It was centered half a mile from Berkeley Lab at 2:56am, on the Hayward Fault. Knocked out the elevators in my building and one other building, but other than that no obvious issues. We've been told to be on alert for anything that looks off. Hard to predict how this affects some of the Lab equipment.
FWIW, I've been expecting something like this. The Pacific Rim ("ring of fire" or whatever you want to call it) has been overly active, and that second 7+ magnitude earthquake in Kamchatka was definitely not a coincidence. That said, earthquakes are not my area, but it is a topic we talk about in terms of catastrophic failure of storage systems as "Hayward Fault Tolerance" where we have tertiary backups in a region outside of the earthquake zone.
For what it's worth, there was an earlier "Cyber Cafe" just off the campus of Michigan State University in the early to mid-90s called Emerald City Cafe. They had 128k ISDN connections to MichNet/Merit by 1994 (when I started going there), and by late 1995 had 3MBit TCI Cable Modem connections.
It wasn't a nightclub-style cafe like the one in the article, but it was really cozy, open until 11:30pm weeknights (1am weekends), and had excellent coffee. Plus the next room over was an arcade / laundry. It's a bummer I can't find an article about it. Just good memories.
Do they have any 2003 Explorer Sport Tracs down there? Because they have the only 1L2Z-3551729-AAPTM parts remaining in existence that haven't been destroyed by sun damage. It would save me a lot of time on this project: https://sporttrac.org/threads/gen-1-roof-trim-reproduction.1...
I love XSL. There are some problems that it is absolutely stellar at solving. NCBI recently changed their JATS schema. No need to change any code, just modify the stylesheet and everything hums along as if nothing changed.
Nevada, seriously. This is an 'electronic craps table' where the House controls _literally_ all aspects of the game, and the players are being prosecuted for 'playing wrong.'
Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up with tooth decay if I stayed down there for more than a few years. Sure enough, five years later I moved back to Michigan and ended up with a cavity in an unusual place. My (new) dentist in Michigan was completely unsurprised.
He said there are two problems with tooth decay in Mississippi:
1. They don't use fluoride in their water.
2. No decent dentist would ever work in Mississippi.
Fifteen years later, with no changes in dental hygiene in my entire life, and I've had no other problems with my teeth. Anecdotal evidence, maybe. But that is my experience.
This is exactly the conversation the wealthy want us to have. A buddy of mine left a job recently. He worked in IT security for a plastics company that you would all recognize. In his last month, he had a meeting with one of the VP's, who said (direct quote from the meeting):
"Biden really ruined the yachting industry."
OK. What does that person do? Does he work in IT? No. Does he work in production? No.
He collects seven figures a year for presenting a particular persona for a successful company.
Think on that before you start comparing middle/lower class occupations. I'm not saying its wrong, I'm just trying to provide another magnitude of contrast to the issue.
Every encounter with AT&T has felt like a scam to me. I tried a mobile hotspot two years ago on a 14 day free trial. One bar of signal, so I returned it the same day I received it. It took them 14 days to "process" the return, and I ended up with a $285 bill (activation fee, two months service). Last year, I was trying to find a carrier that would work with my Sierra Wireless WLAN card, and ended up repeating the same horrible experience - this round cost me $180. Next, I tried Cricket Wireless, which uses the AT&T network. No activation fee, $35/month, works flawlessly. Its not the network, its the company.
I've never seen the Wright brothers beaten up like this. One brother died trying to improve their invention, and the other died in extreme poverty in a small apartment after suffering from a car accident for years. He had received tons of awards from the industry, but those were meaningless to him. He was more interested in documenting the history of his brother's contributions. The general vibe of this thread is incredible to me.
I've had really good experiences with Better World Books. However, I do wonder how they source some of their stock. I've bought several books from them that have historical value and never should have left the Smithsonian.
That won't fix the problem. The NHC uses an ocean model, but the transition across Florida requires the application of a hybrid land/water model, which results in a large divergence when the results of the different models are combined. Fortunately, someone from Mississippi State University developed such a model in 2004. It successfully predicted the exact path of Hurricane Katrina over a week in advance of landfall. That weather model is used for XM Sattelite Weather and the Gulf Coast Hurricane Index, but the NHC still hasn't adopted it after 15 years.
Two great examples are the goo.gl URL shortener and the custom site search widget. These two services actively break parts of the internet when they stop working.
I have a library of old (1870's-1930's) books on bacterial and fungal taxonomy, and I'm cautious not to breathe too deeply when I handle some of them. Many of these may have been used in non-sterile microbiology labs, likely including my copy of A Manual of Tropical Diseases (signed by Catellani himself). Bacterial spores (e.g., Bacillus, can survive in dehydrated states indefinitely). Some of the notes in margins, covers, bookplates and stamps show snapshots of where these have been.
One step further (multi-layer Manhattan distance) will also get you optimal DNA, RNA and protein sequence alignment (Myers, Gotoh and others, 1977-1981). The edit path (often discarded) can be repurposed for simulating RNA and protein folding, as well as calculating DNA melting points (used for DNA-DNA hybridization studies).
It has been a part of every budget proposal since 2017. It was only removed from the FY2020 list this past March as part of a deal to get the budget passed:
I find the post-mortems helpful. I don't want to make the same mistakes with my infrastructure, and it gives me something to reference when, for instance, the upper management decides they want to migrate to one of these services.
Surveys, yes, but also corroborated by interagency reports, many of which are behind schedule do to a prolonged federal shutdown in December 2018 and January 2019. Some offices have been behind schedule on reporting since returning to work in February.
I was going to cite the USDA as my primary example. I have been hearing a lot of this from ARS, FSA and NRRL, and although their specific problems are different there is a definitely a common theme. The USDA NRRL type culture collection is currently slated to be autoclaved and shut down, which would destroy the only known publically available reference samples of many industrially and medically important microorganisms, including many that are critical to food safety testing and the original source of antibiotic compounds (the original source of pennicillin is in that collection).
The top level of US federal agencies has been a skeleton crew since 2017. Much of the reported data was supposed to have been provided by agencies which have been hamstrung due to a lack of leadership in appointed positions. Whether intentionally or not, many of those appointed positions are those that carry the responsibility of ensuring that the congressional mandates of the agency are carried out. Without appointed officials in those positions, that duty falls to "acting" personnel who essentially end up working two full-time jobs. In some agencies this problem is magnified because acting personnel are not authorized to hire administrative support staff. Imagine a company like Facebook eliminating their entire upper management and allowing randomly selected employees to fill in for those positions, whether they are qualified or not.