Week 34

"Out of the 38,000 large scale dams registered by [an] International Commission.. 50 percent are used for irrigation, 18 percent for hydropower, 12 percent for water supply and 10 percent for flood control and the rest for other functions"

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import util; util.bp_hydro_elec_perc("China")

Out[1]: (15.23, 2.97)

15% of electricity, 3% of overall energy is from hydro. I guess that could cause some shortages... more in certain places.. but the numbers above are too small.

What do the numbers say?

"There is drought in China, it means less hydropower which causes electricity shortages".

The student-loan forgiveness is a good move.. it can help raise potus popularity.

Bloomberg: "Germany Taps ‘Boundless’ Fuel Potential in Canada Hydrogen Deal.. Canada intends to start shipping green hydrogen.. to Germany by 2025"

Sat system measures Earth's grav field changes to determine water amount in a location. Smart.

"[A] NASA team proposed 'weighing' Earth's water by measuring its gravitational force. 'Newton's laws tell us that anything that has mass will have a gravitational attraction,' explains GRACE project scientist.. That means a mountain exerts more gravitational pull than a hill, an ocean more than a stream"

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The fight for water - DW Documentary

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If made clean, NH3 from coal can be shipped to power plants that can combust it for power.

Can CCUS be added to this process easily?

Wiki: "Ammonia made from coal is a process mainly practised by China. China produced about 32.6% of the global production in 2014"

NH3 is key; it is an H2 carrier, can extract H2 out of it, pipe it to homes, fuel cars..

Ammonia itself can be combusted cleanly in turbines and generate power. Ammonia cld even be combusted along with coal to reduce a plant's carbon footprint. Plus NH3 is useful as fertilizer.

Carrier, fertilizer, fuel - no other base tech checks so many boxes.

A genetically modified bacteria can generate ammonia.. wonderful.

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Medicare Shmedicare.. It's the enemy that will need care when we whoop that ass!

"@YoBenCohen

A country that 'cannot afford' Medicare For All, shouldn't be spending tax dollars to maintain over 800 military bases around the world"

#Afghanistan #Oliver

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Yes Maverick can take out fifth gen aircraft with a f-ing propeller plane.. For everyone else they are deadly.

Thrust vectoring FTW.. fifth gen aircraft

"F-22 Raptor doing a Power Loop maneuver"

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Yoon Seok-youl of South Korea has net approval of -53. Get a load of that! Didn't they just vote for this guy? The new president of SK right? WTF?

Wired: "A series of papers described astonishing results from using machine learning, the technique beloved by tech giants that underpins [so-called AI]. Applying it to data such as a country’s gross domestic product and unemployment rate was said to beat more conventional statistical methods at predicting [an event] by almost 20 percentage points...

'They were claiming near-perfect accuracy, but we found that in each of these cases, there was an error in the machine-learning pipeline,' says [researcher]. When [they] fixed those errors, in every instance they found that modern AI offered virtually no advantage"

Columbia Biz School - Python Beats Excel

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People living on highlands have the right idea - it is generally cooler and less humid up there... Find the plateau.. Be the highlander. There can be more than one.

Not a slam-dunk of an idea as previously thought eh? Sad... BH concept went to the way of the multiverse, and string theory.

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How Johnny Harris Rewrites History

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Between long covid and boomers retiring (earlier due to pandemic) we could perhaps explain the missing worker numbers. How much of the wage rises are due missing workers? Remaining ppl get more money, not a signal for overheating (therefore inflationary), it is due to missing ppl's money going to them, there is no significant increase.

Brookings: Two studies of long Covid patients found that 23% and 28%, respectively, were out of work due to long Covid at the time of the study. That suggests there may have been about 1.1 million Americans not working due to long Covid at any given time.

Additionally, some long Covid patients reduced hours rather than taking time off: 46% according to a study in The Lancet. That is another 2.1 million workers. If those workers reduced their hours by only a quarter, that would increase the labor market impact to 1.6 million full-time equivalent workers. In other words, under reasonable assumptions given the data available, long Covid could account for 15% of the nation’s 10.6 million unfilled jobs.

