silicaroach

Paywalled ... pass.

If this were true, there would already be nuclear powered aircraft which would be a much more "achievable" goal given the size and weight of even the smallest nuclear power plants.

But there are no nuclear powered aircraft and so no nuclear powered missiles. And many countries have had nuclear _capable_ weaponry for a very long time because nuclear weapons can be small and relatively light.

So there is no news except for the very gullible.

Open source, no. Proprietary? MindBridge.

I have long maintained that scientific consensus is always political and only rarely based on fact. The noisiest and most politically astute scientists rise in stature and influence and sometimes viciously defend their pet beliefs whether they are correct or not.

working already b/c 'buildt' is a new word

personal: surfacebook I since 2014 work: m1 pro w/32GB

Oracle stuff didn't help. It's initial appeal was that it ran everywhere. Now all languages do. So people who just want to code something quickly w/o worries for security, etc. use Js/Node for web stuff and Python for pretty much everything else. For people really concerned about speed and security C/C++ is the 'real' programmer's tool of choice. Java code gets very ugly, very quickly and code reuse, one of the big promises, just never took off. So Java is kind of purposeless. Pick a task and there is something better and easier to use than Java.

Years of fomenting fear of 'climate change' and painting it as a dire crisis has opened up the general public to the predations of snake oil peddlers. With the public demanding immediate action and an immediate fix, they are primed to be ready to accept any and all proposed solutions. In this case the proposal is another instance of geoengineering a body of water that human science is still far from understanding in its role in the planet's climate. We still do not completely understand ocean chemistry nor its effect on the climate and consequently cannot model long term effects. Perhaps it's time to accept that just as it took a long time to create the current problem and it will take a long time to correct it. There is no silver bullet.

FORTRAN .... proof? it's still here :-D

Products here: https://coral.ai/products/#prototyping-products

Does it eat _just_ viruses?

If so, _which_ viruses?

Just wondering if it could be safely introduced in to a body and if some virii are more edible than others.

Read Smil's book "How the World Really Works"

The commitment to fossil fuels is a) far greater than you can imagine and b) will not change anywhere in the near future. Bottom line: 'fossil' fuels are second only to nuclear energy in the amount of energy by volume. Nothing else is close. And we need vast amounts of energy just to grow enough to feed this planet's population let alone distribute it to where it needs to go.

So yeah, BP has got it right.

This is a very cute way of getting people's emails. Link to a link to a 'register for free access'. Kind of where I stopped (w/o registering) but clever ... and also last time I do that.

mastodon: transfer control from a publicly answerable company to private citizens

how does this make sense? it might work at a small scale but how does it scale up? how is is legally held responsible? will this prevent hate promoters from creating their own private forums and when they do who will be held accountable?

it just seems that people are reacting to the CEO and not the platform. What if all the Twitter/Musk complainers & haters put their money together and took control and made it work their way? pffft ... ridiculous suggestion b/c their collective strength is complaining not _doing_.

In a nutshell, they induced the symptoms of hypothermia (shivering, etc.) in a monkey "model" (biologist code for a real living monkey). One of the 'stunning' findings from the data was that monkey body temperature control is more complicated than that of white mice "models". And the conclusion is that being able to induce hypothermia is a step towards human hibernation ... wtf?

Typical of biology, it's not obvious that the results were expected. On the contrary b/c biology lacks first principles most experiments are done on a "let's see what happens when we ...". That seems fine until you understand the approach is being used on living creatures.

Biology is butterfly collecting and animal torture.

When you know exactly how things will be affected, then feel free to make changes.

When you don't know exactly how things will be affected, then you shouldn't make changes.

This action was the second case and it was only done for monetary concerns. This wasn't motivated by environmental concerns, it was motivated by profit. And the profit motive is exactly what got this planet in to its climate situation.

The irony is that the math is straightforward and something a 3rd year engineering or physics student will have seen over and over again BUT biology students would find it challenging. It's also much simpler than statistics another key tool that a biologist should be deeply knowledgeable in. Sadly, biologists by and large eschew math and we occasionally see it used here to explain things after the fact. Biology will become a science when it uses math for prediction and modelling in short when it establishes mathematically sound first principles ... like all the real sciences have.

