adonovan

What’s the source? The museum’s granite facing?

The part about coal coming from dead trees during a window of time before bacteria evolved lignin digestion is no longer the scientific consensus. Such bacteria existed earlier; not all coal is high lignin; and coal still formed later. Too bad; it was a lovely story!

Sadly this wonder of nature was deduced from the 5 feathers that were all that remained after the noble creature was ingested by a turbofan engine of an airliner.

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7...

The usual answer for the macro trend is “the end of ZIRP”.

Before the Piper switchover, Google’s Perforce instance was running on one of the most expensive PCs ever built, with over $1m of DRAM. Its centralized design was not a setup one would want to copy.

The methane quantity from human legume consumption is negligible, and beans are just about the most greenhouse-efficient source of protein there is.

Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.

The most striking thing to me about IBM memos from this era is just how literate executives were. These days most VPs struggle to write a single sentence worth reading.

I was wondering whether it was still in use, and if so for how much longer. Apparently it is no longer operational but, hearteningly, has been historically preserved and is now let out as a period filming location.

https://filming.networkrail.co.uk/filming-locations/woking-e...

Flock: We’re supposed to be the surveilleurs, you see.

“API” meant “library functions” long before the first web server responded with JSON.

Double dash has long been the way to clearly indicate in plain ASCII text an em dash as distinct from a simple hyphen. So I think the author here is here emphatically reclaiming the use of the em dash while pointedly not using the Unicode character so beloved by LLMs.

What do you mean it stole your time?

Years back I was an intern in a bio lab whose ultracentrifuge achieved spin rates similar to a turbopump. On its titanium head was a bar code used to regulate the speed via a beam of light. Unfortunately the manufacturer issued some with the wrong bar code, causing them to overspin and, at one lab, undergo "rapid unexpected disassembly", sending chunks of flying titanium through concrete walls. Fortunately it was at night and no-one was hurt, but the salespeople travelled out to every customer site the next day to implement the product recall.

Brilliant!

Yeah, I get the sense “possibly for ritual use” is how anthropologists say “no idea”.

Can anyone tell whether these exposures occurred through the camera lens (from fallout particles in the sky of the depicted scenes) or in post- (or pre-) exposure handling of the film from hot dust carried by the photographer?

These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.

Broken how? Please report an issue. The latest gopls should support generic methods.

You can switch it off, or make it play one of several different ridiculous sounds.

At least here in Brooklyn a significant minority (a third?) are purchased outright, as that gives the best long term return if you can afford the initial investment, and it simplifies a later house sale (see thread above). I think some of the tax incentives only apply in that case too.

Stuart J. Russell (he of the AI textbook) claims in Human Compatible that YouTube is already an example of a runaway feedback loop between AI (YouTube's recommender "algorithm") and humanity (viewers, content producers, YouTube staff, and society at large). The AI doesn't have a body, a voice, a conscience, or a purpose yet it is busily working away to maximize engagement by changing people's minds, and in particular by bringing extremism into mainstream discourse.

Inferring pronunciation from spelling is very regular in French; the reverse, not so: there may be many ways to spell a sound like “o”, each with a different meaning.

This trend is far older than the AI era. The British magazine Private eye for many years in the 1990s had a running joke in which each issue displayed the new logos of old companies that had spent a fortune on rebranding. All of them were variations on circles.

Naomi Klein in her book No Logo interprets it as a form of abstraction away from the passé and less profitable business of whatever concrete task those industries used to do, and towards outsourcing, branding, and financialization as an end in itself.

How many parts is this skeleton disassembled into in transit? Each bone? Crazy project!

I agree. This is a most unexpected ray of hope.

Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?

Understood. My point is that the job requirements are almost mutually exclusive: must be physically and mentally fit enough for arduous travel and harsh work, yet basically suicidal.

Like enjoying earthly pleasures? The terminally ill do not make good astronauts.

I'd be surprised if there's a single person alive who would volunteer for a suicide mission to a miserable cold dark planet and could travel there for nine months in a tin can through a harsh radiation/muscle atrophy/psychological environment and arrive in any condition to conduct useful scientific work.

It seems quite common for the infrastructure teams to put up a dashboard just to keep a sense of what is going on, but it is then misinterpreted as a “leaderboard” and encourages the most prolific users to find creative ways to squander more to stay the “winner”. Management is slightly disappointed by the waste but also happy that staff are engaging with their future replacements.