JavaScript Trademark Update 1 year ago
GraalJS?
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sradman
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medium.com 5y ago
ME
The Romance of Seahorses 2 years ago
I've been lucky enough to photograph pygmy seahorses in N. Sulawesi. They are tiny, and superbly camouflaged. Observing their mating habits is an incredible achievement. Kudos to Dr. Richard Smith. I look forward to reading the upcoming enhanced edition of "The World Beneath" on November 19th.
There is also a technical blog post [1] on the architecture of Private Cloud Compute. I don't think that there are any details on the context being sent, just that any context is ephemeral, can't be traced back to you, and that the machine instances leverage Apple Silicon's Secure Boot and Secure Enclave.
Gemini works in Canada as of today. Bard was not available in Canada anytime I tried it previously. Maybe the "regulatory uncertainty" was recently resolved [1].
Here is a CBC article [1] with an embedded 17min Quirks and Quarks radio segment on the finding. You can watch how the tool works in the video embedded near the end of the article. The original .mp4 is available as a zipped attachment on the Science paper. Very cool :-)
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/homo-sapiens-braved-cold-mad...
It's still solid fuel rod crap.
There are a number of First-of-a-Kind SMR and Micro Reactors planned for the U.S., UK, and Canada. The advantage of the three leading lightwater SMRs (NuScale VOYGR, GE Hitachi BWRX-3000, and Rolls Royce SMR) are fast time to market due to the existing supply chain and continuous innovation on well understood technology. The problem is not so much the solid fuel, but the Zirconium clad fuel bundles that produce explosive hydrogen gas during Loss-of-Coolant-Accidents (LOCA). Accident Tolerant Fuels are being deployed now and may be another important innovation that reduces the likelihood of meltdowns but these systems also address the main sources of LOCAs: 1. isolation condenser system (ICS) replace pressure release valves that caused the Three Mile Island accident, and 2. passive coolant circulation systems that don't require external/backup power like the ones that failed during the Fukushima accident.
The problem with this class of lightwater SMR is that they are essentially base load power and the projected Nth-of-a-Kind costs will be competitive with fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) at best but are not cost competitive nor a good complement to intermittent renewables (wind and solar). They are a good slot-in replacement for existing coal fired plants.
There are also a number of Advanced SMRs and Micro Reactors (mobile and campus-size) that have announced First-of-a-Kind builds like the X-Energy Xe-100, TerraPower/GE Hitachi Natrium, ARC-100, Moltex SSR-W, USNC MMR, Xe-Mobile, and Westinghouse eVinci. These designs compete on a much larger landscape of theoretical trade-offs that may leapfrog the lightwater SMRs. I prefer this diverse mix of technologies and applications over a single anointed technology like Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). YMMV.
Do you have a link to the full age cohort effectiveness numbers? I didn't think these numbers were published yet, if they are or don't exhibit Simpson's Paradox then the question is what accounts for the discrepancy with the UK and Canadian data and the immunological lab research done by Shane Crotty and Rockefeller [1].
I think the misinterpretation is mainly by the media and the general public. When most of your population is vaccinated and most of the serious disease is in the unvaccinated, you need to report by rate and vaccination status as the Ontario Science Table [1] now does (rather than absolute case numbers).
Simpson's Paradox is more of a data artifact that you have to be aware of. I didn't know about this statistical anomaly before but the takeaway is that if you see a effectiveness percentage decrease from 97% to 77% then you should also check that the value in each age cohort because each individual cohort may surprisingly be above 90%. The Israeli data might be fine but I want to see the "age corrected" range rather than a single effectiveness number.
The bottom line is that we will get good data moving forward from the Israeli 3rd dose program with other quality data sets soon to follow from the U.S., UK, Canada, Singapore, etc.
What we have not yet seen is any good evidence that the vaccinated are contributing to spread, though in the Fauci interview he indicated that the R(t) in the unvaccinated was non-zero. This is an important question, IMO.
[1] https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/#riskbyvac...
