Micand

As was flagged in the other discussions, see Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Or a recap from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/can-neur...

I saw a wonderful recording of a talk the authors gave a few years ago (which I regrettably can't find now), and it was amongst the most eye-opening talks I've ever seen.

I'm grateful that my 2019 Norco Section uses a round seatpost, threaded Shimano BB, and standard cockpit; I deplore the "self-adjusting" D-shaped Giant seatpost on my girlfriend's bike (which is subtly off-centre and takes all kinds of witchery to approximate the ease with which I can adjust a standard seatpost), as well as the mess of BBs and integrated cockpits that are becoming common even on mid-range road & gravel bikes. When I buy my next bike, I will go out of my way to select something using standardized parts. I very much hope something akin to the Framework laptop comes to market in cycling, where the entire machine is built to be user-serviceable with off-the-shelf, readily available parts. I put something like 20,000 km commuting to school on my early 1970s Raleigh Record, which I rebuilt almost completely with my brother, and it was a gloriously simple machine that I miss dearly today.

This is very excellent.

You have 46 chromosomes. Each chromosome is one massive contiguous molecule of DNA, which can be represented as a string of (up to) 150 million letters ("nucleotides") drawn from {A, C, G, T}. Together, the whole human genome is roughly 3 billion nucleotides. Since you have two copies in each cell, you have 6 billion nucleotides in total.

Each chromosome is either an autosome or sex chromosome. The autosomes are chr1 to chr22. All people (excepting those with chromosomal disorders, like trisomy 21) have two copies of each autosome, with one copy coming from each parent. Then, for the sex chromosomes:

* If you're male, you get an X chromosome from your mom and a Y chromosome from your dad.

* If you're female, you get an X chromosome from your mom and another X chromosome from your dad.

So, yes, "two copies of each chromosome" and "two copies of the genome" are the same concept, since the genome consists of chromosomes.

I moved to Toronto from Calgary four years ago to do my PhD at the UofT. I love Toronto.

* Toronto has a legacy as one of the best places to do ML, and while it felt like it was losing momentum, the Vector Institute's opening has infused the academic community with incredible energy. Vector's been recruiting top researchers from around the world, but particularly from the US -- there are a number of new Vector members who've come from the Boston/Cambridge area. The academic community in Toronto will only become stronger over the next few years, given how hostile the US has become to students from abroad.

* The strength of the academic community is fuelling a burgeoning startup scene. While it's still early days, there are a number of accelerators associated with the UofT and other entities, so given the talent coming out of the academic system here, I think the community will grow rapidly.

* Quality of life is fantastic. The food and music scenes are world-class, stemming largely from how diverse Toronto is. Downtown Toronto feels like a mixture of Manhattan and Brooklyn, just on a smaller scale. I don't own a car, and only use the subway perhaps once a week -- everything is in easy walking distance.

As to downsides:

* We have a reasonably cold winter from November to March. It's far less harsh than Calgary, though.

* Rent is expensive and rising. I've lived in the downtown core for all four years on a grad student's salary, so it's possible to make it work. But finding accommodations seems only to be getting harder.

* The political interests of the city are often overwhelmed by the sprawling suburbs surrounding it that make up the Greater Toronto Area. The new provincial government seems to be intent on attacking Toronto at every opportunity.

I've had the privilege to travel around the U.S. and Europe quite a bit during my PhD, and it's made me realize how well Toronto compares to the rest of the world. I plan to settle here after graduating -- the tech scene here seems like it's going to explode over the next decade, and it will be a lot of fun to be part of it.

Hype has almost universally negative connotations to me. Based on the name, I expected your extension would hide "hyped" stories (where hype is perhaps defined by a high comment-to-upvote ratio for a story), since hype is usually bad. You may wish to consider a new name.

I remember reading about OpenWorm a few years ago and thinking it was ridiculously cool. I'm glad to see the project has persisted. They do a bad job, however, of selling themselves.

1. What have they accomplished to date? I see little more than an animated worm. Tell me about how you're trying to model the worm, and how these approaches may accurately capture its behavior.

2. Why should I care about having an animated worm in my browser? Why is this an appropriate medium to deliver the simulation? If I want to do any kind of science, how will this help me? What I've seen to date looks scarcely more useful than Bonzi Buddy. The most interesting part seems the Academy, but I must donate at least $250 to gain access. This seems counter to the "open" part of "OpenWorm."

3. What academic affiliations does the project have? If the project is useful and has experienced success to date, surely they can recruit students/postdocs/whatever to work on it full-time, with well-established labs making major contributions. Are they computational people? Biology people?

