cbkeller

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Diplomats suffered “concussion without concussion” and we still don't know why(newyorker.com)
24 points by cbkeller 8y ago|5 comments
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by cbkeller 8y ago
> There’s a destructive pattern inside of Agile software development of squashing individualism. Devs can’t be trusted to work solo, so pair them up. Devs can’t be trusted to think holistically about the problem at hand, so each 'st
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by cbkeller 8y ago
> any floating point unit may be Turing-complete through encoding into floating-point operations in the spirit of FRACTRAN Well that's the most interesting thing I learned today
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by cbkeller 8y ago
There are also huge variations between fields. Bio postdocs are hugely competitive and kinda brutal compared to my field, for instance.
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Geologist here! It's not just CS, definitely true for us too. I can't speak for all fields, but I do know that the unemployment rate for science PhDs is virtually nil, and the industry demand is absolutely not restricted to softwa
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Interesting to hear from someone involved. > This is the login page - users are typing in a long term stable identifier already! There are so many other considerations at work here though, and I can't imagine that they're not o
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Thanks for the tip! Interestingly enough, this appears to be browser-dependent. Apparently including a pdf in notebook markdown using an img tag like <img src="DenverUPbExampleData/KJ04-70_distribution.pdf" align="lef
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by cbkeller 8y ago
> For 250 years mycologists have tried to reconcile fungal diversity with the Linnean fantasy of a divine order throughout nature that included unambiguous species. This effort has failed and today's taxonomy rests on an unstable ph
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by cbkeller 8y ago
> many academic scientists have not been socialized to make a distinction between development and production environments Geologist here - definitely true in my field. Nonetheless, while I don't develop in notebooks at all, I do us
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by cbkeller 8y ago
There's some recent discussion here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1080.2 I don't know if the citations therein are cherry-picked, but oddly enough it seemed like mostly what you mi
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Interesting point. It looks like there may be negative consequences for eukaryotic algae / phytoplankton [e.g., 1], but on the plus side some prokaryotes are able to usefully metabolize plastics and "bioremediate" the problem
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by cbkeller 8y ago
I haven't seen much of a consensus on that one yet!
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by cbkeller 8y ago
It also looks like the claim here is something like "the total animal population has decreased by 60% on average over all studied localities since 1970" rather than the more dire "60% of all animal species have gone extinct s
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Geologist here! The report in question [1] and supplement [2] seem pretty think-tank-y, but I would say they pass the sniff test to first order (if we have a biologist or ecologist around, they could probably say better). The focus on anima
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by cbkeller 8y ago
That's really interesting. The correlation of amyloid plaques and alzheimers has always seemed to me like a classic case of the ambiguity of correlation and causality (i.e., cause or symptom?!). Sounds like the same deal with calcium i
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Quite right. Geologist here - I know a lot of folks who study climate and paleoclimate, they know what they're doing. If anything I'd say the evidence is even more solid than most well-informed people realize. edit: if anyone want
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Not the OP, but I've started putting all my first-author papers in the EarthArXiv [1]. The original ArXiv only accepts preprints from a few fields, but the Open Science Framework has recently made a federation of preprint servers that
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Geologist here. Interactive public review plus transparent peer review has become standard on the journals of the European Geophysical Union [1]. These are also open-access. [1] https://www.egu.eu/publications/open-acce
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Discovery science is definitely harder to fund than hypothesis science. To take geologic mapping as the example again, the economic ROI has fallen over the past few centuries, when there were bigger unknown areas and you were more likely to
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Happy to help if my expertise becomes relevant
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Yeah. In areas where we know so little that it's hard to make informed hypotheses, there's probably a substantial component of discovery science. It's a bit of a yin-yang situation IMO: discovery science often leads to testab
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Geologist here. This is super-important for hypothesis science. At the same time, I think one of the biggest inaccuracies in the public perception of science (and one of my pet peeves) is the idea that all science is hypothesis science. It
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by cbkeller 8y ago
33 out of the 36 results on the first page of a google shopping search for "furniture" are all from Living Spaces for me, with a pretty homogeneous aesthetic
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Yes! Just to pick one famous ophiolite, the peridotites of the Semail ophiolite in Oman are perhaps 300km * 50km * 5km from a quick look at some maps and cross sections [1], so 75000 km3 at 3300 kg/m3 comes out to about 2.5E17 kg or 2.
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by cbkeller 8y ago
oh, forgot about this paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05873 ) which makes a pretty reasonable argument for paleo-shorelines on the northern basin of the Martian dichotomy. If this is correct then it'd
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Geologist here. Can't speak to the economics, but there's no shortage of mineable olivine, mostly in areas where mantle lithosphere that was formerly below oceanic or island arc crust has been "obducted" on the continent
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Size - Mars and Mercury are both quite a bit smaller than Earth. So they lose heat faster for essentially the same reasons that your cells have to be small: smaller spheres have a higher surface area to volume ratio! While in neither case i
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Flux is awesome. One of the biggest advantages IMO is that kernels you can easily write yourself should be by default just as fast as what's built-in -- since it's all written in Julia and Julia itself is fast, without having to r
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by cbkeller 8y ago
Definitely a problem long-term, but we'd be talking in millions of years at least
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by cbkeller 8y ago
There's a bit of comparison of the two (thermal vs. non-thermal escape) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Thermal_esc... but I don't know the relative proportions on Mars. There have been

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