Update: we'd burn and call the inspectors for foul brood, not varroa. Foul brood is a nasty, fatal and highly contagious bacterial infection.
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That said, varroa absolutely could overwhelm a colony. Then you had to report it, burn the infected colonies and wait for the inspectors. Not fun.
1. In late fall we'd make sure each colony had enough honey to fuel them through to spring (a quick lift would tell you). If short, we'd put sugar saturated water in a tray on top of the colony. The bees would move the sugar into the colony and a couple days later we'd take out the bone dry trays. Failing to ensure enough fuel meant certain death for the colony, though for some in the trade the math was that it was cheaper to buy nukes (a colony nucleus of a queen and some workers) in the spring. Our math was that We liked to have strong colonies in the spring to sell nukes.
2. A bee colony is basically a rectangular box sitting on a frame. We had rectangular insulation that stored flat but easily expanded to slide over each colony before the first snow. The colonies would get buried in snow, which was excellent extra insulation.
3. The bees themselves did the work to survive the winter. They'd huddle in a ball, burning honey to generate heat (a bee could heat itself to something like 40 degrees C), fanning their wings to spread the heat. The bees in the centre of the ball would move out to the periphery while those on the periphery would move into the center.
A cold snap that lasted too long was a disaster as the bees would tighten the ball for greater warmth and then run out of honey within the ball. Those colonies would die. In the spring you'd find the tightly clustered ball of bees, dead, surrounded by honey not that far outside the ball.
You needed at least one brief warming period in a cold snap in which the ball of bees would expand, find a new patch on unconsumed honey in the hive and then recontract around the honey.
If we did our work properly in the fall, we'd have 90% or more of our colonies make it to spring, most strong so we could make nukes to replace our losses and sell on the extras.
It's been over ten years since I spent any serious time with bees, but the bees themselves did a great job on the varroa mites. Sentinel bees at the hive entrance would pick the mites off the incoming bees. The problem was if the colony had a solid floor the mites would just climb back onto the next bee that passed nearby. If the solid colony floor was replaced with a mesh, the mites would fall through to the ground below while the bees could still go about their business.
We would still sometimes treat for varroa, but making it easier for the bees to handle varroa how they had evolved to was the first line of defence.
This was Canada, regular Italian bees, hard winter kills of whatever wasn't properly winterized.
" What changed was that the cost of preliminary exploration collapsed. I could sketch an argument, identify the first serious objections, test whether they were fatal, and reach a provisional verdict in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. [...] Dropping a question after an afternoon’s work feels nothing like dropping one after three weeks. When the exploration costs are low, the sunk cost attachment disappears, and you find yourself dropping bad questions earlier and more often, which means the questions you keep are better. I explored far more ideas, and my working portfolio became both larger and better curated. [...] The skill that improved most, and the one I would never have thought to look for, was something I can only describe as question-identification – the ability to find problems that are both tractable and important. This is the thing an academic career is substantially built on and which nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to teach directly. [...] nobody told me that working with LLMs would reorganise my research practice around finding good questions rather than producing answers to the ones I already had. There is a further wrinkle here that I find harder to set aside, which is that the language I have for describing what these tools have done to my thinking is itself partly a product of working with them. "
Mark-to-market accounting systems are one way to deal with this quirk, but they create their own issues.
No gain would have shown for the gold that was simply moved, even though in this case the buying and selling was simply a more efficient way of doing the equivalent of moving the gold.
Gold that was simply moved wouldn't show the same gain.
" Jensen drove the point home by discussing how these innovations have made him the “Chief revenue destroyer”. He further illustrated this by highlighting that Blackwell had an up to 68x performance gain over Hopper, resulting in an 87% decline in costs. Rubin is slated to drive even more performance gains – 900x that of Hopper, for a 99.97% reduction in cost.
Clearly, Nvidia is pursuing a relentless pace of improvement – as Jensen puts it: “When Blackwells start shipping in volume, you couldn’t even give Hoppers away” "
Closed loop and insulated pipe allows a geothermal project to be drilled into hot rock, which is pretty much everywhere, even if there is no water.
They have a demonstration project in Alberta, a 'commercial' project in Geretsried, Germany (4500 meters, 64MW thermal, 8.2MW electric) and a deep demonstration project in New Mexico (5500 meters, no news since early 2023).
From the company website, it looks like the projects work though Eavor doesn't give any data on their projects that would help calculate the economics. The heavy presence of government in their media suggests that, at least for now, significant government involvement is required to get projects built.
This means they know what their real users would like to consume but can't, because that content isn't being created.
Why wait and hope that content your real users want to consume gets created? Have AI create that content. Now you have more product for your advertisers to pay for, plus it is the juicy, premium rate stuff you know they'd want to buy.