4. What are the bona fides of the people involved? If they can't typeset or capitalize the species' name properly ("C. Elegans") in their video, that doesn't lend much faith to their expertise. The gentleman in the video marvels over the mere "1000 cells" in the worm, but does nothing to put this number in context (with, say, the 10 trillion cells of humans).

I'd love to see this project succeed, and I admire its attempt to recruit funding through a novel means, but the pricing seems too steep, and the overall quality of the pitch is regrettably poor.

I wish Calgary had better public transport. As a Calgarian, my commute is 20 minutes by car, 58 minutes by bike, or 75 minutes by public transit.

I don't understand the crux of this fellow's argument. If we can engineer and then print a fully functional cell, one which perhaps performs a function radically different than found in any natural organism, then what we're doing is no longer synthetic biology -- it's nanotechnology. In this case, we're building nanomachines, not cells.

Synthetic biology's appeal is that it leverages nature to do all the heavy lifting -- we don't have to engineer functions from the ground up, but only find similar designs in nature and then tweak them for our purposes. Furthermore, in synbio, we don't actually have to build anything, but only design it. We let nature -- which can assemble cells extremely efficiently, through a process it has been refining for the last four billion years or so -- build our systems for us, once we've translated them into the language of genes. If we have the ability to build our own nanomachines from the ground up (understanding, of course, that the cell is simply a specialized nanomachine built by nature), there's no need to constrain ourselves to the limitations inherent to nature's design. At that point, there's no reason not to divorce ourselves from the "biology" part of "synthetic biology."

The issue of how to deal with people who seek out child porn troubles me. The tone accompanying an article such as this inevitably vilifies those who consume such material, as though this is a clear moral issue. This implies all of us have pedophilic urges, with only those who lack the moral fortitude to resist going on to seek out child porn. But this is not accurate -- I don't have the least desire to view such images, but instead feel a visceral disgust. Most others, I imagine, have the same reaction.

People who want to view sexually explicit images of children are sick, not immoral. They suffer from a deviant urge from which the rest of us are free. The issue, then, should not be how to punish them, but how to cure them of this urge. (Whether such a cure is possible is another matter altogether -- our sexual desires exert regrettable power over our behaviours.) In conjunction, we must do everything we can to halt the dissemination of such material, just as Microsoft is doing here. By shifting our reaction from wanting to punish consumers of child porn to wanting to rehabilitate them, we will encourage more to come forward for treatment, ultimately reducing the amount of such material that is consumed, and thus the number of children harmed in its creation.

Just what is that "larger point"? Is it that by revealing his identity and publicizing his movements, Snowden has shifted attention to his personal story, away from the issue of U.S. government surveillance? If so, I disagree with the point -- Snowden's story has, if anything, given the issue a more compelling narrative arc, and kept it in front of the public far longer than if he remained an anonymous whistleblower.

I'd also appreciate an invite, if possible. My e-mail address is <my HN username>@gmail.com. Thanks!

Brad Templeton delivered a superb talk on robotic cars at the Singularity Summit 2009 (http://www.vimeo.com/7337628). It expounds on the technology's implications, supporting Maroon's assertion that even a small slice of the market will easily eclipse Google's stake in search. Of particular interest:

* Transportation is more dangerous than we think, and this is largely due to human factors. (Driver inattention is a factor in 80% of crashes; alcohol in 40%.)

* The purchase of private vehicles forces us into a "one size fits all" model. If someone goes skiing only once a year, he will purchase an SUV; if someone spends 90% of his mileage traveling alone to work, he'll still purchase a five-person sedan so he can haul around friends occasionally. By moving to a grid-like service that provides cars to us on demand, we will be able to choose the vehicle best suited to the type of trip we're making.

* Robotic cars could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. Energy usage would be dramatically lower due to people using a vehicle only as large as they need for a given trip. Vehicles powered by alternative energy have a chicken-and-egg problem -- no one wants to build the infrastructure to deliver energy until people buy the vehicles, but no one wants to buy the vehicles until a ubiquitous energy infrastructure is in place. Robotic cars, however, would have no qualms with traveling halfway across a city to refuel, nor with waiting two hours in a lineup before refuelling.

* The transportation infrastructure will also become substantially more efficient, as cars will be able to travel much closer together without compromising safety. As a consequence, energy usage can be reduced another 30% by having cars draft one another.

* Before robotic cars would be accepted by the public, they'd have to meet much more stringent safety standards than we apply to human drivers. No one would accept a robotic car that killed a human, even if robotic cars on the whole were twice as safe as human drivers. Templeton figures we'll need cars on the order of 100 times safer than human drivers before they will be widely accepted. To convince people of the cars' safety, Templeton proposes the "school of fish" test -- imagine walking out onto a track swarming with cars travelling at 40 miles per hour, and having every car swerve around you no matter how hard you try to make them hit you.

