Looks like they have a LaTeX macro or something that's putting a newline after every instance of the word CogPrime in the intro, and a space after each in the main text. It's actually kind of distracting to read. I think the xspace package might help
I've just started at a place that uses a lot of Tcl for embedded scripting and customisation, and I've never used it before so this was very handy.
That said, the document needs work - the syntax highlighting got very confused at some point, and a bunch of the lines are much longer than the width of the document, and don't wrap.
Tcl looks like a nice little language that makes it really easy to write really horrible code. Probably with some discipline you could keep it tidy and comprehensible though.
The big question for me is, can this paper be produced cheaply enough to be more effective per dollar than whatever our current best intervention for clean water is?
My totally uninformed speculation is they're in with a shot if they can get the production volume high enough. But I'd like to see the question explored.
Looks like a very promising concept, at least from a technical perspective. I don't rate its chances of success all that highly, since it needs a lot of buy-in before it gets enough network effects, but it's nice to see someone genuinely trying to find workable solutions to what we can no longer deny are serious privacy and security problems with the current setup.
Something I'm not clear on is the licencing of the code. Is it open-source? For trust reasons I'd want to be able to read it.
Regarding storage, I've read some interesting things about the potential of electric vehicles here. If every car were electric, that's a massive array of large efficient batteries connected to the grid. If utility companies charge varying amounts at different times, depending on supply, you could imagine a smart charger for your car whereby you buy electricity when it's cheap, store it in the battery, and sell it back for a profit when the price goes up (or just use the power in your home, reducing the amount you buy from the grid - the effect is the same). The utility company is effectively renting your electric car battery as short term storage.
Not really. Claire Perry was elected as Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Devizes in Wiltshire. Devizes has elected a Conservative candidate in every single election since 1924, so running for election there as a Conservative is kind of a formality.
She was then appointed to the position of Parliamentary Private Secretary to Philip Hammond, the Secretary of Defence. My understanding is she has no official position, qualifications, expertise, or mandate with regards to technology, the internet, or children's welfare.
If you have a reader, download the ebook from https://github.com/joshleitzel/rawthought. I read it not long ago, and it's one of the most interesting books I've ever read.
> I would be a bit worried to eat one that cost over 10x less and the seller was still able to make a profit.
A lot of supermarkets, at least in the UK, sell various basic foodstuffs as loss leaders[1], so they are making a significant loss on each one they sell. They do this to get you into the shop, in the hopes that you'll buy other more profitable items once there. Also, in university towns supermarkets are prepared to take a loss in order to secure the long-term brand loyalty of students who are shopping at supermarkets for the first time and forming their opinions, and will go on to become professionals who can afford the more profitable products.
If you are smart you can take advantage of these to get food very cheaply indeed.
> This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients.
It really doesn't. Whatever knowledge we do have can be applied, with whatever degree of certainty we have, and that is likely to be better than what we do currently, because what we do currently is basically nothing. Most people, most of the time, eat what they feel like, combined with some vague ideas about calories and fat, and whatever they read in a magazine last week if they're particularly conscientious. In other words, guesswork. Except this is guesswork that's almost totally uninformed. No, we can't be certain about this stuff yet, but what you call "guesswork" i.e. Our best hypothesis given all the information we have about the functioning of the human digestive system, is almost certainly going to be better than the current state of affairs, which is pretty much stab-in-the-dark randomness. It's really not hard to beat.
> any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck.
If you manage to find an optimal diet by choosing foods you think of as 'healthy' and trying to avoid cookies, well that's a stroke of luck. Deliberate scientific optimisation by adjustment, experimentation and measurement? That's not luck.
We invented vaccination more than half a century before we had even accepted the Germ Theory of disease, and the history of science is full of such things. You don't need full understanding with no uncertainty in order to figure out what works. Science is neat like that.
What's it called when a person has an irrational preference for the current state of affairs? Look it up, because you have it.
As an Englishman I must say that it really does bother me when people attempt to write or talk in the manner they imagine an English gentleman might. It always feels quite stilted, particularly in the not-quite-correct usage of unnecessarily antiquated vocabulary.
I'm almost certain that you cannot 3D print functioning LEGO bricks. Considering they're plastic, those things are manufactured to extremely fine tolerances.
> "On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode, use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on both sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose."
I think Aaron Swartz hit the nail on the head with his "What Does Google Mean by “Evil”?" blog post[1]:
> "They specifically name three: showing irrelevant ads, using pop-ups or other annoying gimmicks, and selling off actual search results. Hardly the stuff of comic books. But what do these three have in common? They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money"
This is just about the first time I've seen Google unambiguously break their own definition of 'evil'.
For reference, there are places where this kind of MEDC recreational wood-burning is illegal, and it is easily enforceable without causing other problems. For example (I'm not sure of the specifics), but wood-burning is illegal in built-up areas of the UK. It's pretty trivially enforceable actually - if a police officer happens to see smoke coming out of a chimney, they'll knock on the door and ask you to put it out. There's not a lot of potential for 'underground' wood-burning, and the law has pretty good public support, since in London smogs killed literally thousands of people at a time, in living memory.
Same!