comicjk

20 ms·

181.
by comicjk 7y ago
No, because computer chips don't operate at 100°C (let alone 300°C like a nuclear reactor). Low-temperature heat flows contain little usable work. Typically the best option is to dump the spare heat into the nearest body of water, or i
182.
by comicjk 7y ago
If you see smart people not doing something they could easily do, maybe it's not so easy? Example: the American Council on Science and Health put together a ranking of science journalism sources, putting Nature at the top, and Nature r
183.
by comicjk 7y ago
Well, I'm a scientist and I'm talking about it... If scientists knew how to fix science journalism, we would. It's not just climate. Cancer research and diet research have the same problem, and if battery capacity had doubled
184.
by comicjk 7y ago
This is a problem of science journalism. We don't want all scientists' predictions to agree - there should be a range that reflects the real uncertainty. But combine this with the demand for big headlines, and you have a broken wa
185.
by comicjk 7y ago
Temperatures of 37 C and 36.6 C are barely distinguishable with an ordinary thermometer, and both are within the normal range of human body temperatures (37.32-38.76 C). www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6456186
186.
by comicjk 7y ago
If you can find someone to pay for you to work on it.
187.
by comicjk 7y ago
People with young children do worry about them drowning in the bath and take steps to prevent it. A better example of underfocused deaths, to contrast with the overfocus on unusual murders, would be car accidents.
188.
by comicjk 7y ago
I think that article is based on outdated information. More recently people have started to look at plastic released on the open sea through fishing, and found it to be bigger than all land-based sources. https://www.theguardian.
189.
by comicjk 7y ago
We pay other countries to take our garbage only because we prefer to imagine it is being recycled. It's not like we don't have enough landfill space here, if we were willing to treat it as the trash that it is.
190.
by comicjk 7y ago
Bridge engineers don't have to fear the progress of science working against them, but computer security is not alone here. Consider designing body armor or military aircraft and hoping that the state of the art will stay the same! An a
191.
by comicjk 7y ago
Just to clarify why these aren't used everywhere: heat-to-power devices act as insulation (compared to just letting the heat escape). If you have something that you're trying to keep cool, like a CPU, a system that shunts heat str
192.
by comicjk 7y ago
There are a lot of factors you're not considering. Reducing heat output is good, yes, but putting a layer between your chips and their heat sink is bad! Even though the total heat output is lower, the chip temperature will be higher, b
193.
by comicjk 7y ago
You're optimizing only one of the three important things about a charity. True, the absolute worst charities are those with massive overhead, basically scams. But just avoiding those scams doesn't mean your donation will do the mo
194.
by comicjk 7y ago
In my field, computational chemistry, you are definitely right: when we have more parallelism available, we go for increased accuracy and scope, not reduced latency. The latency is set by human schedules (a coffee break, overnight, etc). So
195.
by comicjk 7y ago
Picking charities, much like picking stocks, is not for amateurs. Now I just give to GiveWell and let them handle it.
196.
by comicjk 7y ago
This is historically doubtful. The most famous anti-heliocentric researcher, Galileo, was a professor at the University of Padua. This university relied on the Church at least as much as a modern US university relies on the NSF. Furthermore
197.
by comicjk 7y ago
A disadvantage: in my experience as a sweaty person, fleece tends to stink after exposure to sweat, while wool resists this more.
198.
by comicjk 7y ago
You aren't taking into account the energy cost of separating substances from each other (understandable, since this isn't widely taught outside of chemical engineering). You can't get electricity by separating dilute carbonic
199.
by comicjk 7y ago
There could be sampling issues, since you can't measure the whole ocean at once. The CO2 in the atmosphere is linked to the carbonic acid in the ocean, though, and both indicators point in the same direction.
200.
by comicjk 7y ago
As long as the big ML libraries support these strategies, people will use them. The choice of user language is not critical. Tensorflow/PyTorch are basically an ML-specific programming model with a Python interface.
201.
by comicjk 7y ago
This is a good point: the tradeoff for learning vs doing depends on how good a learner the individual is. You're describing people who are not efficient at learning. Therefore allocating a lot of learning to them is a bad idea. Maybe t
202.
by comicjk 7y ago
It doesn't have the range for useful travel. It's designed to get the vehicle up to speed, using almost all its energy, and then drop away. Think of the first stage of a rocket.
203.
by comicjk 7y ago
I use a site called "ArXiv Sanity Preserver" - it's mainly for machine learning papers based on its current audience, but it provides pretty useful filtering based on user reviews. In any case, you can still estimate the qual
204.
by comicjk 7y ago
Computers have been able to do arithmetic faster, better, and cheaper than humans for decades. But we still teach children to do arithmetic, and grade them on how well they do it (almost never as well as a computer). Why? Because doing more
205.
by comicjk 7y ago
If some more education is needed to make people informed voters, maybe we should add a couple more years to the end of high school. Effectively, community college for all. After all, we expect everyone to be a voter, not just those who go
206.
by comicjk 7y ago
Hurricane Sandy hit NYC during a spring tide, flooding downtown and knocking out power and a lot of subway tunnels. It cost 53 lives and about $19 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_in_...
207.
by comicjk 7y ago
Alcohol is more deadly than most drugs (smaller ratio between the effective dose and the lethal dose). Yet a little alcohol each week is safe and a part of life for many people. I think we can blame a seller for selling too much to an indiv
208.
by comicjk 7y ago
The price has been rising steadily since August. I think by the time you read about it on Hacker News, the smart money has bought already, and the price of the ETF is as likely to go down as up from here.
209.
by comicjk 7y ago
Repeating it doesn't make it sound more plausible. If you have evidence, please take it to a journalist - this would be an explosive and worthwhile story! In a comments section, though, it's indistinguishable from mere slander aga
210.
by comicjk 7y ago
I signal turns with my arm when biking, especially left turns. Otherwise I would be slowing and moving unpredictably, which doesn't seem safe. Unfortunately this isn't common behavior in NYC - even cars often fail to signal their

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