused by a slight change in temperature that created conditions wherein only males or only females hatched from their eggs."

I don't think much of what it written in that article is up for debate? You can check his wikipedia page for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzo_Abe#Political_positions...

"Abe is affiliated with the openly ultranationalist organization Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference). He is considered a right-wing populist and ultra-conservative within the LDP, and some media and books have referred to him as a far-right politician"

There were also numerous scandals during his tenure, most of which were not widely reported outside Japan... but, an example is:

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

"In March 2018, it was revealed that the finance ministry (with finance minister Tarō Asō at its head) had falsified documents presented to the parliament in relation to the Moritomo Gakuen scandal, to remove 14 passages implicating Abe."