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I don't know if this is "better" or what you had in mind as "gains", but it's certainly entertaining for me!
The article is old news before it was written. The article mentions the previous 'success' (yield was higher than previous experiments), and that was over a year ago now. They haven't been able to reproduce the previous experiment even knowing as precisely as they can what they perceive to be the preconditions necessary for an effective reaction. It also seems that this article was written about a single experiment. They will not be able to intentionally repeat the experiment. The manner in which they're exploring the pareto front is like groping in the dark to find a light switch that has an unknown texture and conformation. It's a classic monte-carlo simulation but they have one iteration every several weeks or months, and they cannot even possibly identify all the controlling parameters, nor do they have the necessary throughput or bandwidth to succeed in their pursuit without windfall.
The low hanging fruit providing the basic harmonics of the solution were discovered well before I was even introduced to this technology (in the 70's and 80's. Coincidentally around the moment of the genesis of many of our modern treaties on weapons testing).
You are overly optimistic, a 40-60% increase in nearly nothing is still nearly nothing. The PR campaign around this event is I think more significant in its political convenience, and in white washing the purpose of the facility. There are significant discoveries that still need to be made to even make the reactions consistent, and they will not come conveniently or quickly. Once the reactions are better understood and the mechanisms can be manipulated with intent the distance between the science and a practical industry / commercial product will require even more hurdles that stretch the imagination to be overcome. For instance I cannot conceive of a practical mechanism for actually utilizing any fraction of the massive amount of energy released in a fraction of a second in a chaotic murder of wavelengths and particles. The most practical way we've yet discovered for converting neutrons to electricity is through boiling water. Grossly inefficient in other contexts, I'm not sure that has even marginal utility in this scope.
I for one am 100% sure I barely know what I'm talking about. My disclaimer is that I'm not a physics guy, and high energy density physics was only a hobby of mine at one brief point in my life. Through perspicacity and access to papers and people, this is my honest mental model of the whole thing. You're welcome to your perspective, but although you seem well informed you sound very inexperienced.
He'll tell you a different story. When you mention the "espionage / sabotage" he doesn't laugh or shake his head, it actually just outright infuriates him. Such a naive narrative only angers him because it seems to absolve the people who managed the company of outright incompetence and corruption, which is how it should be remembered.
For example: one story I vividly recall because I could never fully fathom it involved a specific female executive who was traveling for business - first class overseas. She never made her intended engagement because she was immediately arrested upon disembarking the plane. She had got drunk and (although married) decided to perform overt sexual acts with the gentleman sitting adjacent to her. On the plane. In her seat.[1]
At some point the culture of the executive at Nortel, for whatever reason, became completely incompetent and outright immoral. Rather than Huawei underhandedly perpetrating the perfect crime, it was simply the people at the head of the organization that solicited the crime to pursue their own benefit above all else.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2000/04/06/former_nortel_exec_fi...
CO2 will rise, but it will eventually necessary uncouple from it's relationship to temperature at which point some other factor we are wholy unaware of will probably do something as equally disturbing to our environmental "equilibrium".
If you transform the system in respect to time, you'll find that from some perspective almost nothing ever happened, and from another the whole thing was wildly unstable and unpredictable.
It already doesn't matter what CO2 levels are doing now. Up and to the right and how hard is probably completely irrelevant. What matters is the flux of the system, and everything points to the fact that weve already left the station. There's no unwinding this thing, and it's not going where anyone thinks it's going.
The truly conservative thing to be doing would be to prepare ourselves for the most violent future, but instead what we're trying to do is grip onto the past with our already dying hand. Weakening our heart at the very moment we need to bolster it.
Everything is going to be fine, but you and I will be dead. I assure you of that.
If you believe that I've got some beans you can buy.
This equilibrium you're chasing is much more transient than you'd like to think. Especially in the face of more and more accurate/precise observations.
If you have fresh eggs, boil them with some baking soda in the water.
For hard boiled just put cold eggs in cold water and boil them. When it boils, shut off the heat. When you can stick you hand in the water and pull them out they're done.
The impact of these dams is just incomprehensible.
The problem is the Columbia is immensely powerful, and as such it's impact on our society or environment with or without the dam create such a incomprehensible web of dependencies that it predicting the outcome would be akin to seeing the future. You can't.
The Elwha is an amazing story, but that dam was in disuse long before it was dismantled. The case for removing it was one-sided.
