China: USTC Researchers Discover Cheaper Approach to Producing Hydrogen
The only conclusive thing you can say about pop growth -> econ growth causal relation is that it is inconclusive. You can argue tech (econ) -> pop growth easier in many ways than the other direction. Noone can disagree indust revolution helped populations grow.
Impeachment proceedings would energize centrists a little more and help Biden to get nom, and he would lose the general in a big way. Or Bernie gets nom has more of a chance in gen (but still with disadvant). Either way I dont care. 1st opt centrists will get a major hit tho.
Is there enough to impeach: no. After Russia hoax this is another line that helps unify Dems and cuddle centrist losers.
If politics were not a concern, I'd replace socsec with UBI, completely, paying nothing extra. Society has no obligation to take better care of its elderly, it has a higher resp to support its young, so they can learn, form families, open businesses easier.
Jordanson Peterson... hiding behind his laptop like a little bitch.. Watching the Zizek debate. It's glorious.
I don't want to be too unfair on Jordanson Peterson. It's a general attack laid on cons that they are idiots. It's sad they have to defend themselves on intellectual grounds so much bcz the other side keeps attacking them that way. Their angle was never intellectual.
The con stance, which comes naturally to a lot of ppl, with its family, country, etc. is almost the absence of intellectualism. Some parts of the left attack them from that direction tho bcz they are devoid of ideas themselves.
elon can stay irrational longer than he can stay solvent. $TSLA
— skabooshka (@skabooshka) May 6, 2018
— Marco Zocca (@ocramz_yo) April 20, 2019
@evandeneykel
"To the woman on the plane with the screaming baby: pay no attention to the assholes glaring at you like you’re doing something wrong. You are awesome, and traveling alone with children is hard. Assholes: buy some headphones and mind your fucking business."
@matthewstoller
If we don't charge $300k a year for cancer drugs and $2700 for an ambulance ride and randomly bill you tens of thousands for an emergency room aspirin then you might go to the doctor too much.
@diff_eq
"The first thing people did with early electronic computers was numerically solve differential equations."
Damn. Now that's what I'm talking bout.. the true path to AGI...
2-year postdoc position on pattern formation with Peter van Heijster @QUT. Applications close April 30. See https://t.co/9Nrp1sOLzb for details.
— Applied Math Opportunities (@MathApplied) April 19, 2019
I still think Un wants to keep his existing pile (US can sell that) and only negotiate on further development. Hence his hints on restarting development recently. If he times escalation for 2020, it will be major pain in the ass for the WH.
I think Mr Mustache got slammed after the NK Vietnam debacle. He had the afterglow of a man who had a new asshole torn up right afterwards.
Did they try too hard to push for denuke?
If funny money through speculative credit is given to speculators and they made bunch of money which gov taxed and spent, when after a crisis that money disappears (it was bubble money) and tax revenue decreases the cuts made to services is not austerity.
Teachers are a weird problem for the industrial left. They keep looking at them as "wage earners" which they are not. We expect quality from these ppl not pressing a knob over and over.
I don't like what Israel is doing in Palestine, but for US, Israel is the natural ally.
I wonder if I really bust my ass I can contribute something to molecular chemistry... So far my sci output is one thesis, number crunching / applied math for another thesis (economics), finding / reporting one error in a statistics text book. Basic research.. ? Hmmm
@Hipster_Trader
"The more than half of Americans with less than $1,000 in savings are unimpressed with the NASDAQ surpassing its all time closing high"
“It’s physics,” he said, adding that to charge an EV with the same amount of energy in the same amount of time as a gasoline car, you’d need a charger powerful “enough to run a small city”.
Fantastic. I can't wait existing approaches going belly up
"Silicon Valley's Next Target: Disrupt the Construction and Real Estate Industries"
I hope this election will see the end of "we'll get business to give ...[insert social good]...to its employees" to provide for citizens. A particular kind of centrist cancer set in the Democratic Party which saw businesses at the center of all things.
So naturally Reps wanted to free biz, Dems wanted to burden them. But biz should not be the center of social help. Free college, M4A, nationalized transport, security operate outside them.
LMAO
"Prediction regarding Peter Buttigieg: this candidacy will expose the major faultiness between white gay men and the rest of the LGBTQ community."
