My youngest was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 14 and it has been a tremendous emotional and physical burden on her. It's so encouraging to see research in this area and the faintest glimmer of a hope for a hope that she'll find relief.
That was not the impression I got from his Twitter. He might be able to build stuff but his ability to explain social phenomena is really poor (especially for someone with an economics degree).
I've followed him for years. He's always interesting to read since he's successful while being contrarian on many things about business and tech, but he's turning into a mini Elon Musk talking about "mind virus", "libtards" and "soyboys".
Why can't the internet go back to people talking about what they know? I'm tired to everything being politicized
I’ve been in jobs with cloud platform responsibilities at large financials for the last nine years. With all of the regulatory oversight and internal controls, the all-in price for cloud is actually quite high and usually gives businesses pause when they start to realize that.
Operating data centers is also incredibly expensive. The biggest costs come when you need to build new ones while maintaining what you have. The last place that I worked we spent several billion dollars in data center builds over the course of five years. Cloud was seen as a way to reduce the demand, but it takes a long time to build and mature a delivery platform that can run at reasonable velocity and adapt to business demands.
Now regulators are really focused on concentration risks and are demanding multi-cloud architectures and are testing contingency plans in the event of massive failures on the part of service providers. This will in part drive a demand for reserve capacity in datacenters as well as build out of platform management capability that that can move workloads around without substantial incremental engineering work.
Ernst Häckel created some of the most beautiful art ever and a conversation about his work is funnily enough how this whole little diatom post project got started :)
>As added support for this view, I can contrast with the relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but not always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical location at the time. When I return to that location, the experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions of the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one without the other.
I've noticed something similar with podcasts. It's usually when I first listen to it while driving. When I listen to that segment again I have this intrusive, prolonged, real-time replay of what was going on at the time I first heard it.
It doesn't feel like memory because while I'm watching this replay I can remember portions of it with typical poor fidelity from the usual memory of my brain. It's very odd, and as someone with a generally terrible memory it's something I wish I could figure out how to channel. It clearly is what people talk about when they describe photographic memory, it's incredibly detailed.
And that laser one is the one that there is an issue with.
In the UK my doctors and NHS notes say there is no evidence that this works.
The removal of the vitreous humour does work but the doctors at Moorfields, the top UK eye hospital, do not recommend it as it has what they say is a high risk of making things worse. They will do it but you have to be really really certain that the floaters are impossible to live with.
The one thing that I believe it is successful for is if people have floaters that are suspended directly in their fovea by adhesions to other parts of the eye. They use the laser to cut the ’ligaments’ so it can float away.
I’m not sure ‘breaking up’ floaters would even be desirable, they are still going to be in there making visual noise.
If your goal is passing a test or rushing through homework then yes. But if you’re actually curious about a topic and understand the limitations of LLMs and how to use prompt language you can actually learn quite a lot from them.
Probably almost impossible to adapt written works 'backwards' into a visualization but it might be fun to have different bars represent different notes and have the balls split for chords.
Having N paddles would be cool as well, perhaps with a cost for paddles getting too close (to avoid trivialities), and optimizing which note each paddle represents/beats, maybe imposing a cost on drastic pitch changes so that each specializes in a pitch range.
The closest (presumed) black hole to the Earth is Gaia BH1, which is about 1500 light years away. The expanding shell of photons reflected from the Earth during this era are just now reaching it.
Some small percentage of those photons are going to approach the black hole at the perfect distance such that they will be slung back on a trajectory where our solar system will be 1500 years from now.
Suppose in a thousand years we decide to build a space telescope of tremendous proportion sufficient to peer into that tiny little window and it takes us 500 years to build it. We could watch opening day!
Well the photons leaving earth are scattered in almost all directions. So at 1500 light years there might not be any photons arriving from that exact moment and place on earth because you might be down to say 1 photon arriving per hour or even less. Then the photons coming back would be all mixed in with other photons from the black hole so even if the same photons did go to where earth will be, the picture would be mangled beyond repair, and the darkness of the data you’re trying to capture is so low that again it might be less than a photon an hour.
Those quack homeopathy treatments operate on the assumption that water has a "memory", and it's somehow enough that it's been in contact with some molecule in the past. The astronomy version would be that space has a memory, and you can observe anything if you know there was a relevant photon out there at some point.
