rflrob

28 ms·

271.
by rflrob 11y ago
I assume they meant hack in the friendly, Hacker News-type sense instead of the malicious, my-grandpa-thinks-someone-hacked-his-Google sense.
272.
by rflrob 11y ago
Getting the scientific community to agree to almost anything makes herding cats look like a military parade. Even within a field, there are wildly varying opinions, and some fields tend to have higher or lower means. And thus far, I'm
273.
by rflrob 11y ago
> Hammer did not get especially far, but concluded that the patterns in the two undeciphered notes seemed to be non-random. I wonder if there's any research into the kinds of sequences that feel random, as opposed to those that actu
274.
by rflrob 11y ago
The game: "Return to the play area" Me: "Or else what?"
275.
by rflrob 11y ago
I think the issue is less that you can't legally patent them and more that because of the relatively high mutation rate in both phage and bacteria, patenting is too slow to be practically useful. Patents are good if the thing you'
276.
by rflrob 11y ago
> "In our academic lab, if we knew how to be faster, more rigorous, or both, we'd be doing it." There are some cases where it's obvious how to be faster (and occasionally more rigorous): judiciously throw money at the
277.
by rflrob 11y ago
I wonder about causation and correlation here. Presumably children whose parents can afford to pay for an extra year of childcare before sending them off to school can provide environments that also tend to produce self-regulation. One co
278.
by rflrob 11y ago
Depends on how you count. A quick scan of the paper and my fairly fresh knowledge of academic sequencing prices suggests you could do the sequencing for around $3k, with reagents (assuming you don't count the cost of unused reagents).
279.
by rflrob 11y ago
By participating in the debate, presumably Lessig could have at least gotten his issue out there. As others pointed out months ago in reference to Sanders[1], a "win" wouldn't necessarily be getting the nomination, but in ge
280.
by rflrob 11y ago
I would be curious whether electric planes significantly reduce the carbon footprint of flying. My intuition is that you wouldn't be dumping CO2 and H2O (both fairly potent greenhouse gases) directly into the upper atmosphere, so it wo
281.
Unsolved problems with the common core(liorpachter.wordpress.com)
75 points by rflrob 11y ago|21 comments
282.
by rflrob 11y ago
I don't want to suggest that what the school and police did to this guy is anything but terrible, but I suspect that he'll actually be fine in the long run. If I were an admissions officer at MIT, I'd jump at the chance to a
283.
Lens Writer: an online editor designed for writing scientific manuscripts(elifesciences.org)
3 points by rflrob 11y ago|0 comments
284.
by rflrob 11y ago
It reads to me not so much as an ad hominem as an explanation of why he sounds so bitter towards academia. "He's only had one second author pub" is, almost unequivocally, a statement that he hasn't been academically succ
285.
by rflrob 11y ago
It seems insane to me that naloxone isn't over the counter everywhere. It's a drug with (as far as my limited reading goes) literally no potential for abuse. To be fair, it has no purpose unless you are taking opiates, but it seem
286.
Chris Hadfield's ode to the ‘delightful impossibility’ of the Martian Chronicles(theglobeandmail.com)
2 points by rflrob 11y ago|0 comments
287.
by rflrob 11y ago
I wish I could up vote this more! For those who don't have the three minutes, the "punchline" is: "I know those forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking abou
288.
by rflrob 11y ago
In the absence of any other context, saying "X has a conflict of interest because Y" implies "and therefore X is unlikely to be believed." Yes, presumably the UN does have a conflict of interest here. However, as Chola
289.
by rflrob 11y ago
Lucky you . My advisor has a reputation of not even reading theses ( http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-th... ) which makes it hard to gauge what the thesis should even be.
290.
by rflrob 11y ago
I would think the technology in question is a sensitive detector. In that case, it could work either passively for the exolife search, or in an active SAR situation.
291.
by rflrob 11y ago
I am impressed that the effort to enforce a corporate monoculture (if we want to be uncharitable to Hsieh) has such a humane escape clause—3+ months severance and COBRA is nothing to sneeze at. I would be curious to see if there's any
292.
by rflrob 12y ago
Sutton's law: that's where the money is. Even if it's not going to make you rich, someone has to pay for the research, and funders want to have funded big ideas. Your last question is about right as well. All the most success
293.
by rflrob 12y ago
> We’re going to go out on a limb here and guesstimate that the remaining “maybe” answers can, given enough time and effort, be turned into “yes” or “no” answers, and that these will be distributed similarly to the 20:17 ratio of the ful
294.
by rflrob 12y ago
There are rare instances of people coming back to academia after being very successful in industry. It's hard to say whether the rate is low because there's a bias against it from the hiring committees, or if people are actually g
295.
by rflrob 12y ago
They do that because their "better" colleagues from the top tier also get the jobs at the top tier. Note that "better" likely includes a healthy dose of luck.
296.
by rflrob 12y ago
I was at an astrobiology conference this week, and one of the ideas that we discussed is that life on Earth is good at finding and exploiting gradients for energy harvesting---thermal, chemical, even electrical. I'm not sure how to wei
297.
by rflrob 12y ago
The same was true of singles bars before we had OKTinderList. Even if neither person really likes singles bars per se, having a culturally agreed upon way to meet people has some value, and once you've met your person of choice there,
298.
by rflrob 12y ago
Causation is dead simple---if you can directly manipulate the putative causal variable. Otherwise, you're left with the old saw about correlation, and while you might be able to tell a story about why there should be causation, the bes
299.
by rflrob 12y ago
I could rationalize the message ratio as sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If she sent many messages, she was probably already interested in him for some reason, and so would be more likely to rate him highly at the end. As a methodologic
300.
by rflrob 12y ago
For once, a counter example to Betteridge's Law! http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlin...

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