brownbat

33 ms·

241.
by brownbat 7y ago
This is such a pointed reference that I can't tell if you're just being ironic. In a very loose sense, PR is the same algorithm universities use, evaluate quality of some content based on the number of references to that content.
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by brownbat 7y ago
More and more I care far more about latency than throughout. I want responsiveness, I don't want my traffic to circumnavigate the globe, and inconsistent pings can signal other qos issues.
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by brownbat 7y ago
New Hampshire Public Radio and Outside/In just spun off a podcast on Lyme disease, Patient Zero: https://www.patientzeropodcast.com/ I've been really impressed with the quality of journalism from Taylor Quimby, Sa
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Time to Get Serious about Tick-Borne Diseases(blogs.scientificamerican.com)
484 points by brownbat 7y ago|285 comments
245.
by brownbat 7y ago
Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA. The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?" The ape generally replied that she was bored a
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by brownbat 7y ago
"Foucault's Pendulum" by Eco deeply impacted how I interacted with ideas. I took it as a parable about the danger of mixing dogmas or untestable hypotheses with crowds, conspiracy theories in that case. Ultimately, probably a
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by brownbat 7y ago
An AV that alarmed on unpatched vulnerabilities might be better. Attackers will resignature their code to evade everything on VT, then spam the world to hit whoever hasn't patched. For ransomware anyway. If they're targeting you s
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by brownbat 7y ago
Interestingly, the American roots of free speech come from across the Atlantic. Milton's Areopagitica, J. S. Mill, and Voltaire all contributed to the American foundations on this topic. The Constitution was written in light of centuri
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by brownbat 7y ago
There's a lot of open space available, but transportation doesn't evenly distribute itself among the available space. There will be clustering points because people want to go the same places or use the same thoroughfares, and tho
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by brownbat 7y ago
I was curious about this, but the only research I could find points the other way. For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3395354/
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by brownbat 7y ago
They aren't pure ghg studies, they talk about water consumption and landfilling. Your response seems to imply you throw your bags in the ocean. If you don't do that, the analysis comes out differently.
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by brownbat 7y ago
I know it's a surprising result, but this is a well studied topic, so there actually is a lot of evidence out there, and the scientific consensus seems to indicate that paper bags have a much higher impact than you might expect. You sh
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by brownbat 7y ago
> Some people were there for an adventure, some for money, and some to get away from their problems. It turns out, their problems followed them. This sounds like a great tagline for a novel.
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by brownbat 7y ago
Another factor - there are probably a few billion people in Asia in rapidly growing economies who need a hedge against all their savings suddenly becoming worthless due to local instability. Suppose you are planning your future, and you thi
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by brownbat 7y ago
Yeah, it's a bit like "second order" wisdom of the crowds. First order: "How many jelly beans are in this jar?" Second order: "What percentage of people will get the wrong answer to this question about Pennsylv
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by brownbat 7y ago
Interesting point. Outside/In Radio has a few episodes you might like, one series on trying to turn invasive species into culinary delicacies, to put pressure back on those populations: http://outsideinradio.org/shows&#
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by brownbat 7y ago
I want to be careful, this could get holy war-ish... So I do not want to sell anyone on changing their view. This isn't advocacy. But just want to provide one illustration of why someone may prefer Fahrenheit. When I travel, hotel room
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by brownbat 7y ago
You could generate a key that way, but then we'd expect pre-distribution of each side. That would help confirm identities to both sides - if the courier and drop don't know each other, they just match the bill halves before dealin
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by brownbat 7y ago
That University disconnect is powerful and cuts across issues. I remember hearing a freshman lawmaker talk about transitioning from other fields into politics. The first thing campaign advisers did was cut all references to advanced degrees
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by brownbat 7y ago
I especially liked the points about how often we vary our criticism of journalism based on the topic. Reminded me a lot of Gell Mann amnesia, which I catch myself suffering from a little too often: https://en.wikipedia.org/w
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by brownbat 7y ago
How many drops tried to claim they didn't get any money or that the courier forged a receipt before they invented physical nonrepudiation? And it's nonrepudiation without identity, the identifying info is destroyed in the transact
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by brownbat 7y ago
Content satisfaction was more important when they ran a service where you spent several days waiting for and returning a disc. The metrics shifted. Subscriber retention just isn't that tightly correlated with them identifying hidden ge
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by brownbat 7y ago
USB has become an odd sort of universal standard where everyone's best bet is to stick with the cable that came with the device.
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by brownbat 7y ago
I'm a big fan of that study. It suggests there may be an opportunity for a company to push rooftop solar for big strip malls and other large footprint single owner buildings - they aren't utility scale, but the install efficiencie
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by brownbat 7y ago
"Joel got the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a friend of Sean Lennon who had just turned 21 who said 'It's a terrible time to be 21!' Joel replied to him, 'Yeah, I
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by brownbat 7y ago
Agreed, this echoes Rosling's points in videos and in Factfulness about how societies actually progress. India will have a special challenge from mosquitoes and diseases like dengue and malaria, but maybe the best approach to malaria w
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by brownbat 7y ago
That thread should be the link. We need more clear and calm explainers like that from scientists.
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by brownbat 7y ago
> not wanting to read books that parents would buy for 4-year-old kids Similarly, children's books can be great for learning a foreign language, except that they're children's books. It's hard to find simple language
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by brownbat 7y ago
Fascinating. In the lead up to that, passenger trains used to be heavily subsidized by the mail cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office Postal employees would sort the mail while it traveled. Parallel p
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by brownbat 7y ago
> allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend I agree companies should be forced to tell the truth to their customers, but in all cases where they're asking for details about the customer service rep? That could

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