jballanc

30 ms·

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by jballanc 10y ago
I always find it funny that the summer ManhattanHenges (there are two, one as the sun's inclination increases and one as it decreases) are so celebrated, yet the winter versions of the phenomena (when the sun lines up with the city gri
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by jballanc 10y ago
Sure, integration is usually the hard part, but that's engineering for ya'. The point is that there's no new science at play. In other words, this is less like going from horse-and-buggy to the moon, and more like going from
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by jballanc 10y ago
How about a demonstration system spanning the island of Manhattan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor... The thing about hyperloop is that none of the technology is new...or even recent! The p
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by jballanc 10y ago
Well for one thing without them we wouldn't have Penguin diagrams! ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_diagram )
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by jballanc 10y ago
I find various accounts of nuclear accidents fascinating because, as the intro of the article alludes to, they often involve complex systems undergoing complex failure scenarios. Then there's SL-1 ( https://en.wikipedia.org&#
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by jballanc 10y ago
Probably the most popular of the historical-fiction variety are "Muhteşem Yüzyıl" and its spin-off "Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem". "Behzat Ç." is a pretty good police drama. The one that really sort of kicked off the
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by jballanc 10y ago
Honestly, you know what? This is fine. The insistence of US media companies to continue geographically restricting content in an effort to make a few extra bucks has done more to kill US cultural imperialism than decades of "home grown
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by jballanc 10y ago
Right, but this wouldn't be as big of a problem for science if it weren't for the fact that the tradition of scientific journals was already focused on publishing positive results. There are efforts underway that may eventually
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by jballanc 10y ago
I disagree. It is a very easy question to answer so long as you realize that "science" is a subset of "knowledge". It has been accepted for quite some time now that falsifiability is the key factor distinguishing scien
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by jballanc 10y ago
sigh ...Do you want the short answer or the long version? The short answer is: peer pressure. The longer version requires a look back at the history of scientific publishing and how it's been perverted in more recent times. Originally
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by jballanc 10y ago
There's more to it than just testing. If there weren't, then I'd be inclined to agree with the author. What many people fail to realize is that the full form of the scientific method (when applied properly) is: * make an obse
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by jballanc 10y ago
Not to mention the researchers' and post-docs' and students' time. By not paying to store it, you're risking the possibility that all of this money is essentially flushed down the toilet by a software bug because it ca
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by jballanc 10y ago
The real takeaway lesson from this research should be the vital importance of Open Data to the modern scientific enterprise: > "lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices" that prevent most of the discipline's body
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by jballanc 10y ago
FiveThirtyEight did a really great piece (much better written and more reasonable than this article) expanding on what you identify as the problem: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-technology-not-even-t... In sho
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by jballanc 10y ago
The USDA has a good page on this: https://www.ars.usda.gov/sites/monarch/ The "cautionary tale" is that releasing GMO crops before their full impact has been studied and assessed only adds fuel to the GM
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by jballanc 10y ago
Sure, there are many, many nuances surrounding the whole GMO debate. It turns out that while bt-Corn could pose a threat to Monarchs, in practice (in the wild) the risk is negligible. (One might also ponder how to weigh protection of an
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by jballanc 10y ago
Pick two: 1. Feed the world 2. Produce food organically 3. Don't genetically modify foods Before the Green Revolution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution ) the world was facing a truly bleak scenario th
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by jballanc 10y ago
Assuming that you can avoid the problems of "old" cities by simply starting out with the right "new" city is like assuming that you can avoid scaling a web application by starting from the very beginning building micro-s
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by jballanc 10y ago
Ah! This is where I get to pull out one of my all time favorite Wikipedia graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supranational_European_Bo... ...ya know, just in case you weren't confused enough already!
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by jballanc 10y ago
Why not work remotely?
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by jballanc 10y ago
I believe the fact that seismic events can trigger other seismic events along the same fault system is well known. What is still up for debate is how soon, how far away, and how large. I've heard it said that the only way you can tell
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by jballanc 11y ago
Reminds me of the "Six Stages of Debugging": http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/
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by jballanc 11y ago
The problem, of course, is that the salaries of most supporters of the Republican party would not be impacted at all by most measures that would be taken to curtail emissions. The salaries of the leaders (and, more importantly, their back
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More Turkish women consider writing code as career(hurriyetdailynews.com)
1 points by jballanc 11y ago|0 comments
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by jballanc 11y ago
I've avoided doing so until now, but at this point I have to assume that you've only read the introductory paragraph of TFA and no further. The comment about only passing on half of an individual's genes is the author attempt
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by jballanc 11y ago
Apologies and much appreciation for the introduction of some interesting, and very much important, models from evolutionary biology. I fear my tone was somewhat poisoned by that of the grandparent comment. Wanting to learn about evolution i
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by jballanc 11y ago
Except that's not how evolution works. You can't just randomly decide to "count backward" and you definitely can't ignore the fact that ancestors overlap. You might look up "The 7 Daughters of Eve". In s
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by jballanc 11y ago
The amount of genetic material passed on does not remain the same. Each offspring is an independent event, and which half of the genes gets passed along is selected randomly. So if an asexual organism has genes "A B C", then both
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by jballanc 11y ago
We all agree that sexual reproduction is advantageous over a long time scale. The question is what about a short time scale. Even with selective breeding, it'll be at least two (and more likely 3-5) generations before you could get
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by jballanc 11y ago
You're assuming that a population of asexual organisms was mixed with a population of sexual organisms. In reality, asexual reproduction came first, so the inability of asexual reproduction to overcome a large contingent of sexual orga

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