The Environmental Impact of the Data-Center Industry. My favorite part of highways in the American midwest are the wind turbines. Not so much the massive wind turbines on the horizon, begging for a contemporary Don Quixote to come at them, but the bits and pieces of wind turbines—single fan blades and bits of foundation—that pass by on longhaul trucks. They’re like an exploded diagram on wheels, a useful reminder of the sheer scale and complexity entailed in building energy systems. Data-center operations managers love to talk about energy systems—or, more specifically, efficiency in their use of energy systems. The fact that companies increasingly foreground this sustainability information when engaging with journalists demonstrates a growing public interest in The Cloud’s environmental impact. But really articulating and measuring that impact is difficult.
Starting around 2006, power-usage effectiveness (PUE) has been the metric of choice for the data-center industry. Which isn’t to say there isn’t interest. Related Video. Turing-Complete Contracts. The divested Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't exist anymore, even though the same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle farms. Accelerando, Charlie Stross Inspiration and Motivation Once upon a time, a programmer received an investment contract containing the following text: If the investment for the purpose of the Series B Funding is valued at not more than S$32.5 Million, then the investors in the Note shall be entitled to convert the Note into Shares at a fixed valuation of S$27.5 million.
If the investment for the purpose of the Series B Funding is valued at not less than S$100 million, investors in the Convertible Note will be entitled to convert the Note into Shares at a fixed pre-money valuation of S$50 million. Modeling Entities The goal? Imagine a dog. Got it? I don’t. Here’s what it’s like to be unable to visuali... I just learned something about you, and it is blowing my goddamn mind.
This is not a joke. It is not "blowing my mind" à la BuzzFeed's "8 Things You Won't Believe About Tarantulas. " It is, I think, as close to an honest-to-goodness revelation as I will ever live in the flesh. Here it is: You can visualize things in your mind. If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. You experience this differently, sure. I don't. If you tell me to imagine a beach, I ruminate on the "concept" of a beach. But I cannot flash to beaches I've visited.
And I grew up in Miami. This is how it's always been for me, and this is how I thought it was for you. What do you mean "lost" his ability? Neurologists at the University at Exeter in England showed the man a photo. Then they removed the photo and asked him to imagine Tony Blair. Aphantasia. Reading this article was extraterrestrial puberty.
I opened my Facebook chat list and hunted green dots like Pac-Man. —Yes... No. Why My Young Daughter Is So Much Better at Learning Chess Than I Am. My 4-year-old daughter and I were deep into a game of checkers one day about three years ago when her eye drifted to a nearby table. There, a black and white board bristled with far more interesting figures, like horses and castles. “What’s that?” She asked. “Chess,” I replied. “Can we play?” I nodded absently. There was just one problem: I didn’t know how. And so I decided I would learn, if only so I could teach my daughter. So, time-starved and not wanting to curse my daughter with my ill-formed knowledge, I hired a coach to teach us both. It wasn’t long before it struck me that chess seemed to be a game for the young. Also in Neuroscience The Wisdom of the Aging Brain By Anil Ananthaswamy At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival premiere of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, director Woody Allen was asked about aging.
Although it scarcely occurred to me at the time, my daughter and I were embarking on a sort of cognitive experiment. And then my daughter began beating me. That was then. Evolution. A new species has emerged in front of scientists' eyes. LIKE some people who might rather not admit it, wolves faced with a scarcity of potential sexual partners are not beneath lowering their standards. It was desperation of this sort, biologists reckon, that led dwindling wolf populations in southern Ontario to begin, a century or two ago, breeding widely with dogs and coyotes. The clearance of forests for farming, together with the deliberate persecution which wolves often suffer at the hand of man, had made life tough for the species. That same forest clearance, though, both permitted coyotes to spread from their prairie homeland into areas hitherto exclusively lupine, and brought the dogs that accompanied the farmers into the mix.
Interbreeding between animal species usually leads to offspring less vigorous than either parent—if they survive at all. But the combination of wolf, coyote and dog DNA that resulted from this reproductive necessity generated an exception. Coyotes dislike hunting in forests. Wolves prefer it. Even wilier. Dealing with Autism. Beautiful minds wasted.
IN AMERICA in 1970 one child in 14,000 was reckoned to be autistic. The current estimate is one in 68—or one in 42 among boys. Similarly high numbers can be found in other rich countries: a study in South Korea found that one in 38 children was affected. Autism is a brain condition associated with poor social skills. It has a wide spectrum of symptoms, from obsessive behaviour to hypersensitivity to sound, light or other sensory stimulation, the severity of which ranges from mild to life-blighting. The range of consequences is also wide. At one end, the autism of a computer scientist may be barely noticeable; at the other, a quarter of autistic children do not speak. Autism is a condition that defies simple generalisations. These numbers represent a tragic human toll, as millions of people live idle and isolated outside the world of work.
Pieces in the puzzle Early screening is essential. A second aim should be to provide autistic children with schooling that suits them. How Warren Buffett’s Son Would Feed the World. When his three children were young, Warren Buffett installed a dime slot machine on the third floor of the family’s house, in Omaha, Nebraska. The objective was to convey the dangers of gambling, but it also meant the children’s allowance remained in his hands. “I could then give my children any allowance they wanted, as long as it was in dimes, and I’d have it all back by nightfall,” he remarked once at a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.