@lucalucchesi10
Without credit creation for asset purchases, and the thereby created asset price inflation, alternative asset managers like Blackstone or KKR would be out of business. Young people even in Germany are now struggling to enter the middle class. Try buying or even renting in Munich
The American right-wing: so pro-life they’ll kill for it. https://t.co/vntxZL2AMk
— Ana Kasparian (@AnaKasparian) April 10, 2019
they’re going to get her murdered https://t.co/DvCk85q226
— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) April 10, 2019
@EmmaVigeland
"The people who think Cersei is a feminist icon are the same people who think defense contractors having female CEOs is progress."
Fahrvergnügen
Autogramm Mercedes GLC F-Cell: Der frisst Kilometer wie ein Diesel. https://t.co/24Zpk7Vtm1 via @SPIEGELONLINE
— Stephan Parlow (@StephanParlow) April 15, 2019
Just remembered TR nat anthem has fascistic overtones (written in 1920s). It talks about a "heroic race". Which race? What kind of color is tigga color?
These ppl are frozen in time.
Fans who complain abt some DC movies; this game is almost as good as a movie. That's some great facial motion capture work!
Haven't read a book, with paper pages and cover and things for ages. Not missing it.
Centrism is not a program or a coherent set of beliefs. It's an elite pathology concerned with offering people the absolute minimum institutional power is willing to concede at a given time (which is often less than nothing) and calling this "progress".
A: Savage
Q: Wouldn't copyrights impede the development of art by reducing funding for artists, authors?
A: One of the reasons I comfortably push for "zero copyrights + reward-like free art" is seeing how generous people are on the Net for those things. Just watch one of those live shows on Youtube with its "superchats" (money given in the chat window accompanied by a question / comment), from viewers. $$ rains on them like a motherlover. In one show a viewer dropped a wad (digitally speaking) so huge, tuber was speechless for a while. Not sure what the amount was, maybe in the thousands. But there is amazing potential out there. And this is for a random dude talking. Imagine the rewards for a big-tent professional well-made movie, art.
Q: A lot of your approaches are less-restriction-beforehand-reward-afterhand.
A: Yes; I instinctively like these approaches bcz it provides more freedom, plus it can scale. Let's have social nets with zero censoring (and are distributed, truly peer-to-peer), less focus on pre-filters means dissemination, discussion is faster. Filters are installed on the clients,. and even the creation of filter packages would be open, there should be competition among them, so ppl can boast "I am the maintainer of FamilyPG2019 filter package [which filters out X,Y but not Z]". Whichever package you like, you download it, and install it. If you think abt it, filtering does belong as close to consumer as possible. At home parents decide, at work IT managers / CEO decide.
Q: But if you lose copyrights on imaginary characters (say superheros, Star Trek) that would mean anyone can make such art, degrading the quality.
A: Righht, and current approach to copyright did SUCH wonders for Star Trek (one example). The franchise appears fukked beyond repair at this moment, such that its comedy counterpart (The Orville -Star Trek TNG with Fart Jokes-) is doing better Trek than Trek right now. We all see what is going on with Star Trek Discovery (some call it Disco, some call it STD, for short), and Jar Jar Abrahams movies with its alternate universe, multiverse. And one reason for such meanderings was the fact that because of corporate necessities / legal issues parts of Trek license remained somewhere, other parts somewhere else, lawyers literally told STD to make the show "20% different", which contributed to their change in direction fans ended up hating. Veering off canon also hurts your merchandise sales. Oh, and let's not forget these new shows also had to be Woke and SJW compliant now which meant they are 50% dumber by definition. But that's for another post.
It seems Trek, franchise based movies would be much better off without copyrights. Who would dare to make a Spiderman movie which is not sanctioned by Stan Lee, or whoever is the standard bearer at Marvel? And if they did who would watch it? Plus when fans generate content on established canon, it's a good thing for the franchise. Star Wars and Trek benefited greatly from such fan generated fiction. George Lucas fought the fans on such derivative work for a while, but later gave up, and it turned out for the better.
I am very serious on this. This is not a cherry-on-top nice-to-have position. We need this. We need to reduce friction, increase dissemination, increase scale. Otherwise we are fukked. No patents, no copyrights.
Q: Critics say it is unfair to have a trans woman competing in female sport with a biologically male body.
A: Critics are right
They might argue back "well these are just some divisions, categorizations, why do they matter so much?". By that logic male / female division is also arbitrary, why worry about that also? So the problem is further categorization on existing categories become complicated because of the first one. Let's look at that first categorization: Should men compete against women in all sports? No.
We are also seeing a problem of finer-and-finer categorization. The answer to that is simple: trans athletes can compete against other trans athletes.