The dams are hugely beneficial to society. The produce energy and expedite inland commerce, and that makes us all better off. At the same time everything comes at a cost, and the costs are easily just as catastrophic.
I've seen rivers three times the size of the Columbia that have no dams. They are like the arteries of the Earth. They wend and breathe through existence itself. Heave and fall feet in hours. To see this, to be near it is to feel everything upstream. It's like looking into the night sky, but instead of making you feel small it connects you.
The Columbia is dead. I get itchy about it because we've lost that and no one even knows anymore. We long ago muted a voice that used to sing to us, but people will only consider the loss in economic terms - salmon fisheries. We can't even talk about things like humans anymore.
This is objectively false. Salmon populations are more often than not considered in decline. The fish haven't "figured it out". They marginally persist solely due to intensive management that plainly consists of atrocities for species less popular in the media [0][1], millions spent on fish ladder theatre, and hatcheries.
The dominant mechanism in support of the fisheries being hatcheries that are basically a strangely laundered welfare program for indigenous, sport and professional fishermen each to their licensed proportion.
If you live in the Dalles, and you don't know the Columbia basin damns are an ecological nightmare.. it's unconscionable.
Not to mention the displacement of indigenous peoples from important traditional regions, the complete loss of stochastic annual flows feeding nutrient cycles in the river... etc etc.
Im no eco-activist. I don't necessarily think removing the dams would improve anything for anyone at this point, but if we're going to advocate for doing things a better way in the future - let's be honest: dams are horrible. The dams on the Columbia will eventually result in no salmon, no matter how hard we try. It's inhospitable. They used to run all the way up the snake into Idaho. Into IDAHO. Never again.
It's ok to advocate for energy, and the things you believe in, but let's not be belligerent about it - be honest.
In the Astoria maritime museum (several years ago now) I remember reading a passage that was proud of "..taming the wild Columbia, and turning it into a beautiful series of lakes and streams to wonderfully facilitate shipping and recreation.."
Some hutzpah, to think we know what we're doing.
[0] https://www.audubon.org/news/the-corps-cormorants-and-cull [1] https://www.marinemammalcenter.org/news/response-to-columbia...
I must admit I've always sort of blindly believed the same thing, but here I am year after year accumulating and submitting my own absurd set of turbo-tax button smashes.
Honestly I have trouble figuring out how much I owe myself. I would believe that they have some core set of data linked to my SSN, and every time I submit they run some sort of markov-chain statistical model that says - "meh, looks pretty close. No need for further review. Please pay the refund to the latest identity scam." or "red flag for actual review".
100% chance the IRS is understaffed, running legacy spaghetti, managed by folks just trying not to be the next scape-goat so they can go home to their family and watch the next episode of what everyone at work is talking about.
Hierarchies are still important, but now they're just training wheels in many instances.
I can't imagine what would happen if you gave every citizen 10k. I would think there would likely be something akin to a revolution that may or may not result in a more robust economy. What the gov't is doing by giving so much money to existing companies that have already failed vs individuals with the possibility of failing is very much protecting the existing social structure of society.
Corporations like these are a hierarchy that generate implicit social striations in our society. By maintaining this regardless of the fundamental success of the product or competence of the management, they act only to preserve the class structure enforced by the institution and thus the stability of society in a configuration with marginal utility as regards productivity.
They're clearly ensuring their own future.
"... we've found 19 cases of covid-19 in [insert place]", or "35 deaths from coronavirus" deprived of context has nearly no utility.
I'd be willing to wager that if there was a good enough historic and near enough to realtime dataset of individuals entering the ER with pneumonia, and this disease is actually atypical for the season: that the ramp actually started more than a month ago in some regions.
Although I do wonder if the necessity of some pre-existing condition to perpetuate the development of the disease might present some type of choke in the significance of the anomalous nature of the thing..
Anyone know of any dataset like this? It would be really interesting to consider.
It began simply because Apple said "...iBEACON.." and everyone corporate wanted the new buzzword in their portfolio to let people know how hot/hip/tech they were (toys -r- us considered it for awhile) so they could pull the kids away from the internet and back into brick-and-mortar. How can we use these? What are they good for? No one really cared, they just wanted them in the store and we were there to sell them that (at a premium).
In 2015 - indoor location was bogus. Everyone in this forum seems confident that there are multiple ways you can determine location with Wifi (round trip packet time) or bluetooth (RSSI). A cacophony of radio in a catastrophically noisy environment does not work to provide reliable location information.
