nicodds

A simple tool to extract data from PDFs and images using Google's gemini-2.0-flash-001 model.

I recently came across Barricelli reading Labatut's book "The MANIAC"

A voice from the field here (Puglia, southern Italy). I can assure you that the landscape has changed drastically in a decade. Where a few years ago you could see immense expanses of green, now you see a ghostly landscape. It's incredible. Years and years have been spent inconclusively, both by politicians and by investigators, who have also wasted time with conspiracy theories.

Only a few people have replanted olive trees using species resistant to Xylella.

Not to be picky, but Sora is here: https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Sora,_Laz...

I think mechanical ventilation (MV) is less risky and almost as effective in preventing spread of viruses. Probably, coupling MV with a boxed UV lamp (no UV radiation outside the box) would be more effective.

It is like quantum mechanics: the measurement process produces a perturbation of the physical system

Personally, I like very much leveldb/rocksdb. They're very fast and solid.

You're right, that is big issue. Anyway, it's a matter of a lot of things that adds up together.

An Hydro plant doesn't have the same security requirements as a nuclear one. You may think for example to shielding for ionizing radiation. It all adds up to the count.

That is not completely true. Thermodynamics tells that, overall, to produce energy, you must spend a lot more energy. You may think to the nuclear plant: it doesn't build by itself, you produce lots of environmental pollution to get it

If you think about it, the adult-media field is scalable by design

I think being a generalist is definitely a value. In a near future, specialists will be substituted by artificial intelligence (AI). Generalists, instead, will stay at their place, since they do what AI (currently) can't: making connections.

Almost like Donald Knuth's TAOCP!

This is a good introduction to the topic: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cr00033a001

This is one of the magnetic field effect on radical pairs recombination.

Once you put a magnet near the site of a chemical reaction where radical pairs are formed, the rate of the reaction may be changed, due to the additional energy levels introduced by the spin-magnetic field interaction.

Anyway, in order to have such kind of effects, you need an energy intensive process responsible for the radical pairs creation.

It seems like the story of the chicken or the egg: do these differences come from meditation or are they the reason that push people towards meditation?

This is really common in Italy. Some years ago there was also some politicians involved. They rent houses of public property for an epsilon of their price. In the palace where I live, there are families paying 50 euros/month for their apartment (near 100 square meters)

I'm a physicist, with a PhD in physics. I worked for a while as a post-doc in Italy and recently I quit University, working now in the private sector as a Data Scientist.

I'm happy with the change, my life is more relaxed now. I've time for my family, for me. I've also better and stable earnings.

When I was in academia, I was involved in experiments consisting in the exposure of flies (drosophila melanogaster) to 900 MHz controlled electromagnetic fields.

I participated to the design of the exposure chamber, essentially a bi-planar transmission line, with a peak electric field near 220 V/m.

We were able to find evidence of an effect only after 7 days of continuous exposure to the field.

The effect was an up-regulation of the genes encoding for a stress-response protein (Hsp70, aka heat-shock protein).

We tried also exposure to pulsed high intensity magnetic field (~1T for 2 usec) for 3 hours, 1 pulse per second. Same effect.

My opinion is that, as long as fields are at low intensity and for short periods, we can consider such exposures as moderately safe

Hello people! A voice from the field here.

As in most of the cases in Italy, we can say that the approach is: "the situation is hopeless, but not serious". Apart from the joke, it is a sad period and the Xylella case is just part of a bigger whole. But let's stay focused.

Actually, the problem has a long history and Nature wrote about it several times over the last 5 years.

I'm not an expert, nor a practitioner of the field. Nevertheless, it seems a growing evidence show that the bacterium is responsible for the problem together with a state of abandon, spread over many areas of the region, uncultivated from several decades.

The local court started an investigation to understand how Xylella reached the Salento area. Due to a poor scientific approach and an uneffective communication, such investigations gave rise to very large protests among public opinion. These protests blocked de facto any political decision to stop the spreading of the bacterium: politicians are more interested in their consensus.

This lead to a paralysis status in which Xylella prospered and the infection spread over, towards southern areas of Brindisi province.

Meanwhile, the investigations did not find a clear responsible. There are two main voices in this side. The first says that Xylella infection was the result of an out of hand scientific experiment aimed at testing some plant protection products. The second says that Xylella comes from massive and uncontrolled import-export activities in a big plants trading facility. Both stories have a similar geographical origin, near the city of Gallipoli.

HTH, Nico

Do you know about data science competitions on https://www.kaggle.com? There are lots of resources, codes and insightful discussions

I think the writer is overgeneralizing his particular use case. Surely, the situation he represents doesn't need any AI/ML, but it is the result of a simple use case, with little variables and with an easy workflow.

Does the same pattern apply also in more complex scenarios?

maybe this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6PpPqbR4YU ?

The main advantage of this fusion reaction is that it is aneutronic, i.e. it doesn't produce any neutrons, so it is relatively safe.

Petawatt class lasers are nowadays possible and several examples exists (Los Alamos, Oxford central laser facility, ELI Prague, South Korea). The technology used to compress photons energy in short length pulses is called "Chirped Pulse Amplification". This opened the way to femtosecond laser pulses.

Suppose you are a physicist and you have a theory you want to test, ok? Then, you design an experiment to test your theory. If it fails, you are sure that your theory is wrong. Otherwise, you know that it works, unless future experiments show that it fails.

In my opinion, this is pretty like Test Driven Development, which has lots in common with the practice of physics (aka Popper's falsification).