z2h-a6n

Do you have any references to support this? What you and the person you responded to said both seem reasonable to some extent, but without evidence It's not clear to what extent they are true.

Relatedly, does "stress" have the same meaning in what you say and others are saying? It seems reasonable (though I have no evidence or related expertise) that the optimal level of stress is non-zero (for some definition of stress, to the extent that it can be quantified). Why wouldn't the optimal level of stress promote more pro-social, creative, cooprerative, etc. behaviour than sub-optimal stress levels?

Ok, I tried it (for as long as my limited free time and interest in CUDA allows). The closest I came to a getting started guide is this [0], which by my (perhaps naive count) is 25561 lines of documentation, and I would probably need to learn more C++ to understand it in detail.

I'm sure CUDA is great, and if I had more free time and/or better reasons to improve the performance of my code it would probably be great for me. My point was mainly that a few lines of code which may be trivial for one person to write may not be for someone else with different experience. Depending on what the code is being used for even a vast increase in performance may not be worth the extra time it takes to implement it.

[0] https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index....

As other commenters have noted, large universities are quite heterogeneous and their administrations are fairly decoupled from their research activity, except in a big-picture sense. The timing is basically irrelevant because you might as well regard Stanford Data Science and the Stanford University Administration as separate entities for all directly-research-related purposes.

I'm a researcher at a large university (admittedly a grad student, and therefore more insulated from university administrivia than a professor), and I don't even know who my university's president is.

Sure, but if you've never used CUDA or any other GPU framework, how many lines of documentation do you need to read, and how many lines of code are you likely to write and rewrite and delete before you end up with those <100 lines of working code?

> like throwing a guide line over a tree

You mean like this [0], or indeed three of the other four images in the the article I link?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_thrower#/media/File:US_Na...

It could largely be sampling bias.

The people who care about speed talk about going faster, while the people who don't care about speed don't talk about it, rather than talking about not caring about it.

(Edit: typo)

Ahh. In that case, this [1] is my (browser-specific) solution. The results are not always great, but they're generally not bad.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628457

If you mean that KiCad needs dark mode, this can be done using a combination of GTK (or QT?) color themes, which are associated with your system configuration, not KiCad, and color themes for the editing tools, which can be changed in the preferences menu. I found some reasonable options here [1], but if you're picky (like I am), you can write (or generate) your own. In the current version of KiCad, you can choose between themes (files in the appropriate directory) with a drop-down menu in the KiCad preferences, rather than editing the default configuration.

[1]: https://github.com/pointhi/kicad-color-schemes

In addition to the other recommendations in the thread, it may be useful to learn how the whole process works (KiCad, ordering or making PCBs, and assembling everything) with an even simpler circuit with just a few components. Making a simple battery + LED + resistor + switch circuit would involve learning almost the same amount about KiCad etc. as a more complicated circuit (within reason), with a lot less opportunity to be overwhelmed by component selection, PCB layout, etc. It would also be fairly cheap to make mistakes, since the PCB could be quite small and would probably cost only a few dollars even from a fairly high-end PCB manufacturer (I like OSH Park, but they can be expensive for large boards; see pcbshopper.com for price comparison).

> Yeah, I wish my phone was like 3x thicker and just had a row of buttons on the side apps can use. Then just bind them to few common camera features rather than fidding with fucking touchscreen.

Surely this part is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Digital cameras still exist.

It looks like power plants are also a significant source of nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere, though I don't know what the major/top sources are. From the US EPA [1]:

  NO2 primarily gets in the air from the burning of fuel. NO2 forms from emissions from cars, trucks and buses, power plants, and off-road equipment.

As I say, I'm no expert, bu my understanding is that NOx compounds can be formed whenever nitrogen and oxygen are mixed at sufficiently high temperatures, e.g. when burning stuff in air.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/no2-pollution/basic-information-about-no...

I am by no means an expert, but as far as I understand NO2 pollution is mainly generated by internal compustion engines (especially diesel?), so I don't understand why there would be a causal link to A/C use. I can imagine various reasons for there to be a correlation without direct causation, in particular because the atmospheric chemistry of NOx [1], though to be honest I don't really see the correlation you mention just from the visualizations.

