terramars

"We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games."

This seems like a prima facie bad conclusion to their hockey study, considering that the Panthers won the cup while being effectively tied for the lead in penalty minutes, with #3 not being particularly close. Yes there's a weak correlation between penalties and losing, but considering that the absolute best teams usually have a high rat index, there's a big lost opportunity to go into the rat factor in hockey and how it translates to the corporate world!

if this is due to that specific manufacturer having battery fires, i don't hate it as it seems like the battery replacement option is basically the same as a recall. completely different from a random bug causing it or an across-the-board EOL update. pixel longevity isn't great, but at least they're relatively easy to maintain and the device protection program is acceptable.

This isn't really accurate, they're targeting industrial wastewater yes but they are working with and have tested brackish water up to several thousand TDS. They had a working EDR system for drinking water installed in Gaza until relatively recently and several in India as well. I'm also skeptical they can make it work with seawater, but it absolutely works with undrinkable brackish water in many other cases too.

This is a questionable way to present what's an excellent project and hopefully soon to be commercialized technology. The big deal here is it's a presumably installation ready application of EDR for desalination instead of RO which most systems use. This is a big deal because the membranes use electricity instead of pressure as the filter, which means everything can run at low, normal plumbing, pressures instead of the crazy high pressure RO stuff. For seawater it's borderline whether or not it will match RO for performance, but for lower salinity groundwater and industrial wastewater, it should be significantly higher performance for the same power as well as lower maintenance and capex.

The no batteries thing is basically irrelevant to the innovation, and in fact Genius Water already offers no battery RO systems, also with questionable benefit (as well as being difficult to work with).

I run a solar and water focused EPC in East Africa and will hopefully be working with these guys in the future when they're off the ground with a commercial system. The potential is extremely high, particularly if the maintenance overhead and operational complexity can come down in practice.

i'm down with solar robots, but this is definitely one of those problems that's only a problem because of overly restrictive immigration laws. installing panels is pretty easy, there are tons of people who would be delighted to come to the US and install for $20/hr.

source : have a solar engineering firm in Kenya, and have never had problems with panel installation labor (QA is another story).

i thought it was making fun of flat earthers? it's pretty amusing they have a good writeup on a very technical piece of very circular math if that is not the case.

This is really cool research, but to say "symplectic geometry, an abstract field of math that is generally far removed from messy real-world details" in the context of orbit planning is a gross mischaracterization. All serious solar system dynamics research happens in phase space not cartesian space, which means symplectic geometry - that is the orbital parameters are integrated instead of x,y,z. This amusingly named website has a fairly approachable description of what's happening : https://wiki.tfes.org/Symplectic_Integrators

There are several African energy startups named Okapi, I don't think it's an appropriate name for a CRM startup considering competition for visibility.

https://www.unhcr.org/us/news/stories/refugee-led-business-p...

https://www.okapi-oil.com/ (maybe not a startup)

(I built the Okapi Green Energy pilot minigrid funded by USADF in Kakuma)

you can only account for 6hrs of sun per day, so it's more like 30liters per day. that gives you 10m^2 per American. however serving Americans is not a practical use case. i agree these kinds of systems are not going to be competitive with large scale PV driven RO (i build medium scale solar RO plants in africa and they're pretty good and surprisingly affordable). however having a mobile one you can put on a vehicle or deploy in a small scale distributed manner with little to no expertise would be extremely useful in low population density or nomadic context.

I took couple years off coding to build a Kenyan infrastructure engineering firm - we're still going although I've started programming again. The biggest thing we've done is 6.7km of a mountain / lakeside ring road in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria (Kodula village section specifically, the work is visible on satellite). We're actually not completely done with it but watching the community growth from having the paved road reaching completion and improving the accessibility was absolutely incredible. Extremely frustrating sector to work in and difficult to pay yourself a salary even when it's not charity, but sometimes the rewards are awesome. I have a physics background so doing civil / electrical / mechanical stuff is tractable for me beyond programming, then we use the classic PM tooling to make things run ~relatively better than most people doing stuff out there. All Kenyan engineers other than me, lots of smart people who are highly motivated to meet and work with.

love foraging seaweed and eating it in a bunch of different things. large scale consumption of it is pretty difficult unless you're somewhere that conveniently has both a lot of good stuff locally and has a food culture that knows how to prepare it. cooking with eg kelp is not trivial. there are probably lots of interesting industrial and processed seaweed products that could be very good, especially the animal feed applications, but i think these kinds of articles overlook the very real problems associated with building cuisine from ingredients that aren't widely adopted.

I implemented the RS encoder that ended up being used on the production satellite bus for the telemetry system in space systems / Loral upgraded bus during my engineering coop in school! All in verilog. It's complicated especially the decoder but understandable with time. The turbo codes and more modern extensions that enable lte / 5g and other low power / small antenna applications are absolute black magic though. Such a cool field!

one of the reasons why tech culture has an 18-24 month half life at jobs... it's almost impossible to get a market competitive internal promotion. "not doing performance reviews" and only doing normal 1:1s + an occasional dive doesn't solve this problem at all. i've seen and been at plenty of places that do junior -> mid -> senior pipelines fine, but senior -> exec? it never happens despite external exec hires having extremely high miss rates and very high cost of miss. 100% blame this one on classism + unwillingness to trust people you know vs the shiny outsider.