There is not strong evidence supporting a 3rd booster dose in immunocompetent people. We have partly seen a misinterpretation of the Israeli data [1] and specifically the single low effectiveness value that appears to be the result of Simpson's Paradox [2]. Dr. Fauci reported this single value decline from the high nineties to the high seventies on Andy Slavitt's podcast [3]. Pfizer's CEO has promoted this same data, Israel's 3rd dose campaign is well under way, and Fauci's public statements are a strong indicator that the U.S. will follow the same path. British Columbia's Dr. Bonnie Henry indicated yesterday [4] that the Canadian numbers do not yet support a general 3rd dose booster but, like the UK, a longer 2nd dose interval due to a First Doses First (FDF) strategy may be a factor.
The 3rd dose is safe and will probably provide a small benefit to the recipient as Shane Crotty described in TWiV 802 [5]. The downside is that these doses are in short supply globally where they could make a significant difference.
[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
[3] https://lemonadamedia.com/podcast/dr-fauci-answers-your-bigg...
[4] (YouTube ~3.5min @36m45s) https://youtu.be/93Rnjmr7iCk?t=36m45s
What Is an OLAP Cube? An Exhaustive Explainer 5 years ago
OLAP Cubes have been disrupted by Column Stores. Unless you are interested in the history of Data Warehouses, the technology can safely be ignored.
A corollary is that SQLite is as ubiquitous to structured storage as JavaScript is to programming and it too lacks the exact decimal representation available as DECIMAL(precision, scale) in other SQL engines.
These are not fatal flaws, IMO, just gaps in need of attention.
I'm interested in the API interface while the string literal example is more about the SQL language. JDBC has long provided prepared statement metadata that is used extensively by numerous tools.
Great news, domain constraint enforcement is a welcome new feature. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater; being able to specify an ANYTYPE/VARIANT column on a STRICT table would make this feature more useful. The canonical use case for ANYTYPE is a BIGTABLE or Entity–Attribute–Value (EAV) model.
I haven't checked recently, but I was unable to determine the type of ? parameters in SQLite prepared statements. Maybe this is something that can also be accommodated with STRICT tables.
A shark mystery millions of years in the making 5 years ago
The paper An early Miocene extinction in pelagic sharks [1]:
We present evidence for a previously unknown major extinction event in sharks that occurred in the early Miocene, ~19 million years ago. During this interval, sharks virtually disappeared from open-ocean sediments, declining in abundance by >90% and morphological diversity by >70%, an event from which they never recovered. This abrupt extinction occurred independently from any known global climate event and ~2 million to 5 million years before diversifications in the highly migratory, large-bodied predators that dominate pelagic ecosystems today, indicating that the early Miocene was a period of rapid, transformative change for open-ocean ecosystems.
Nicholas has Waded (pun intended) into the waters of irrational horror over gain-of-function research that seems to gain viral traction following every spill-over event. The only argument presented in the article that leans towards the lab-leak hypothesis is the human-preffered double CGG codon that appears in the furin cleavage site; this is nothing like a smoking gun, IMO. Yesterday's TWiV 751 covered a paper The furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is required for transmission in ferrets [1] which has the following abstract:
To investigate the importance of the spike polybasic CS of SARS-CoV-2 (PRRAR), a number of spike mutants predicted to modulate the efficiency of furin cleavage were generated (Fig. 1a), including: substituting two upstream arginines to produce a monobasic CS similar to SARS-CoV spike (monoCS), replacing the tribasic CS with the furin CS of a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza haemagglutinin containing seven basic amino acids (H5CS) and two naturally occurring deletions seen following passage in Vero E6 cells and/or in clinical isolates21,26. The first deletion removes eight amino acids including all three arginines of the PRRAR site (ΔCS), while the other removes five flanking amino acids but retains the tribasic CS (Δflank). The mutations were engineered into a spike expression plasmid to enable cell surface expression and generation of coronavirus lentiviral PVs. In addition, to study the importance of the PRRAR motif in the context of live virus, we used a naturally occurring Vero-cell-adapted mutant SARS-CoV-2, ΔCS26. This variant and the wild-type (WT) virus from which it was derived were cloned by limiting dilution to enable studies using individual genotypes.