The data are (or will be) available in the sources mentioned here [2], if anyone wants to analyze them (I think, I haven't actually tried to access them). I don't know where you would get geospatial data on A/C use to compare with though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx [2] https://tempo.si.edu/data.html

Literally zooming out to see India and China wouldn't work, as TEMPO is on the Intelsat 40e geostationary satellite and the field of view doesn't include India or China. [1]

That said, TEMPO is part of the same polution monitoring project as GEMS [2], which was launched a few years ago and covers China.

And of course, TEMPO/GEMS/Sentinel-4 is not the only satellite-based pollution monitoring project. If you actually want to look at global pollution data from satellite-based instruments, NASA's EOSDIS Worldview site is a pretty interesting place to start, e.g. this may be of interest: [3]

[1] <https://www.orbtrack.org/#/?satName=INTELSAT%2040E%20(IS-40E...> [2] <http://gems1.yonsei.ac.kr/main.php> [3] <https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-131.9352415053293,-...>

And more to the point, what fraction of centralized businesses in the past 10,000 (or even 1,000, or even 100) years did not eventually fail?

While I'm all for drinking local beer, is there any available data on whether it's actually more environmentally friendly than beer made by larger producers? I can imagine some aspects of the brewing process that would tip the scales either way, e.g. economies of scale favoring large producers, potentially-shorter supply chains favoring small producers.

If you like clever-sounding quotes in place of information, the obvious counter is: "Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence." -- Aurthur C. Clark

> Why do articles emit such obviously pertinent information? sigh It’s all just narrative.

That's because this is a press release (i.e. advertisement) from the associated university's communications department, not a news article or a scientific publication.

> I wasn’t calculating the annual possibility.

When I wrote: > For N = 100, this is 63%, ... I was responding to your comment: > It means that in out of a hundred trips, it’s pretty certain one will involve an accident.

Whether or not 63% == 'pretty certain' is another matter I suppose.

Note: marcinzim was referring to the probability of "getting into an accident". It's not clear what the law firm you link is referring to since their source doesn't cite their sources properly, but it looks like they might have been referring to the probability of being injured in a car accident. Even so, I'm not sure where they get their numbers or exactly what the numbers are supposed to refer to. See the sibling comments for some references to statistics that are very different from those that the law firm seems to have gotten from an insurance company.

> Are you sure? If I drive once a day, to and from a single place, that suggests I’m involved in (365*2/100)= 7 car accidents a year. That seems high, no?

That's partially because MonkeyClub didn't do the math correctly. If the accident rate is really 1% of trips (which seems doubtful), there is a 99% chance of an accident free trip, a (99%)^N chance of N accident free trips, and a 1 - (99%)^N chance of one or more accidents occurring in N trips. For N = 100, this is 63%, and for N = 365*2 this is 99.9%.

As you mention, the data from the NHTSA seem to indicate a much lower accident/injury rate. Based on this data from the NHTSA [0], and going back to 2018 to avoid any pandemic-related effects on the statistics, it looks like there was on average only 1 (police-reported) crash per 481 thousand vehicle-miles, or one crash involving an injury or fatality per 1.7 million vehicle-miles.

[0] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf, other formats and more data available here: https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm

To provide some rough intuition, I might point out that in order for a material to become superconducting, there must be some interaction in the material that allows the electrons to form Cooper pairs, and these interactions are more likely to occur in crystalline systems. In typical BCS superconductors for example, the electrons interact with atomic lattice vibrations (called phonons) to form these pairs. The work being discussed indicates that the relevant interactions are (magnetic) superexchange interactions between electrons are relevant in the cuprates (although I'd say more work is necessary to be sure). In both cases, the structure of the crystal lattice is important for determining how these interactions take place. That said, I'm aware of some amorphous (i.e. non-crystalline) superconductors, although I'm by no means an expert in these.