We can work out a ballpark value here. Suppose we're trying to see one square meter of Earth's surface on a sunny day, in the sense that we simply want to get our photons close enough to the black hole to be noticeably affected by it.
Under direct sunlight typical illumination at noon is on the order of 1 kW/m^2 (this is a slight overestimate, since Japan is in the mid-latitudes and not the tropics). Typical surfaces reflect roughly 10-20% of the light that strikes them; let's say 10% to make the math easy and to compensate for the previous overestimate. So 100 W of mostly visible light is reflected, i.e., 100 joules of energy per second.
A single photon of visible light has an energy of about 4 x 10^-19 J, so that's 2.5 x 10^20 photons reflected from our hypothetical square meter per second.
The black hole has a radius of around 30 km, or an apparent area in the sky equivalent to a plane of size pi * (30 km)^2 = 2800 km^2. It's actually a bit bigger than that because the "shadow" of a black hole is larger than the event horizon, and that's what we need to hit, not the horizon itself. So let's say 10,000 km^2 to make it nice and round. That's 10,000 km^2 of coverage on a "sphere" of radius 1500 ly and hence of area 4 * pi * (1500 ly)^2 = 2.5 x 10^33 km^2. So the shadow of the black hole occupies about 4 x 10^-30 of the sky.
If we spread out 2.5 x 10^20 photons across the sky evenly, we hit the black hole's shadow with about one-billionth of a photon from our square meter of Earth per second, or about one photon every 30 years. You hit it with a photon from somewhere on Earth at most roughly every ten seconds or so (when the geometry is such that Earth is close to "full" from the black hole's perspective).
The situation for actually lensing it properly to get it back to Earth is far worse, since not only do you have to hit the "shadow", you have to hit a particular point in the distorted image of the sky that corresponds to Earth, meaning you effectively have to thread this needle twice. Assuming you just want to hit Earth, which is bigger than the black hole's shadow, you're still trying to hit another 10^-26 or so shot. A single photon from Earth should make that shot roughly every 10^19 years, or about a billion times the current age of the Universe.
TLDR: ain't gonna work.
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In reality, none of this matters for a more fundamental reason: diffraction. The fact that light "smears out" as it travels poses a fundamental limit to resolution based on the size of your telescope, and the resolution we're trying to achieve here is orders of magnitude beyond it. For scale, Hubble is pretty close to the diffraction limit for visible light and a telescope of its size, and it already can't image planets within our own solar system at the resolution we're talking about here. So no reasonable telescope could even image Earth from the black hole, much less image a tiny portion of Earth.
...or that would be true, if you limited yourself to physical telescopes.
See, the diffraction limit depends on the size of your telescope, or more properly, on the size of its lens. And the effective size of a gravitational lens can be very, very large indeed. It turns out that current technology is sufficient to reach a distance where the distortion of the Sun's own gravity focuses light - the required distance is a few times the distance to the Voyager probes. From that vantage point, you could theoretically use the Sun itself as a giant telescope. And the resolutions achievable are tight enough that, while you wouldn't be able to image individual square meters, you actually could image details of planets with a resolution of tens of km (the rough equivalent of looking at a globe from a distance of a couple of feet away) across galactic distances. [1]
The reason this works is that it's not hitting the gravitational shadow of the gravitationally-lensing object itself - it's hitting a focal "ring" with a very large radius around the object, effectively magnifying the imaged object by ~eleven orders of magnitude. At such magnification even a handful of square meters start hitting with meaningful numbers of photons, though diffraction is still (I think) the limiting factor on actually resolving anything.
The black hole here is not much more massive than the Sun, so it wouldn't achieve too much more power. But with careful observation, you could use the hole to image Earth to a scale that would let you map out our world and our civilization to reasonable accuracy - if not the details of our corporate endeavors.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137-LS for an example of this kind of lensing on the scale of galaxies, which allows us to see a single star (or possibly a binary) from literally halfway across the Universe.
The trick here would be getting your spacecraft to be exactly Sun-antipodal from the planet you want to view, right? At multiple times Voyager's distance, its orbital period would be thousands of years, and any thrusting would make for impossibly tiny changes to your solar-relative angle.
Doing the math: the Wikipedia article says the solar focal distance is 547 AU, which would be an orbital period of 547^1.5 = up to 12793 years to line up with any particular target along that plane.
One proposal I saw would be a series of spacecraft on a one way trip that pass through the focal point and image as much as they can while there before going off on their way forever.
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