* Robotic vehicles will record video everywhere they go, for this will prove invaluable in determining the cause of accidents. Any modifications to the driving software will then have the ability to be tested on the "trillion mile road test" -- they will have a corpus of testing data composed of the recorded footage of every trip ever made. New software will be tested against every vehicle accident that has ever occurred.

* The privacy implications of this universal recording are disconcerting. Templeton raises the spectre of a situation like that in Minority Report, where police can remotely override your control of a vehicle, locking you inside and transporting you to a destination of their choosing.

Ditto -- I'm Canadian, so I'm not holding out hope. I'd kill to get my hands on one of these to use as my daily beater at school.

I found A Field Guide to Genetic Programming to be a good introduction to genetic programming, which is a subset of genetic algorithms. The book can be had freely at http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/

'"If he doesn’t make a dramatic move soon to clean up the service, the brand will be permanently tarnished," says another interested investor.'

Is Chatroulette not already synonymous with anonymous penises? I'd say the brand's already tarnished in that regard. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- anonymous penises may be exactly what some users are looking for.

Ubuntu is the best choice for a user who is not terribly computer literate. The Ubuntu devs have made an extensive effort to provide a cohesive and well-integrated system that should not require the user to drop down to the command line for most uses. No other distro has made as exhaustive an effort to insulate the user from Linux's rough edges; Ubuntu's popularity ensures that numerous online tutorials are available to assist in just about any task.

As with any operating system, installation is the biggest hurdle, particularly if the user needs to preserve existing data. Once past that point, however, if he can handle Windows or OS X, he should have no trouble using and maintaining Ubuntu.

In Canada, CTV offered access to both live video and recorded clips for these Olympics. On Windows, the service seemed to work seamlessly -- it did not prompt for cable providers, e-mail addresses, or any such thing. On Linux, the experience was less smooth. As the video relied on Silverlight, I had to install Moonlight. Through the first day or two of the Games, only the stable v2.0 was clearly offered on the Moonlight Web site, which did not support video from CTV or NBC (and which had the unfortunate habit of ballooning a freshly-launched Firefox to more than a gigabyte of memory usage). Later on, the v3.0 preview, which does support video, was prominently offered on the Moonlight site. Sadly, it performed poorly -- video ran at only about 5 FPS on my system, while consuming an entire CPU core.

In contrast, CBC handled Canadian coverage of the Beijing Games in 2008. All their video was offered via Flash, which worked splendidly in Linux. Almost every event was viewable, often without commercials and commentators. I am saddened by this backward step.

I do it to keep track of my position when I scroll a document.

iTunes proved that people are willing to pay rather than pirate if you make purchasing more convenient than pirating. The movie studios seem almost to be begging their customers to steal content.

I was just picking through a copy of The Singularity is Near today. Kurzweil makes several specific predictions in his "2010 scenario":

* Computers will become invisible and invade our environment -- woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture, and so forth.

* We'll have very high-bandwidth, wireless connections to the Internet at all times.

* Displays will be embedded into our eyeglasses and contact lenses, and images will be projected directly onto our retinas.

* Similar tiny devices will project auditory environments.

* "Beams" of audio that only a specific person can hear will be projected from a distance.

* We'll have augmented reality devices that can recognize a person and remind us of his name.

* Real-time translation of foreign languages (subtitles on the world) will exist.

* Virtual assistants will step forward when they see us struggling to find a piece of information. Kurzweil's example has us struggling find "that actress ... who played the princess, or was it the queen ... in that movie with the robot." Your virtual assistant then whispers in your ear that it was "Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala in Stars Wars, episodes 1, 2, and 3."

I'll give him the "pervasive, invisible computers" point. Though they're not yet woven into our clothing, Kurzweil has pointed out in recent talks that smartphones such as the iPhone fulfill the same role. Ditto on high-bandwidth, permanent connections to the Internet -- the 3G connectivity of smartphones meets this criterion. Augmented reality applications, such as New York Nearest Subway, are available in a nascent form on smartphones. Real-time translation of foreign languages is also becoming a reality: consider Google's recently-announced automated transcription of subtitles for YouTube videos, along with their automated translation into foreign languages. Shakier are his claims regarding displays embedded into eyewear, "personal beams" of audio, and intelligent virtual assistants. One can point to experimental implementations of each, but none have been widely adopted.