Scheduled my call with them in a week! Long overdue, but I wonder if the protein subunit still makes sense in an age where mRNA is an option. Obviously too much sunk cost to change the platform even if it was better though.

i highly highly recommend trying Colmap if you like ODM. it's not suitable for drone footage by itself (it works but why), but it has amazing performance for just handheld video walkthroughs or if you have a lot of geotagged photos. basically the next generation / natural extension of the original Bundler that brought open source unstructured SfM to the mainstream. not photo realistic or anything but very usable for most practical applications.

This is a pretty well debunked ratio for actual actions as it's pretty rare to get that level of multiplier... this goes over it briefly with some WW2 data although it's not as good or relevant as the original one I saw : http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/2018/04/25/u-s-army-force...

TL;DR defender advantage is vastly overstated although still a factor, and probably larger than historical in this conflict.

yeah.... a good friend of mine (dual citizen) who manages a large engineering team there for US startup was picked up randomly not at the protest shortly after they started, thrown in jail, denied access to consular services, his very good lawyers got his jail term taken down from 15 days to 12 days despite the guys who picked him up not showing for the hearing or testifying that he was in fact not at the protest when they picked him up. a couple weeks after they started rubber stamping everyone picked up for protests with 2 years regardless of actual involvement. this isn't even including the extreme random violence some people are subjected to and horrible general conditions. fuck everything about this attitude - belarus is just around the corner from civil war it's not cool at all.

this is a terrible title. what the article says is, a third of the corn belt has lost all of its topsoil. the rest of it has lost a large percentage of it (some of which may just have migrated). so the situation is actually quite a bit worse than the top line. of course the good thing is all of that is repairable, the bad thing is it will take centuries to fully restore the grassland if you leave it alone - which of course can't happen!

Did no one else notice the gem in here that BBC failed to mention, that this lizard has one of if not the largest dicks relative to body size of any vertebrate? Due to gender size dysmorphism and internal fertilization.

I agree this is ripe for abuse, but I also know enough about the CA water ecosystem to know it's a welcome development from an agriculture capacity planning perspective. There may be some speculators, but overwhelmingly the people trading this product will be water utilities and large farms who need multi-year planning for in particular tree crops. It looks like it's purely a cash backed contract and there isn't delivery, so it's going to just be used for hedging. Privatization of water is a huge issue especially in the developing world, but this isn't the same problem.

EDIT for clarification : water is a basic human right, but pumping 1 million acre feet to grow almonds and make bank is not.

Wow... this much bullshit makes me really glad I never interviewed for them and recently switched to Gemini... Talk about taking corporate censorship to the next level!

I like how this whole yield paper and model is based on the results of a 3'x3' trial area...

"With artificial lighting increasing the intensity and duration of light beyond what can be captured from the sun in a field, the short indoor growth cycle produced mean grain yields of 14 ± 0.8 t/ha per harvest at 11% grain moisture based on a 1-m2 edge-protected experimental area"

How tf can you say your yields are going to extrapolate from that tiny space to a hectare scale facility? It's ridiculous. We have a huge problem achieving lab-theoretical yields on working farms, outside of the super optimized and most destructive conventional agriculture methods. They didn't even do a full greenhouse trial. Come on guys, you can say it's promising but to say you can get 1000+t/ha out of a vertical farm because of this is fantasy.

it's not cheap even domestically, N95 china retail price is 20RMB right now (not like 3M, domestic brands). Compare to US price ~$6-7 most of that difference is shipping. The price inflation goes all the way to the source production equipment and raw materials, it's every step.

my friend probably had the virus (2 inconclusive tests) and tried to get into this study. some group asked her for $125 to get tested. i'm not sure if she saw any of the facebook ads. so, grain of salt about representativeness of the sample. there's for sure a response bias towards people who think they had it.

abokifx.com

IITA would be all over that! Their internet is really bad.

How would you compare your service to Express Wifi (or similar), is it competitive or does it serve a different market segment? I'm also curious how you manage forex risk and the regulatory system there.

this is garbage, the geographic variation of salaries are significant (maybe not for teachers or servers, but for others certainly). also, all the astronauts live in florida or houston ;)

In line with this, $1-10/day basic income in the developing world would be a much cheaper and potentially more impactful way of testing the concept compared to the ~$30/day minimum for meaningful impact in the US.

Enabling technologies for improving quality of life and economic opportunity in the developing world, in a way that doesn't require large capital outflow or aid-based investing. EG, low cost renewable power generation, labor reducing tools for agriculture, water purification and management, sewage handling, computing, local manufacturing, etc.