With all your data, it practically automates itself.
I'm not saying all this is good, just that it totally makes sense if you are in the business of making money and see yourself as doing that by giving both your users and your advertisers what they want.
https://assets.iflscience.com/assets/articleNo/76971/aImg/80...
“My dad's a genius,” said Eap. “It had the highest level of encryption available.”
Not only did Sky ECC provide end-to-end encryption, like Whatsapp or Signal, but unlike those free apps, it also redirected the data on its own secure network. "
This was the basis for users to think the system was secure? Seriously!?!
I'm reminded of the saying 'don't roll your own crypto'. Obviously the authorities were able to crack the crypto, probably at multiple points.
Kerosene, refined from crude oil, was at least as good as whale oil for lamps. It was also cheaper, so that was the end of the whaling industry. There were pathetic advertisements from the whale oil people of that time arguing for 'pure' whale oil over 'impure' substitutes. However kerosene was so obviously a better deal consumers switched with lightning speed anyway.
As an aside, gasoline was a waste product of the crude oil refining process that produced kerosene. That meant very cheap fuel for the internal combustion engine which was starting its climb up the technology s-curve at the same time.
There is an excellent overview on the Marginal Revolution blog:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/10/ac...
Alex Tabarrok writes:
" I think of Daron Acemoglu (GS) as the Wilt Chamberlin of economics, an absolute monster of productivity who racks up the papers and the citations at nearly unprecedented rates. According to Google Scholar he has 247,440 citations and an H-index of 175, which means 175 papers each with more than 175 citations. Pause on that for a moment. Daron got his PhD in 1992 so that’s over 5 papers per year which would be tremendous by itself–but we are talking 5 path-breaking, highly-cited papers per year plus many others! (Of course, most written with excellent co-authors). In addition, he’s the author of a massive textbook on economic growth. More than any other economist Daron has pushed the cutting-edge of technical economics and has also written books of deep scholarship still accessible to the public. In his overview of Daron’s work for the John Bates Clark medal Robert Shimer wrote “he can write faster than I can digest his research.” I believe that is true for the profession as a whole. We are all catching-up to Daron Acemoglu. "
These black holes have some bizarre properties. In particular, the so-called surface gravity at the boundary, or event horizon, of such a black hole is zero. "
It had been thought impossible for such black holes to exist. However, new work now demonstrates that such black holes are indeed possible.
None have been found, however. Though this seems unsurprising. How would you detect one?
The world record balloon was launched on September 21, 2016, stayed up over 767 days, circled the world 35 times and traveled over 1.5 million kilometers.
Their website, still from 2018, indicates they are working on even better designs.
However, as they learned from experience, Loon was slowly increasing their upper limit on how long their balloons could stay up.
" In 2022, he published a complete genome of Spanish flu from a lung taken from a 17-year-old girl who died of pneumonia in 1918. From this genome, he learned that our seasonal H1N1 influenza virus is likely a direct descendant of that pandemic-causing pathogen. "
The same scientist found measles from 1912, that it was substantially the same as measles 2024, that a measles 2024 vaccine worked against measles 2012 and that measles likely originated ~2500 years ago, at the same time as a surge in the development of urban areas of sufficient size to support the sustained spread of measles.
" Our data indicate that the Chicxulub impactor was a carbonaceous-type asteroid, which had formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter. The five other impact structures have isotopic signatures that are more consistent with siliceous-type asteroids, which formed closer to the Sun. The ancient spherule layer samples are consistent with impacts of carbonaceous-type asteroids during Earth’s final stages of accretion. "
The link to the paper itself: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4868
Good managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity.
"
Males and females need to pair or there will be no new sparrows. However opposite variants also need to pair or for behaviour reasons there will be no successful young.
For instance, wM-wF spend so much energy fighting with each other they fail to raise young.
The y variants are less aggressive but better with young and are the most popular mate choices. The y-variants are also monogomous while the w-variants are not.
The aggressive w-variants grab all the y-variants as partners. The result is that y-y pairs are rarely (never?) seen, even though they could produce young.
The article notes that yellow throats have different food strategies from white throats. This will also tend to reinforce alternate gender pairing.
An MF pair is going to bring in less food if both are going after the same sources (they might start fighting!) while if each has a different strategy the young are less vulnerable to food shortages should one strategy or another not produce at any given time.
The four gender outcome seems to be in a sustainable equilibrium. If one is favoured, say wM-yF, then these sparrows would become like most other birds, with males having one colour pattern and females another.
Instead, behaviours have somehow distributed themselves across genders so a successful couple needs to match both if they are to raise the next generation of young.