tony_cannistra

Road ecology is a very interesting and important field, particularly the modeling of animal interactions with road crossings - all very interesting and important.

The rhetorical title is absurd, however, and I'd argue even Ben Goldfarb would agree with that.

Habitat loss is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss, as a result of many, many drivers. You've heard of all of them. The presence and proliferation of roads is, of course, one of those drivers.

> generate lifelike bird sounds to enhance the samples of underrepresented species. These can then be used to train audio identification tools used in ecological monitoring

That's a pretty neat idea. "feature generation" but for rare birdsong spectrograms.

in this particular case, most of the important/needle-moving work being done in climate modeling is done with a hell of a lot of context about prior work. PhDs have that, by necessity.

They're also good at prioritizing outcomes, rather than other stuff.

I'm not sure. NVIDIA is also working on it (with, interestingly, some of the original AI2 folks).

Similar to the DeepMind effort, the ACE ML model that AI2+others developed is really just looking for parity with physical models at this stage. It looks like they've almost achieved this, with similar massive improvements in compute time + resource needs.

Similar methodologies are being applied to climate modeling, too.

The Allen Institute has worked on it for a while, and has hired quite a few PhDs (https://allenai.org/climate-modeling).

As with many real-world modeling exercises, it's perhaps a fool's errand to attempt to capture the entire space of possibility, unless the pure notion of capturing the domain is what's interesting.

In reality there are a number of practical constraints that place limits on the search space for these kinds of models, including ones that are likely genuinely decoupled from CO2 concentrations (think of things like mutation rates).

That's actually only partially true; there's quite a bit of work that attempts to capture this idea, particularly in taxa that have relatively well-understood adaptive dynamics. Here's a good general example: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201...

You are correct that much of these dynamics aren't captured in long-time-scale climate models, though. But it's being modeled quite frequently in different contexts, especially ecological ones.

Good article. One of the chapters of my dissertation focused on a small portion of this – I used remotely-sensed measurements of ocean surface temperature to drive mechanistic models of phytoplankton physiology to get a bit more detail on the effect that marine "heatwaves" have on their growth rates. I was able to validate this approach using another remotely-sensed dataset of ocean chlorophyll, which we'd expect to be linked to phytoplankton growth rates.

Besides being some interesting science, it was also an amazing testament to open data and high-quality scientific publishing. I was able to pull all of the ocean data from government sources for free, and leverage physiological model parameters published in open-access journals. And I was able to run the whole thing using Python/Dask on a VM in Google Cloud.

> it is human nature to chase fortune where you can

alright, it's Friday - I'll bite.

Really? Human nature to chase fortune?

Well, I can't read this because of the academic publishing hegemony. But it reminds me of something interesting I learned recently which is probably related – the concept of saltwater intrusion into aquifers as a result of groundwater pumping in coastal areas.

The density of saline water relative to fresh water makes this a somewhat interesting phenomenon (though of course not for the people who depend on fresh water in their aquifer).

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

seems like you're suggesting that recycling lead has some kind of impact on battery longevity? Can you provide more detail there?

I feared this was related to the RAV4 Prime (the PHEV version), but thankfully this appears to be a (highly consequential, but–) fairly run-of-the-mill ICE vehicle recall.

Has to hurt, though.

Not OP, but almost anything where "a map" is the output will be a hugely big learning opportunity for you. Static maps, print-quality maps, interactive web maps -- the experience of building any of those will bring lots of learning. (That's how I got started.)

This is a cool idea.

It reminds me of an idea I had on a road trip once – a Google Maps-like driving directions app that would occasionally announce interesting facts about the places you're driving through. Things like pieces of natural or cultural history, or geology, etc. Would help to get to know the places one is passing through.

I think someone made something similar, so I kinda gave up on it.

Great projects, amazing work.

I'm mostly here though to say thanks for the reminder about `.horse`, which I haven't seen since my friends and I would go on domain-buying blitzes and host static pages with repeating backgrounds of random images on them, in college.

made an app to get avalanche forecasts in your e-mail when they update. it's half-baked in that it scales horribly and slams a free API, which I feel bad about. But it works?

http://avy.email

Certainly there are plenty of folks under the age of 62 to whom this applies, and might save them the money.

Interesting! I work on a very similar product.

I don't know Julia well, but I definitely would suggest exploring whether PostGIS can help improve the speed of your DB queries.

I'd also consider how you deliver your geospatial data to your clients -- I'm not sure GeoJSON is your best bet. Protobuf tiles might be better for your use-case (e.g. the Mapbox Vector Tiles spec).

Some friends I know who work in earthquakes maintain that this article caused a measurable increase in the amount of funding available for earthquake research.

A particularly crazy thing I learned from some friends who I know who work in this field is that they use underwater hydraulic chainsaws (!) to sample some of these trees.

https://www.stanleyinfrastructure.com/products/underwater-ch...

The field work in general seems very wet for this kind of research. (my partner did lots of it for her graduate work)

my partner has taken to using Daniel Coe's methods [0] to make her own maps like these, we have a few on the wall in our house! They are very cool.

[0]: https://dancoecarto.com/tutorials

I'm still on my iPhone 11 too.

I only recently started getting annoyed at how sluggish apps have felt compared to using my friends' newer phones.

Regarding Github, you're right -- that is what I was trying to say. There's nothing wrong with linking work you've done - much to the contrary.

But I think a Github portfolio from a relatively inexperienced developer says "I'm an inexperienced developer" first, and requires a recruiter or whoever to actually click into repositories.

Linking directly to work you're proud of avoids that.

This is good advice.

Good luck, you can do it. One piece of advice I'd offer that I read somewhere recently and liked is: at your stage, I would avoid "linking to your GitHub."

Instead, if you want to show your coding prowess, pick one or two repositories and link to those on your resume.

However, you'll want to be careful with this, especially never having written code professionally before.

I certainly didn't know what "professional" code _really_ looked like until I started getting reviews from folks much my senior and learned from them.

Maybe you're referring to the personal backup product. Until now B2 prices haven't increased since launch, in 2015.

The FAQ on OP's page says this is the first price increase they've ever had.

It looks like they've included slog in their performance benchmarks, which show zap as considerably more performant (though I don't really understand the benchmark).

Christian's "Ravine Palace" album from a few years ago is an awesome piece of work. Jerry plays on it, alongside some other modern greats like Andrew Marlin and Eli West.

I hope you go see more bluegrass music. You can get this experience just about as often as you like nowadays - lots of great bands have amazing improvisational skills, and they use them!