This is the horror of in vitro and in vivo viral lab research and the result is a magnificent advancement of our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the furin cleavage site, and its role in TMPRSS2 assisted membrane entry. This research follows the equally eye-opening paper covered in TWiV 715 that explained why hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) failed; Vero E6 cells lack TMPRRS2 so HCQ fully blocks entry via endocytosis. It should be noted that this study includes MERS-CoV which also has a furin cleavage site; falsifying one of the claims of Wade's article.
Regardless, lab experiments begin with one or more viral isolates and molecular clock techniques should show that the original Wuhan variant has almost identical non-coding genome segments compared to existing lab isolates. The RaTG13 sequence is a very distant relative using this measure. Also, RaTG13 is not an isolate, only an RNA sample collected in wild bat anal swabs. Conflating viral isolates with RNA samples seems to be a common error; an entry in a genetic database does not imply that a viable viral line exists in a lab. A RaTG13 lab isolate would have been an important achievement to further our scientific understanding.
I'm confused by the dismissals of the natural origins hypothesis. The horseshoe bat roosts, that are studied, are mostly found in or near Kunming, Yunnan. This lush wild area is part of the Lancang/Mekong River watershed/ecosystem shared by nocturnal bats and nocturnal arboreal mammals like palm civets, pangolins, and raccoon dogs. The nearby villages contain people engaged in guano collection, the wildlife trade, and domestic livestock farming.
The average incubation time of COVID-19 is 4.5 days. Armed with Google maps and a basic understanding of planes, trains, and automobiles we can gauge travel time from Kunming Airport to either Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (2 hr 5 min) or Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (2 hrs). In 2003, SARS-1 emerged in Guangzhou (near Hong Kong) and the now demonized Dr. Zheng-li Shi and her team traced the origins to palm civets (the intermediate host). Why is this so hard? Why do we not ridicule the assumption that travel between major Chinese transportation hubs must leave a wake of infections along the path?
Finally, Wade's article mentions a U.S. State Department claim [2]:
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
If true, this is an important early super-spreader event but the remainder of the release consists of a facile analysis performed by people more knowledgeable in geopolitics than science.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w
[2] https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
From 2014, Host cell entry of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus after two-step, furin-mediated activation of the spike protein [1]:
Such furin-mediated activation is unusual in that it occurs in part during virus entry. Our findings may explain the polytropic nature, pathogenicity, and life cycle of this zoonotic coronavirus.
MERS-CoV uses furin cleavage of S1/S2 but it does not bind to ACE2 like SARS-CoV-2.
competition from plentiful natural gas, wind and solar power, which are rapidly becoming less pricey.
No one questions whether the zero emissions target is rational. Natural gas in North America should complement the variability of wind and solar, IMO.
The March 23 press release Pfizer Initiates Phase 1 Study of Novel Oral Antiviral Therapeutic Agent Against SARS-CoV-2
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a relatively new feature in wearables with optical heart rate monitors, is a good proxy for stress. Some years ago, IBM did a study that found that HRV in newborns served as an early warning system of illness. Athletes have long used this measure to determine when off days are needed.
If I remember correctly, Eric Schmidt said that one of the first things he did as CEO of Google was to move the company off of Quickbooks and onto Oracle ERP. SAP HANA is certified for AWS, Azure, and GCP and all three are trying to win SAP customers as they transition their OnPrem systems to the cloud. Oracle has long had an antagonistic relationship with its partners; I suspect this move is a strategic alignment with SAP as a key Google partner. The enemy of my enemy... probably plays a part too.
The Arab News also covered the controversy: Anti-feminist trolls target first Egyptian woman captain with fake Arab News profile [1]. Hopefully the story is covered in non-English news sources as well. I suspect that the coverage will ultimately be good for Marwa Elselehdar and Egyptian women in general.