Buffett—who, despite being worth about $60 billion, has lived for 58 years in that same relatively modest house, for which he paid $31,500 in 1958—once told Fortune magazine that he intended to leave his three children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” He added that “a few hundred thousand dollars” sounded about right. The money would not be spent inscribing Buffett’s name on this or that important building. On the face of it, Buffett is a study in contrasts. As the Howard G. The Water in Your Glass Might Be Older Than the Sun. The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous. J.G. is a lawyer in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner.
His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety. J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip. His drinking increased through college and into law school.
By the time he was a practicing defense attorney, J.G. In the spring of 2012, J.G. decided to seek help. J.G. says it was this message—that there were no small missteps, and one drink might as well be 100—that set him on a cycle of bingeing and abstinence. He felt utterly defeated. The first night, I took a pill at 6:30.
Marvin D. Here's what fruits and vegetables looked like before we domesticated them. Next time you bite into a slice of watermelon or a cob of corn, consider this: these familiar fruits and veggies didn't always look and taste this way. Genetically modified foods, or GMOs, inspire strong reactions nowadays, but humans have been tweaking the genetics of our favourite produce for millennia. While GMOs may involve splicing genes from other organisms (such as bacteria) to give plants desired traits – like resistance to pests, selective breeding is a slower process whereby farmers select and grow crops with those traits over time.
From bananas to eggplant, here are some of the foods that looked totally different before humans first started growing them for food. Wild watermelon Alvaro/Wikimedia Commons This 17th-century painting by Giovanni Stanchi depicts a watermelon that looks strikingly different from modern melons, as Vox points out. Modern watermelon Scott Ehardt/Wikimedia Wild banana Genetic Literacy Project Modern banana Domiriel/Flickr Creative Commons Wild eggplant Wild carrot. Everything Science Knows About Hangovers—And How to Cure Them. Good morning, sunshine! You are so screwed. The light coming in through the window is so … there. You’d kill for a glass of water but die if it came with food.
Your guts are in full rebellion; whatever happens next is going to happen in the bathroom. You have at least a couple of the following symptoms: headache, malaise, diarrhea, loss of appetite, fatigue, nausea, the shakes. You might also be dehydrated and feel generally slow—a little stupider, a little less coordinated. You, my friend, have a hangover. Alcohol has long been the only recreational drug for which scientists could not articulate a mechanism of action—which is to say, no one knew how it got you drunk, and no one knew how it got you hungover. Now, though, that’s all beginning to change. It wasn’t until 2009, though, that a Dutch researcher named Joris Verster got the world’s hangover researchers together for an informal meeting.
Take dehydration. Click to Open Overlay Gallery. Fleming's discovery of penicillin couldn't get published today. That's a huge problem. After toiling away for months on revisions for a single academic paper, Columbia University economist Chris Blattman started wondering about the direction of his work. He had submitted the paper in question to one of the top economics journals earlier this year.
In return, he had gotten back nearly 30 pages of single-space comments from peer reviewers (experts in the field who provide feedback on a scientific manuscript). It had taken two or three days a week over three months to address them all. So Blattman asked himself some simple but profound questions: Was all this work on a single study really worth it? Some days my field feels like an arms race to make each experiment more thorough and technically impressive, with more and more attention to formal theories, structural models, pre-analysis plans, and (most recently) multiple hypothesis testing.
Do we need more "small" science? "You would have to solve the structure of penicillin or find the mechanism of action," he added. Why don’t we learn from our mistakes – even when it matters most? Perhaps the greatest academic growth area over the past twenty years or so has been “European integration studies”, a field that has both analysed and boosted support for the European “project”. Almost all of its practitioners have proceeded from the assumption that the process of integration is – must be – “irreversible”. It is the intellectual equivalent of the principle of the European acquis communautaire by which powers, once surrendered or pooled, cannot be retrieved.
Or, more unkindly, one might see it as a “European Brezhnev doctrine”, by which socialism, being inevitable, could not be allowed to fail in any country in which it was already established. But what if this is not so? The stark truth is that in the past century or so of European history there have been many more examples of disintegration than integration. Take the cases of Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. What caused their collapse? Decision-making has become a two-stage process. The Potato Chip That Tastes Like a Sandwich: A Scientific History of Extreme Flavors.
Recently, I tried a bag of Lay’s “New York Reuben” potato chips, one of the four finalists in the company’s “Do Us a Flavor!” Contest to find its newest variety of chip. The experience was nearly hallucinatory: From within a substantial haze of salt emerged the pucker of sauerkraut, the familiar fragrant sourness of rye bread, the unctuousness of Russian dressing and Swiss cheese, and the rubbery meatiness of corned beef. It was gorgeous. But there was also something disconcerting about this vivid mirage of an entire sandwich delivered in a mouthful of crunch. As much as I enjoyed the taste, I also felt like I was eating in the uncanny valley.
Mark Schatzker, in his recent book The Dorito Effect, defines junk food as “food that tastes like something it's not.” At that time, the canned vegetables and meats, packaged crackers and cakes, and factory-baked breads were beginning to make up a significant portion of the American diet—and, in general, were pretty bland.