Cant add gpx files to Maps.me? 👎 Enter OsmAnd.

Hydrogen was already used to remove sulphur during the refining process, for fossil. That's why oil majors know a lot about our magic molecule... Salt caves, hundreds of miles of existing H2 pipelines - the know-how beind that was all due an existing need. Now they can put that knowledge into use, for H2 as the primary energy carrier.

Russia can bring in a million more troops easy

Ukraine is also trading its own soldiers' lives for time. They are losing a lot of people that are hard to replace.

"It’s become a truism, in the sixth month of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, that Ukrainian forces trade space for time, staging a fighting retreat from less important towns, especially in the east, in order to bleed and stall Russian forces"

Israel is the ultimate 'frontier country' for the outer alliance. That is their function, and a role they liked to play recently. It is more suitable for them compared to say "Turks" whose bizarre national identity causes them think they are outsiders, but Israel at least legitimately can claim, looking at its near past, that it was an outsider, culturally different (European) and not liked by many of its neighbors. Still it is better for them in the long run to play nice in their own region. Can't keep playing Cowboys and Indians forever.

Israelis never miss an opportunity to cause Palestenians to miss an opportunity

Constant attacks, military occupation; how could there be peace under these conditions in Palestine?

How did I process the data? File has towns in rows, dates in columns, for a town on a particular date file has 'RU', or 'UA'; I replace those with 1 and 0, then sum all the rows (which obviously adds only 1's) - the total gives a chronological progr of total towns under RU control.

Targeted gov intervention works better on the supply side, incentivizing companies towards certain goals.. Incentivizing consumers en masse has more backfire potential - too many student cheap loans blows up tuition prices, easy credit for consumption, mortgages can blow up prices on goods, homes. Tougher to control effect on "the many". During 08 crisis gazillions were thrown at corporations, yet no inflation (except in the stock market, housing). Inflation did not show up bcz money did not reach people's pockets.

Numba is a fantastic OSS - Pythonic science FTW.

"@teoliphant

Just released Numba 0.1. Thanks Jon Riehl from Resilient Science for all the hard work. Binaries to follow"

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Saw the new Top Gun.. Actors had to fly actual planes while filming? Nicely done.

@hrgoliverpool

'Could a six-hour workday be a reality?'

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"@jchawner

When do I not want to Paste as Plain Text?"

No need to 'abolish the administrative state' to fix problems such as these.. Have a better, accountable state.

Brian Williams: Did anyone [at the NSA] know or care that I Googled the final score of the Rangers-Canadiens game last night because I was traveling here?

Snowden: You might say, does anybody really care that I’m looking up the score for the Rangers game? Well, a government or a hacker or some other nefarious individual would say yes, they’re very interested in that, because that tells a lot about you. First off, it tells you probably speak English. It says you’re probably an American, you’re interested in this sport. And they might know what your habits are. Where were you in the world when you checked the score? Did you check it when you travel, or did you check it when you’re just at home?

They’d be able to tell something called your pattern of life: when are you doing these kind of activities? When do you wake up? When do you go to sleep? What other phones are around you when you wake up and go to sleep? Are you with someone who’s not your wife? Are you doing something? Are you someplace you shouldn’t be? According to the government—which is arbitrary, you know. Are you engaged in any kind of activities that we disapprove of, even if they aren’t technically illegal? And all these things can raise your level of scrutiny, even if it seems entirely innocent to you, even if you have nothing to hide, even if you are doing nothing wrong. These activities can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, and used to harm you as an individual even without the government having any intent to do you wrong. The problem is that the capabilities themselves are unregulated, uncontrolled, and dangerous.

Williams: All because I Googled “Rangers-Canadiens final score”?

Snowden: Exactly.

Why does blanket surveilance matter? Even if it is for "inocous" "harmless" data? I believe that issue was addressed through the Snowden leaks. Let's recall that Brian Williams interview when he asked something like 'why does it matter if they know I do harmless X or Y?'. Remember how Snowden just rattled off bunch of things he could do.. That should've scared the shit out of anyone. And that's just one guy; imagine a team of capable people like him, planning for weeks.