We need to humanize education more than we need to personalize learning
A: Ed should be reoriented around access to quality. No need for hand waving, smiles, flailing, etc. A researcher w some teaching ability in any subject is the best person to teach that subject. Get their lecture videos, distribute them to kids. Done.
"But I had a great teacher in high school". This is not about your dear teacher, or any other good teachers who are, sadly, rare. We can't scale "I had a great teacher in high school". We can scale bits though, and by seperating teaching from the certifying.
"We can educate great teachers for public schools in big numbers".
No you can't. Also, how is this different than any dipshit billionaire saying education will fix poverty? You know that can't be done in scale. We should scale the one thing we know we can scale.
Former Energy Sec. Steven Chu told a roomful of scientists in Chicago they should think now what they could do with renewable electricity that costs only 1.5¢ per kilowatt hour. And, he suggested, those thoughts should include hydrogen.
"The cost of renewable energy at the best sites is 2¢ per kilowatt hour. And that is going to widen," Chu said at the University of Chicago in March. "I’m an advisor to Royal Dutch Shell. They think within a couple decades the very best sites will go to 1.5¢ per kilowatt hour cost of electricity.
A: Great.
Chu is a former U.S. Secretary of Energy, and 1997 Nobel Prize winner in physics.
I’m in a used book store. I asked where medical books are. [Answer] “Between metaphysics and cooking.”
A: Ha ha
Q: I want to lose weight
A: You really can survive on one meal a day (make it breakfast). This is the hunter-gatherer way (still our biology). Eat something rich in proteins, nutrients. Meat is one of those dense foods, lots in small volume. This is how we reduced our stomach size and increased our brain size. Gorillas are vegeterian, big stomach, they had to eat lots of plants to satiate themselves. Less nutritous, have to eat more.
Look at the pics of hungry kids in Africa - big stomach. Or a fat slob in America; same problem. Eating less nutritious food, less protein, it'll eff you up.
Q: How does infinity help mathematicians?
A: Reading the great book by Strogatz Infinity Powers made me realize infinity is a tool (mostly, for mathematicians, especially for Calculus). You use it to simplify stuff. No really.
Friend asked me a puzzle question once. "You and your friend have a loaf of bread, how do you make sure you divide it equally between two of you?". The "right" answer is "have your friend cut it into two, but you choose the piece you want". This utilizes psychology.
My answer was "divide it into thin little slices, for each slice give 1 piece to you 1 piece to me, etc". And , "the division will approach equality in the limit". This answer utilizes Calculus..
So chopping stuff into pieces literally solves problems for you.
Q: Creating food out of thin air seems so sci-fi. How is this possible?
A: The process is not too complex really. H2 for energy and CO2 for carbon is fed to special bacterias that generate food in powder form.
The process is not unlike making beer or wine. A special microbe eats sugar produces wine. Here eats H2 and CO2 generates food.
Q: Why is Japan into hydrogen?
A: Japan is always a good country to watch, on energy. When the main fuel is oil, Japanese looked around and said "I dont got it". The answer: invent the supertanker, transport oil from the Middle East, the more at one shot the better.
For renewables, it's about the sunshine, wind; Japanese look around "I dont got that either". The answer: find the densest transportable energy source, from the nearest sunny place: Hydrogen from Australia. U need high energy density to get the most bang for your buck.
Australian hydrogen could power the world many times over
A: Australia is the new Saudi Arabia?
Re-reading Road to Serfdom (happy 75th bday) and struck by how moderate it is.
A: Yes
Tax Day is around the corner and guess what? Corporations are lobbying for a new law that would prevent the government from offering you a free and easy online way to pay your taxes. The system is rigged and we need to drastically change it to protect the public.
A: Sad
The industry can continue to decarbonize the power grid for many years by using a mix of natural gas and renewable power generation. However, how do we continue to make progress in places like California, where coal-fired power generation is already retired, and where excess renewable electricity is causing market distortions? Progress will have to be defined differently.
The answer lies in the next phase of development: the storage of electricity using hydrogen.
In the last century, hydrogen powered the space program and brought us to the moon.
A: Right on
Q: BEVs (battery electric vehicles) might be a bad idea but I like them, I like the torque.
A: FCEVs (fuel-cell electric vehicles) are electric cars too let's not forget. There is no combustion, no burning. The difference is electricity comes from a fuel (through a catalysis, a special membrane) rather than lithium-ion batteries whose performance is inferior due to their rechargable nature.
BEVs try to solve too many things at once. One is let's have an EV with clean motor, second is let's have a battery that does not weigh a ton, charges fast, etc. The world cannot wait while the monkey boy flails, trying to do it all.