Another point to consider is that most chemically homogeneous solids are in principle crystalline, although in practice a chunk of matieral may be made of very many tiny crystals stuck together in random orientations.

As for whether nanoscale structure could have a significant effect, that question forms a pretty major part of my current research. The stuff I'm actively working on isn't ready to publish yet, but to repeat the example I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, my colleagues were able to increase the superconducting transition temperature of strontium titanate by almost a factor of 2 by plastic deformation (i.e. squeezing it until we start messing up the structure) [0][1] (full disclosure: I'm one of the authors of this paper). We think this basically occurs by modifying the nanoscale structure in a way that introduces mechanical strain in the crystal, and this strain in turn influences the electronic interactions in such a way as to locally increase the superconducting transition temperature. In a general sense, this is somewhat similar to the fact that in many cases, applying high pressure to many superconductors will increase their transition temperature.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-021-01102-3 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.00514 (same paper as above, but in a non-peer-reviewed and paywall-free version)

> It may be that you simply need to construct the right geometry between nodes to get superconductivity.

I would say that the key thing is to construct the right interactions between electrons. That said, the geometry (or structure, as we would generally say in condensed matter physics) is one of the key parts of what determines the interactions in a material, so this is certainly one approach. In practice, it is difficult to tune the structure of most materials except by applying pressure, or by changing to a different (possibly related) material, so finely tuning the interactions by influincing the structure can be difficult (twisted bilayer graphene being a notable exception).

> Regardless of the underlying quantum mechanics, there's a large opening for experimental physics here. Are there edge effects, what about grain boundaries, etc.

I agree! Topological insulators and their surface states (which are in some sense "edge effects") is a pretty hot topic right now. Related to superconductivity, the research group I'm working in has been playing with introducing disorder to unconventional superconductors by plastically deforming them (i.e. squeezing them until we start to mess up the structure). Surprisingly, this has actually increased the superconducting transition temperature in some cases [0][1] (full disclosure: I'm one of the authors of this paper). As far as we can tell this "strain engineering" of the electronic properties of superconductors is basically a new subfield, so there's still a lot to learn. One of the difficulties is that in unconventional superconductors (which includes the high-Tc superconductors), theorists tend to prefer to work on idealized models of materials, since the calculations are difficult enough without introducing disorder, defects, etc. in addition.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-021-01102-3 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.00514 (same paper as above, but in a non-peer-reviewed and paywall-free version)

The people quoted in the article are all fairly well known in the field, and while I obviously can't speak for them (especially because each of them alone has much more experience in the field than I do) I expect that they generally have realistic rather than what I might call sensationalistic views of this result. I expect this is also true of the authors of the work in question, though of course they may be even more excited about the result (with good reason). To be clear, this is an interesting result, and is certainly food for thought, but I think it's too soon to tell how much of the "cuprate problem" it solves.

I my guess that the sensationalism in the article is just a combination of overexcitement and misinterpretation by the journalist. I think most people in the field would agree that this result is interesting, and could end up being quite important. If the journalist heard something like this from everyone he asked, he may have misinterpreted this as the matter being "settled" in the view of most of the community.

As a physicist studying cuprates, I would caution that many of the strongest claims in the Quanta article are basically clickbait, especially the title of the article, and the notion that this experiment has solved the problem "to nearly everyone's satisfaction".

The actual experiment and resulting paper [0] on the other hand are very good work, and may very well be right, but a substantial amount more work will be needed to determine how much of the rather unusual phenomenology of the cuprates is well-explained by superexchange interactions. I guess even more work will be needed to convince the majority of the field that this the right model for the cuprates, as opposed to any of the very many other models that have been proposed and studied in the past few decades. In particular:

- High temperature superconductivity is not the only strange thing about the cuprates. The normal state (i.e. above the superconducting transition temperature) also has some rather unusual properties that are the subject of much of the current research. Some of these properties can probably be explained as arising from superexchange interactions, but I expect not all of them can.

