rindalir

This is fascinating! I'm going to try this on a certain clip from Jurassic Park.

They are literally on vacation and will do absolutely nothing.

I TA’ed for Harriet, she’s awesome!

As someone who raises horses and other animals, I can say with pretty high certainty that most of the horses were not allowed to "retire". Horses are expensive and time-consuming to care for, and with no practical use, most horses would have been sent not to the glue factory but (at that time) to the butcher and their non-meat parts used for fertilizer.

Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper: “ The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…

I think this expresses how many of us feel very eloquently.

Professor Felleisen, is that you?

Forget the "AI" label, this has been a goal of pricing people for ever. Who knows how good they are at it (note: used to work for a consulting company that specialized soley in pricing)

Somewhere in there, there's a model trying to estimate your willingness to pay and then present you with that price. What I don't know what other data they will use, it seems to me like a critical piece would be your previous purchase behavior (assuming it's personalized). But also your behavior of selecting other airlines because of price. So ... if Delta has access to all your airline purchases not good. If they don't, maybe an agent (human, code, whatever) can game the system, searching for airfare, starting the purchase process and then abandoning.

[edit: spelling]

I love videos like this. Shenzhen looks like a great urban environment. But ... on a second watching all I could see were the cameras everywhere.

Far more coherent write up of the initial charges: https://dailymontanan.com/2024/02/07/montana-man-charged-by-...

Also note the charges of conspiracy. He and his co-conspirators knew what they were doing was illegal and took steps to falsify records.

My solution when I lived near a museum I liked (the MFA in Boston, USA) was to get a membership and go once every week or two and only spend half an hour to an hour, in one specific room or exhibit.

When I'm visiting, I try to look a museum up ahead of time and then focus on a small but good subsection of stuff. I hit full saturation/fatigue at about two and a half hours.

I can't be the only person to think the correct universal number should be 0118.999.88199.9119.725...3

okay ... sure: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/

My variation is that i heat the chamber until the water boils, alone. Then turn off the heat, plop in the portafilter, screw on the top, and turn the heat on low and watch it until the coffee coming out turns from brown to clear-ish and starts "strombolating". Then put the bottom chamber under cold water to stop the process.

I am really appreciating the IANAH and TINHA side effects of your post :)

Oh my brain edited out the "unfair" part in the original question, I assumed it was just asking about higher value/tax. I think that an urban farm, baring some very extenuating circumstance, is an enormous waste of space. And I'm a part-time (non-urban) farmer.

So in the article, it actually says "U.S. auto dealers will be able to sell vehicles on the tech company's platform". This implies dealers aren't out of the loop -- but the only thing I care about is : is pricing going to be transparent, or will there still be the "contact seller for price" crap? Will different Amazon customers see different prices based on some "algorithm"?

If you own a farm in a city or area with high housing demand, yes, I think it would. (edit: and I'm not meaning this to be a sarcastic response -- there are urban farms).

I know that these kind of write-ups by universities tend to overstate the importance of research. However, it's nice to see a write up that at least on the surface goes into some fairly interesting detail and actually does NOT seem to overstate the significance or imply this will result in a single cure for cancer in just a few easy steps.

Right, network effects -- benefits accrue as power of population size. That's a good point.

And the stagnation is a depressing thought. I naively hope that if we can survive this phase of our existence we will find a way to exist in large numbers but also allow all the other beings along for the ride with us to exist and thrive as well. But to survive that long and figure all this out, we actually need to increase our numbers and demographic trends look pretty pessimistic for that.

I'm one of those people who often says "the problem is that there are just too many people." But I hadn't ever really thought about the hypothesis that the "good idea" yield was low enough that you needed a large number of brains to make technological (or other) progress. Certainly there are lots of problems in the near, medium-term, and distant future that will require creative solutions.

That's how it always starts! :) I think the origins of the state in agrarian societies is super interesting. Does it start organically (like you and your neighbors agreeing paying a small % for a security service) and then one day you blink and its morphed into a massive bureaucracy with royal granaries, armies, ziggurats and human sacrifices? Does a certain class of people step in and intentionally turn the system into one that primarily benefits themselves? How complex does a society have to be before that happens? etc...

I think this idea is also present in the work of James C. Scott, author of "Against the Grain". But I think he was talking about this in the context of it being easier for governments to "steal" grains (and just subjugate the farmers + general population), whereas other agricultural societies such as those in parts of Africa avoided this kind of societal dominance and large parasite/ruler/priesthood class by growing crops like yams that were hard to just show up and steal/tax in bulk. You could always just leave the tubers in the ground for a while and harvest on an as-needed basis.(edit for spelling).

Perhaps this tree will get its own "Golden Spruce" story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiidk%27yaas

Yeah, beech bark disease was actually introduced from Europe, to Halifax in the late 1800's. (well, i should say, the insect part was. The mechanism is that the scale insect creates an opening for the native-to-North America fungi in the Nectria genus to infect the bark). So the disease has been around in Europe (with local Nectria infecting) for much longer and my understanding was that European beech has better defenses and was more resistant, thought not entirely unaffected.

Not super up on the leaf disease, but it does appear that European beech can be as well.

How long did it take between when you first noticed something and the decision to try to treat and then remove?

In most forests in the New England and New York State areas that I am familiar with, it's actually nearly impossible to find healthy beech trees, and has been for decades. Beech bark disease kills mature trees over a period of years, and what's left is either smaller trees with significant scarring or thickets of sprouts (which we used to call "beech hell" since they are super annoying to traverse when doing field work). There are some beech bark disease resistant individuals and populations, as well as some isolated patches of forest where there are healthy beeches (and they are... magnificent). I haven't really kept up with the literature on beech leaf disease, but it leaves me wondering if this will potentially fully remove the unhealthy beeches. It would be interesting, in the long-term (is there a long term anymore?), if there are doubly-resistant individuals and if someday they may once again make beech a major forest component.

It's hard to watch beloved tree species disappear. It's very hard. I love these forests so much. But something I have seen time and time again -- is that life is resilient, and it's not like a barren wasteland takes over (at least here). I try to think what amazing solutions life will cook up next.

My background: I studied beech bark disease in Eastern NA forests back in the early 2000s, mostly working on modeling populations and the evolution of resistance.

Some "pop"-sci books that have inspired me:

1."Uncle Petros & Goldback's Conjecture" & "Logicomix" (both by Apostolos Doxiadis),

2."Chaos" by James Gleick,

3. "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" by Paul Hoffman

4. "A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy

5. "The Indian Clerk" (fiction) by David Leavitt (about GH Hardy & Ramanujan)

6. "Genius at Play" by Siobhan Roberts (about John Conway). Normally I stay away from pop-math books with the words "The mind of..." or "Genius" in the title but this is a delightful book.

Some "actual" math books: 1. Nonlinear Dynamics & Chaos (Strogatz)

2. the Way of Analysis (Strichartz) -- note, this one is controversial as to its quality as a math book but I really like the presentation style

3. The Nature of Computation (Moore & Mertens)

That would be ... scary for me. The closest I could find was some limited evidence of an association between cyanobacteria blooms and odds of ALS in the surround population: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5727154/

In many mathematical circles, and certainly in a lot of popular books about mathematicians, there's this persistent idea that you are at your mathematical peak in your 20's (or earlier) because that's the peak of your brain power, and that once you hit 30 it's all cognitive downhill. I've always been suspicious of this (as a mathematician nearing 40, for personal reason) -- and reading this makes me wonder if the decline in productivity (if it even exists) is because of other factors entirely, such as people start families and now have other responsibilities, maturity dictates spending your time and resources elsewhere, etc...