linkstream2 microblog

QT:((”
“One reason is the rebound effect. Insulate buildings better, and people will wear fewer layers rather than turn the heat down. The way energy-efficiency schemes are structured does not help, argues Richard Twinn of the UK Green Building Council, a think-tank. The schemes only finance a single type of upgrade at a time, such as loft insulation. A whole-house retrofit, in contrast, could have added digital
thermostats to ensure that greater efficiency was converted into lower bills rather than higher temperatures.”
“))

Efforts to make buildings greener are not working
https://www.economist.com/international/2019/01/05/efforts-to-make-buildings-greener-are-not-working

Hungry birds
animal workout
animal sounds

https://www.techlicious.com/guide/best-amazon-alexa-games/

Tic tac toe
Number Genie
Hangman

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/games-you-can-play-with-google-home/

Good quotes:
QT:((
Hoover noted, “When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer; and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.”
…
There’s just too much to do. Instead, presidents should follow Calvin Coolidge’s model. “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business,” he said. …
Can one person handle all this? In 1955, former President Herbert Hoover completed a review—his second—of executive-branch efficiency and suggested the addition of an administrative vice president to help the overloaded president. (The existing vice president was apparently already too busy.) Hoover’s report was issued a few months before President Eisenhower had his first heart attack. It was the fifth heart attack or stroke to hit a current or former president since the Wilson administration ended, in 1921. This caused the columnist Walter Lippmann to wonder whether the job was too much for one man to bear. Addressing the “intolerable strain” on the president, Lippmann wrote, “The load has become so enormously greater … because of the wars of this century, because of the huge growth of the American population, of the American economy, and of American responsibilities.”
“))

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/a-broken-office/556883/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/business/family-tree-dna-fbi.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/artificial-intelligence-study-human-genome-finds-unknown-human-ancestor-species-180971436/#ppY5jy9gT2zYRh6U.99

QT:((”
“Let me get the most important question out of the way: is AlphaFold’s advance really significant, or is it more of the same? I would characterize their advance as roughly two CASPs in one (really ~1.8x). Historically progress in CASP has ebbed and flowed, with a ten year period of almost absolute stagnation, finally broken by the advances seen at CASP11 and 12, which were substantial. What we’ve seen this year is roughly twice as much as the recent average rate of advance (measured in mean ΔGDT_TS from CASP10 to CASP12—GDT_TS is a measure of prediction accuracy ranging from 0 to 100, with 100 being perfect.) As I will explain later, there may actually be a good reason for this “two CASPs” effect, in terms of the underlying methodological breakdown. This can be seen not only in the CASP-over-CASP
improvement, but also in terms of the size of the gap between AlphaFold and the second best performer, which is unusually large by CASP standards. Below is a plot that depicts this.”
“))

https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/

QT:((”
““The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” “))

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal-googles-intellectual-property

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Days_(Bruce_Springsteen_song)

http://theconversation.com/life-expectancy-in-britain-has-fallen-so-much-that-a-million-years-of-life-could-disappear-by-2058-why-88063