Chilling. The best of reasons are likely present in the research proposal but it takes little imagination to see where this can (and likely will) go. It's only paranoia until it happens.

Fascinating read esp. in light of another article here (somewhere) about the surreal legal manipulations to bring down Sabatini (cancer researcher). It is all about the exercise or misuse of power for personal gain at every level.

Valid points in the article but they boil down to:

1) WFH unexpectedly made for awkward at-home office arrangements (eg kitchen table) and meeting formats (eg. zoom) BUT over time people sorted these things out 2) WFH people worked much longer hours perhaps over compensating for not being in the office, and that takes its toll on health

That's it. So really nothing to see hear _except_ that this is a subtle attack on the WFH spun to favour those who need to see their workers in the office.

The funny thing is: WFH favours those who are productive but penalizes those who get ahead by 'networking' or 'schmoozing with the boss'. If you're in the latter group where promotion-by-popularity is what works for you then, yeah, WFH is a bummer.

I don't pay for SO but I do contribute both questions and answers. Asking a question is often as important as answering one. I actually think SO is how the internet should be: take little, give a little.

Typical biology. Consider:

a) why would any creature with a nervous system _not_ feel pain? b) does it not disturb that someone would conduct experiments to see if a creature feels pain?

Biology is not science. There are no first principles as there are in say math or physics. It is purely observation and collection eg. recently a new kind of jellyfish was observed and video-taped briefly ... before it was 'collected' (read killed for dissection). Mice experimented on and killed are referred to as 'models' not sentient creatures. If you have to hide things like that, you aren't a science.

More accurate: of all the animals tested for this, honeybees and humans seem to be ...

javascript/nodejs. I had been using Matlab ~15 yrs until I left the institution that was paying for it. I looked around and js/node was the clear winner. NodeJS was being continually improved with faster engines, the browser as the default GUI for any app I could create, Node can access to C libraries directly. So though I didn't know it at the time, I became full stack dev. And that is on top of my real job of engineer/data scientist. Unlike a lot of my colleagues who know only python/Fortran/C/C++ I'm comfortable putting together a server to crunch the numbers, tap in to a dB, and serve it all to a GUI of my own design if need be. JS/Node is not easy but it is the most flexible language ... oh, and you'll never be out of work even if that's the only language you know.

Why. Would. They. Not?

Biology is not science.

Ask yourself: what causes 'emotions' in humans? Chemical/molecular balances and imbalances. Same happens in any creature you care to name. Unless you suppose that all other creatures are static unchanging automatons at the molecular level ... which is mind-blowingly stupid.

Also: what if other creatures have emotions but they are not identical to what we call 'human' emotions.

Again: biology is a farce when it tries to be 'scientific'.

Possibly a decade ago I read an article that described worms as basically being akin to one long nerve. It was impactful enough that I stopped hooking worms for fishing ... before I eventually gave up that "sport". It never ceases to amaze me that biologist pursue the study of pain in other animals and seem surprised to confirm its existence. Of course, they have a vested interest in not finding proof of experiencing pain as it would make their experimentation seem cruel. Which it is. Biology, lacking any first principles, is not a science. Biology is at best butterfly collecting unceasingly surprised at everything because it cannot predict anything.

Kind of unexpected that this hasn't been looked at before esp. given that methane is a greenhouse gas. Didn't you kind of think that we already knew all about all sources of methane before pronouncements started being made about the 'dominant source of methane is cows' or some such. If it turns out humans are a significant contributor just by _being_, then human population growth becomes a consideration ... one that is rarely mentioned btw in climate change discussions.

This perfectly describes the current state of academia. The belief in treating academia like a business to promote 'efficiency' and 'accountability' leads to all the ills you see in business. The bottom line is that you should be extremely distrustful of anything aggressively promoted as 'scientific consensus'. If an idea is successful, whether correct or not, then as in business people will blindly support it to 'get a piece of the pie'. As an example, machine learning is replete with incremental, incorrect, and false papers all riding on the success of a few genuine results. The most successful academics are not the smartest or best researchers, they are those best at marketing their results.

I have astigmatism and dark mode is a nightmare for any length of time. I'm not a fan.

It well and truly sucks to be a pig.