In fact - it was so bad, that there were a handful of other equally unrealistic solutions being pedaled by everyone from universities to light-bulb manufacturers. One such solution was to profile the accessible space of a building using a phone's compass, and then use the observations from a client device compass to identify how generated patterns correlated to the profile for the building.
The torrent of data you see pouring from your phone to the service via wireshark is real-time sensor data that is being used to feed a service side bayesian / markov-chain / monte carlo / kalman-particle filter / keyword soup monstrosity trying to generate some possible marginal confidence in a probable location. We found that this system was most effective in turning your phone into a pocket warmer, but sold like hot-cakes in a B2B setting wherein the intended end user had absolutely no voice.
Corporate wanted to buy it so they could sell advert-space (pop-up coupons) to affiliates. So we sold them something that worked barely well enough to provide a one-popup demo to potential interested parties. The affiliates bought the magic, corporate paid our company an arbitrarily large quantity of dollars for the service.
A deployment of thousands of coin-cell driven beacons per store, placed within reach of bored youths, maintained by an underpaid associate staff is of only questionable utility.
On a scale of things to worry about, ranging from nuclear holocaust to e. coli in your produce - this ranks a solid -3. In fact, in the 4 years since I've worked in this field I think the only advancement that has been made is that it's harder for third parties to sell because no one can do it well, so why not just do it in-house? It's cheaper and has the same garbage result.
If you think I'm wrong - go do it yourself. All these signals are easily grep-ed within any store (there's no way to make it proprietary), and you can create your own model and out-sell the proprietor. Surprise me. With an actual, viable client-oriented product (and assuming users actually want reliable indoor location) you'll make bundles selling it to the valley. Everyone is trying to do it (even cisco tried for awhile) - no one has.
Michael Kwet has read all the marketing copy, and rewritten it for popular consumption as a product. The insight/value provided by these systems is far more sparse than implied.
Buyer beware. Seriously, don't do this to yourself. I read this because streaming is an enigma to me, but this post is suicide.
If you want something this fragile for yourself, just pay this guy to do it for you.
In one vein, nature in it's modern form can simply be rationalized simply as 'uncontrived'. In this respect the article is certainly insightful in that even contrived systems can have emergent properties that cannot be contrived, that must be something other than 'man made'. However nature has always had a noble connotation, and emergent complications that are inarguably [poorly controlled / anticipated / understood] that only stand to ultimately reenforce the futility of our ambition will ever be deemed noble.
Nature is saturated with self organized critical systems (much akin to traffic) but I don't know know that we can see ourselves as pebbles in an avalanche, to do so is unkindly.
R's documentation is terse and unorganized. Anyone who says different is obviously someone with more experience with the language (which is not how it should be). When people complain about the documentation it's because they're trying to learn, and if the documentation isn't together learning is painful. Learning R is painful.
Next- Learning is painful, and the documentation is horrible because: the actual built in functions or extensions are a nightmare of arguments that [sometimes do/sometimes don't work]. If you plot x and you don't want the key to show up then set auto.key=FALSE, if you plot class(x) = [something else] and don't want the key to show up set colorkey=FALSE, if you want to layer plots: load this library and format your data to a new S3/S4 (object) type, add them together, then plot them (without the library you can't add these objects)... In case you didn't catch that: I wanted to layer the plots so I had to load a function that made the objects I wanted to plot add, not load a library that would change the plotting driver.
The community around R is disenchanted. If you get into the right place on the web and ask about a feature that doesn't exist: more often than not I've seen the typical guru response of the type "It doesn't work that way - that's a feature, not a problem." Change is bad, and in my experience generally discouraged.
Finally (and perhaps this really doesn't need to be said) the more I've been working with it - the more I feel like the reason it is so popular is because you can load it up read your data set, google some of the more central functions, and poof - get that set of characteristic statistical answers everyone needs to have in their [presentation/HW assignment]. If you look at the answers in this thread you get 2 types A) it's impossible to use, B) it does standard statistical analysis really easily. In my narrow world view it appeals to people who don't work with software a lot - professionals who need some automated numbers on the side without hiring someone to do it right.
That all said, I still do use R. You can do some nifty statistical analysis pretty easily and push it to a vector plot, pop it open with your favorite editor and post edit it super pretty (in a few days).