- BSCCO is one of quite a large family of cuprate compounds. In this case, it was almost certainly chosen because it cleaves easily, producing nice surfaces which are necessary for this type of experiment. On the other hand, it is quite structurally complicated, and in some sense "messy" compared to many of the other commonly-studied compounds. This is actually taken advantage of for the experiment discussed here, but it would be interesting (if possible) to see if a similar result can be replicated in any of the other cuprates.

Anyway, this is quite an interesting experiment, but I'm somewhat dissapointed in the Quanta article for such sensationalistic reporting. I suppose that's to be expected for a popular science article.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207449119

You mean like one of these [0]? It has GPIO pins, Bluetooth LE, a nice case, a screen, a few buttons, a bunch of common radio chips, and apparently a virtual dolphin for some reason.

[0] https://flipperzero.one/

The superconducting transition temperature (Tc) of many superconducting materials increases as the pressure applied to the material is increased, so I guess the idea is to make the ambient pressure high enough that Tc is below the ambient temperature.

My instinctual reaction (as a physicist studying superconductors, but with no expert knowledge of geophysics) is that this won't work for most (possibly all) materials, because (a) the maximum Tc under high pressure is still generally less than ~ room temperature, (b) the ambient temperature increases with depth below the earth's surface.

Except for this:

> My comment was mocking scientific evidence as this study is pure science and not very practical from the human perspective.

I generally agree with your idea that a natural work environment is better than a boring one. My point was about your assertion that we should get rid of the idea that the tool is the problem, followed by discussion of other factors in a work environment. If we want to know whether or not the tool is the problem, we need to study the tool.

As you point out, and the paper you linked makes clear, there are many other factors involved in creativity in a work environment. The OP study is about one tool however, and it makes it fairly clear that the tool in this case can be a problem. Whether or not it is the main problem is another matter of course.

More generally, the thought that we should even attempt, let alone need, to get rid of any idea without strong evidence to refute it strikes me as worryingly antiscientific. In the context of workplace optimization this may not be very important in the grand scheme of things, but in other matters (climate change comes to mind) it may well be of existential importance.

I was hoping for some actual data. As I mentioned there's plenty of anecdata online, but I don't know if anyone has really studied this. The article you linked to suggests that nobody has done a systematic study.

As a counterpoint to the video you linked, I'm reminded of this video of Danny Macaskill having to work pretty hard to break a carbon rim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfjjiHGuHoc

> ... if one is not racing, is it really worth the extra risk for minor performance improvements?

It really depends on how much extra risk there is and how much the rider values the performance improvements. Without actual data about the (relative) risk of carbon fiber failure in bike components, we have to guess based on the information we have avaliable. Most of this seems to either be anecdotal, or coming from from interested parties, e.g. bike manufacturers, lawyers who make their living suing bike manufacturers, and journalists who are probably more interested in writing about something exciting happening than something exciting not happening. My impression is that the relative risk of of using carbon fiber in some (but perhaps not all) bike components is pretty small compared to the other risks involved in biking, and the performance improvements are big enough to be worth it for me, even though I don't race.

> We need to rid this idea that the tool is the problem.

Do you have any scientific evidence (preferrably peer-reviewed) that the tool is not the problem? If not, it would seem to me to be a reasonable thing to study.

> Look at the experiment they are doing. The room is so boring and controlled.

If I am reading the paper correctly, the rooms being used by remote and in-person participants were identical. While they may be boring, the point was to control for the effect of the room, not to study it. It sounds like you are wishing for a different study.

Out of curiosity, do you have any sources with actual evidence that carbon fiber is prone to catastrophic failure in bike frames/components, particularly compared to aluminum? From my (rather limited) research, there seems to be plenty of speculation and anecdotes online about the fragility of CF, but not much actual evidence of rates of catastrophic failure. My impression (not based on expertise or much evidence) is that properly designed CF is much stronger for a given weight than most metals, but can fail at relatively low loads if stressed in a way it wasn't designed for. As it applies to biking, I guess this would tend to mean that CF bikes are more likely to be structurally damaged because of a crash/fall, but not necessarily more likely to fail and cause a crash/fall. This of course supports your point that CF is not a good choice for someone who falls often.