I think Kurzweil's ideas generally have merit, even if the man himself comes off as overly optimistic. The technological singularity argument essentially boils down to the question of whether humanity will create an intelligence that far exceeds its own. To do so, we must possess both the desire and the means to create such an entity. I think we have both -- our desire is unquestionable, for the applications of an artificial general intelligence are far too great across all aspects of human existence for us to turn away; the means to do so will also exist, as hardware and software are both progressing at a phenomenal rate, and they must eventually cross the threshold necessary for intelligence. Whether we will realize such an intelligence on Kurzweil's aggressive schedule is less certain. Given that his predictions for 2010 made five years ago are substantially inaccurate, I am less inclined to believe his claim that we will achieve a "technological singularity" in exactly (or even around) 2029. Other ideas freely expressed by Kurzweil, such as the belief that he'll be able to resurrect a simulacrum of his dead father once this technology singularity is reached, make him sound, well, nuts. Still, murky as the details and timeline may be, I think Kurzweil's general vision of humanity's future is compelling.

On a similar, somewhat-related tangent: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is a fantastic novella depicting rapid change caused by a technological singularity.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/

I ran Gentoo from 2003 to 2007 -- I credit it with opening my eyes to how simple and elegant *nix is. When I got tired of monthly upgrades taking six to twelve hours on each of my four systems (including twenty to forty minutes at the console for each, running various commands and fixing things that inevitably broke), I switched to Debian Sid. When it (unsurprisingly) proved too unstable, I moved to Ubuntu, and have remained with it ever since. I don't always get to play with the latest shiny toys, but I'm amply compensated by weekly upgrades that take no more than sixty seconds. I'm glad that I gained a more thorough understanding of my system's workings through Gentoo, but I find Ubuntu lets me focus my attention on tasks more interesting than system administration.

Seconded. I wrote a basic blog/portfolio on Django for a designer friend of mine, and Webfaction has served his needs extremely well. If you do not wish to administer a VPS from Slicehost or Linode, Webfaction is an excellent alternative -- it gives you most of the same power (with the ability to run Rails, Django, or just about any environment you please) but without the administrative overhead. Though their control panel is not as powerful as Dreamhost's, it doesn't really want for it. For anything that will be used in production, Webfaction is a better choice than Dreamhost, as Webfaction's servers are much more responsive due to a substantially lesser load.

If ARM and x86 are targeted, this means no Flash (not surprising, given how poorly it runs on Linux), which presumably means YouTube will be operating in full-on HTML 5 video mode by the time these devices launch.

If netbooks continue their meteoric ascent, and if Chrome OS grabs a significant share of the market, we may finally see the realization of the mythical Year of Linux On the Desktop. The ironic aspect, of course, is that even though a large number of non-technical users will finally be running on a fully open-source platform, they will use it to run applications whose workings are even more opaque than traditional closed-source, client-side apps.

I wonder what role, if any, Native Client will play on these devices. I understand Native Client to target only x86, but I find it difficult to imagine Chrome OS -- Google's first direct challenge to Windows -- not being able to run Native Client applications.

A Google developer who works on Chrome posted some interesting information on Shacknews: http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=19972940#item_19972940

"We continue to work on our own extensions framework. There's still a lot to do for "version 1" but it's progressing fast. Extension auto-update is just starting to land so you won't have to manually remove/re-install extensions to update them (yay).

Mac and Linux are also progressing fast. I can't say when we hope to start getting alpha-quality versions into the Dev channel but we're hoping for Real Soon Now. They're still obviously rough but the teams are pushing them forward fast."

I'm working through my high school chemistry, physics, and biology textbooks in a self-directed manner, as I hope to challenge my provincial exams without taking the associated courses.

Working from PDF copies of my textbooks has proven surprisingly comfortable, and has offered benefits over their dead-tree brethren. Though my first read of the material is usually in the paper version of the book (if only so that I may escape my computer chair), my second note-taking pass is always from the digital copy, for I've found taking notes easier when the material is on-screen and adjacent to my text editor. Taking screenshots of illuminating diagrams and inserting them into my notes is much faster than re-sketching the diagrams by hand. The ability to search the book's text rather than thumbing through an index is appreciated. The PDF version of my physics textbook is made available on its associated Web site ( http://physicssource.ca/ ) -- the electronic copy provided there is the latest printing, which resolves numerous ambiguities and errors present in my paper copy's earlier printing.

The only downside I've encountered is the manner in which an electronic textbook tethers me to my computer. In your daughter's school's case, I doubt that this would prove a handicap to most students, so long as they were given access to their textbooks outside of school. Ideally, the textbook should be provided in an open format such as PDF or HTML -- not one of the proprietary, DRM-encumbered formats favoured by some publishers.

That is indeed fascinating. Perhaps it was some sort of phone cloning attempt ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_cloning ), in which cell phone subscribers' accounts are hijacked to make fradulent calls. I know almost nothing of the issue, but I hope someone can offer some more informed commentary.