Q: If you had to pick one place to start for H2 adoption, where would it be?
A: Buses
Buses are the simplest / best first place to go for H2 adoption. They carry a lot of ppl, constantly in use, n pollute a lot. But they are also under the control of a single mayorality, so a mayor can order their change wholesale. Then wazoom! Clean xport 4 all.
Best part is their fueling; buses go through certain stops all the time. Cities only need to provide fuel stations at key points, and you are done.
By change it is meant either refurb existing buses as fuel-cell, or buying new ones.
Fed gov could play a role providing pointers for tech refurb, or directing cities to the companies ppl knowledgeable in the area.
Obviously as BEVs are a bad idea for cars, they are even a stupider idea for buses. They would take half a day to refuel!
Comment
The most important reason why China is getting into hydrogen is that it has recognized the problem with the infrastructure of building charging stations for all battery-powered elecric vehicles in China. The majority of Chinese people live in multi-family homes in densely populated cities, so they have no way to load their cars at home. It is the same situation as in Tokyo and many other Asian cities.
A: Good point
If it means anything, “base-load” means generating capacity that is rarely if ever switched off, indeed which is expensive or impossible to switch off. When coal and existing nuclear power plants were the cheapest sources of power, and before the risk of climate change was well understood, that might have been acceptable. But now, if consumers are to gain the cost and climate benefits from super-cheap renewable power, what is needed is flexible, dispatchable power by way of complement, not inflexible base-load that crowds it out. So, if the actual or de facto nationalization of our power system is the wrong answer, and an atavistic yearning for the simplicity of base-load is the wrong answer, what is the right answer?
A: There is some archaic vocabulary around energy. Today when electricity is generated from hydropower for example, the turbines make on go-around which creates on cycle in the AC alternate current. This current flows downstream, and must be consumed. Otherwise it is lost.
This is the old vocabulary. In the future we will have renewable energy generation, it could be intermittent, or excessive. We don't care. Alphabet (Google's parent company) has installations where excess energy is stored as molten salt, I've heard of a similar approach in the Middle East. Or pick any material with sufficient energy density, like ammonia, we can store energy at room temparature, with very rich content in hydrogen.
News
Assange is arrested
A: I hope the plan is letting him go through the backdoor. Jailing the best journo in the world is not cool.
Airbus Commercial Aircraft President Guillaume Faury
As the CEO of an aerospace company, I've seen a growing willingness to explore the potential of hydrogen as a possible aviation fuel for the future. That's why we, at Airbus, decided to join the Hydrogen Council.
A: [thumbs up]
Did you know that if 20% hydrogen were to be injected into the natural gas grid across the UK, it could save around 6 million tonnes of CO2 every year, that's the equivalent of taking 2.5 million cars off the road!
A: Crazy
News
OpenAI research center postpones making its newest development public because scientists at the company are worried that it is so good so it could be dangerous.
A: I say to AI researchers, step on the gas and never look back. Use of tech is a political matter and it will be handled as issues come up. Right now all we have is bunch of attention sluts with their doomsday scenarios whose "let's be careful" talk can hamper the progress of science.
If Haber stopped his research on ammonia production bcz the substance could be used to kill people, we would not have fertizilers. Hell Haber did his research specifically to kill people, to gas them, not making fertilizers. But his research ended up feeding billions.
Question
Are neural nets the final answer for AGI?
A: They may not be... Right now what we do is like using linear regression to analyze ball drops. You will find a linear relation on the right equation (a coefficient for that linear relation, from data, that is) but that's only part of the picture. Replace regression with NN for intelligence (nonlinear instead of linear), that's where we are.
The deeper mathematical language for pattern matching, intelligence still eludes us. Calculus gave that language to physics. We might need the same for Intelligence.
Some might say "atoms, molecules work at a deeper level, at that basic level the rules are more easily mathematicizable. Look at them wiggaz, tiggaz, chiggaz, m'f'kas are too hodge-podge (because of evolution)" you cant model that. Perhaps. But we still evolved to some kind of optimality, which could be mathematicizable.
Mathematician Mumford started some work on a vision pattern language, trying to build that machinery from ground up.
The above line of thought was partly triggered by this.
I believe this language vs. reverse-engineering opposition is the real reason behind @GaryMarcus's beef with NNs. Marcus is a critic of the "connectionist" approach.
Deep NNs did wonders as of late however. No complaining there.
Question
Can the structure of a neural net be seen as that language akin to mathematics?