Dflat: SQLite FlatBuffers 5 years ago
This is an alternative to Core Data. The DFlat tool generates Swift code from a FlatBuffer schema and persists objects in SQLite during runtime. Core Data objects are defined in Xcode using the Interface Builder.
ScienceMag summarizes this research in an article named New generation of carbon dioxide traps could make carbon capture practical:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/new-generation-carbo...
What Data Can’t Do 5 years ago
From the ungated archive [1]:
Whenever you try to force the real world to do something that can be counted, unintended consequences abound. That’s the subject of two new books about data and statistics: “Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters”, by Deborah Stone, which warns of the risks of relying too heavily on numbers, and “The Data Detective”, by Tim Harford, which shows ways of avoiding the pitfalls of a world driven by data.
Data is a powerful feedback mechanism that can enable system gamification; it can also expose it. The evil is extracting unearned value from a system through gamification not the tools employed to do so. I’m looking forward to reading both books.
woodworkers take pride in the finished product, and seeing that finish product being used. They are not all hot on the tools they use, and nor do they value the art of planing for its own sake.
Woodworkers are hot on the materials that go into their finished product and, for better or for worse, our language choice brings along a runtime and library that becomes the foundation of our digital artifacts.
Our toolchain matters and mastering more than one is non-trivial. Material world metaphors don’t map well to the digital world. I’m not a fan of Uncle Bob Martin and the tweet about Clojure in 2021 made me giggle but a mediocre proposal doesn’t take away from the importance of the underlying problem; our language ecosystem mastery defines the problem spaces we inhabit.
The paper is pure science. I’d argue that the Life Sciences are entering a Scientific Revolution 2.0. We are on the cusp of learning how many living systems work. The scope is broader than genetic engineering alone, IMO. This revolution is shaping up to be multidisciplinary; computation will be a critical aspect.
The Smithsonian article is based on the paper The Four Black Deaths [1] by Monica H. Green:
The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/5/1601/604...
I finally escaped Node 5 years ago
It was my understanding that Node never implemented JGSI [1]. I've never compared the two APIs so you may be correct. Regardless of the path taken, the middleware should apply to a separate web server module that is functional by default. The tight coupling that emerged was too hard to master and the defaults are too attack prone to inspire quick public deploys. It resulted in copy-and-paste server-code between projects rather than reusable server modules.
This may be a property of all embedded network libraries but I think my observation still holds; server-side Node did not outpace the alternatives despite its superior performance/concurrency relative to the dominant GIL platforms.
EDIT: AWS Lambda (i.e. Function-as-a-Service) can be considered an extremely simplified service gateway interface though it is rarely thought of in those terms.
I finally escaped Node 5 years ago
The article focuses on server-side Node, rather than its role as a CLI tool. Compared to V8, Ruby, Python, and PHP are not performant. Node’s libuv network library was highly concurrent and Node built single-core concurrency into the runtime and libraries; multi-core concurrency, however, is not best-of-class.
IMO, Ryan Dahl made two fundamental mistakes in both Node and Deno that make them uncompetitive for simple server-side 12-Factor Apps: 1. No web Gateway Interface like WSGI and Rack, and 2. No DBMS API/SPI like JDBC. Express was supposed to be a Microframework like Sinatra and Flask but developers have to spend most of their time defining a robust web server. Since the http server and app code are tightly integrated, 12-Factor Apps or JSON API Microservices are more complicated than they need to be in Node. The lack of a JDBC-like API/SPI hurts many languages included Node and Rust.
The GIL languages are not performant nor concurrent but they have good httpd/dbms interfaces. All the popular server-side language/runtimes are flawed along some fundamental dimension. Server-side REST shouldn’t be this complicated.
This can generally fall under the category of “Generate Test Data in SQL” with both generic techniques like Recursive CTEs, as in the OP, and SQL dialect or tool specific options. Search is your friend. The OP also provides a table lookup technique for readable names but doesn’t address other data types such as timestamps or other functions such as MD5(). Other data distribution techniques other than random may also be needed. This post scratches the surface of testing with generated data.