A: Hmmm
NN structure as a language is not as expressive (yet) as mathematics itself, and it does not lead to easy, straight-forward, algebraic-like effortless (read: computation-less) manipulation. Also it itself does not compute anything; whereas Calculus can compute using symbolic manipulation alone.
Keanu Reeves
I dream of a day where I walk down the street and hear people talk about Morality, Sustainability, and Philosophy instead of the Kardashians.
A: Nice sentiment though flawed
See Keirsey's Pygmalion Project.
Not everyone is as Ti heavy as K (concepts). This is modernist nonesense. "Let's educate all in the same mold".
The sentiment tickles me a little bit bcz I grew up on it. But... it dont work.
Measuring the value of digital goods and services. [..] The authors propose a unique way of directly measuring consumer well-being using massive online choice experiments. This methodology assigns a dollar value to the free digital goods people use by asking them how much it would take to relinquish the products for a period of time.
A: I do not support mucking around with value computation of GDP. Create a different measure if you want, but we need a measure like GDP that captures dollars paid for services rendered / products delivered. For FB that exchange is in the ad dollars earned. Simple.
If we play around with mythical "satisfaction" scores, let's not forget those scores exist because customers are there because service is free. And the ad dollars is high because people are there.. It's all connected you see...
I dont mean to nag on Bjksdjfklsjlkdfjlskson. He wrote some good stuff on AI.
Progressive
Electoral college should be abolished
A: Maybe this progressive is trying to throw a bone to centrists with electoral colllege talk. Not worth it. Also, whining abt Garland fits in the same category. That appointment was not "stolen". Senate has a role in the process. + that mo.f.ka was Harvard down to his underwear. The left should be ecstatic he was not appointed.
Also Obama knew Garland would not go through when he appointed him. He wanted to give Dems a reason to vote for Hillary. As it turns out it didnt work.
News
Democrats are asking for Trump's tax returns
A: Finally a good move.
Bitching abt Russia, the electoral college, "stolen judge" made u sound like whiny losers. Main reason was all these complaints are based on lies. Tax return is abt unearthing the truth about something. Good.
Jay Leno
Late-night comedy is too one-sided
A: He is not wrong
Trump caused the system to go haywire. I wish saner days were back. Right now Conan seems to be more like Letterman of old, not too partisan, showcasing young talent... Does The Late Show still do that?
I saw this the other day looked good.
Q: But Letterman also went negative on Dubya, whenever approval ratings of a prez go down (as Trump's are low now) they get roasted.
A: Fair point. But today it feels like there is a whole different level of partisanship. Obviously Trump bears some of the blame. But comedy overall it still too extreme on the one end. After a certain threshold it's not even funny anymore.
Q: Where does comedy come from
A: Having strange characters around you helps
Leno talked abt his childhood once, his father, an Italian who ate only Italian food all his life, would often point to Jay while outside, to people eating foreign food, like "wow look at that white guy eating nochos" or "look at the Chinese guy eating hot dogs". So people eating out of their ethnic group was interesting to this man. You don't need to add or subtract anything to that, it's already funny. This kinda stuff can be source material.
E.g. the conversation sequence I did here (not that I am pro on this at all), where an imaginary Pickard says "while you take a number two, try not to pass any gas", I stole that from someone I knew. I went to high-school with him actually, so this kid got it into his head he could shit not fart. He became obsessed by it, he made it his project and tried this for a week. He failed, and when he told me I nearly cried.
BEST analysis of what really is happening on the #Boeing737Max issue [..] Bottom line don’t blame software that’s the band aid for many other engineering and economic forces in effect.
Some people are calling the 737MAX tragedies a #software failure. Here's my response: It's not a software problem. It was an
Economic problem
that the 737 engines used too much fuel, so they decided to install more efficient engines with bigger fans and make the 737MAX.
Airframe problem.
They wanted to use the 737 airframe for economic reasons, but needed more ground clearance with bigger engines.The 737 design can't be practically modified to have taller main landing gear. The solution was to mount them higher & more forward. This led to an;
Aerodynamic problem
The airframe with the engines mounted differently did not have adequately stable handling at high AoA to be certifiable. Boeing decided to create the MCAS system to electronically correct for the aircraft's handling deficiencies.
During the course of developing the MCAS, there was a
Systems engineering problem
Boeing wanted the simplest possible fix that fit their existing systems architecture, so that it required minimal engineering rework, and minimal new training for pilots and maintenance crews.
A: Basically Boeing created a sub-optimal design in its hardware and tried to make up for it in software. The software had to become more unnecessarily complex which made it fragile, prone to failure which it did.