Too many comments about AI and not enough fun facts about isopods! Can anyone tell me more about them? How do their eyes work? They look like blackberries in a lot of the species.
Personally I love a lot about software engineering (iterative problem solving, sorting through complexities, the predictability you mention or at least how things are logical and often deterministic, etc) but I also love being outside and moving my body. After years of sitting behind a computer all day I do day dream about work that fulfills me in other ways. I'm sure if I took a different job and spent all day in the field I would miss software in a similar vein; time is finite and the number of possible ways you can spend it is not.
I really really love both Outer Wilds and the DLC and think the reddit community, when asked, does a great job of providing advice or tips for specific situations without revealing too much.
Such a great book! I thought the whole section on why we age was compelling. The idea that nature can select for mutations which may be beneficial earlier on but have harmful effects after a given time period was new to me.
I strongly recommend both of these books. The Soul of an Octopus is more anecdotal and Other Minds is more academic; in sum they offer not just a fascinating picture of octopuses, but a larger discussion on consciousness and foreign intelligence.
I feel like a significant portion of human traffic jams are caused by bottlenecks but as far as I can tell this was not addressed in the study. Would be interested to see how much more efficient ants are in the case where the width of the path is variable.
Depending on where the epicenter is, it may take 1-2 minutes for the S waves (which are the slower, damaging ones) to travel to the major population center. Up to 30s of warning for an earthquake early warning system is enough for people to take cover and for cities to shut off things like water/gas lines. That being said my system is definitely not ready for that, and twitter can be seen as one source of information used to augment other early detection systems.
I wrote a script that monitors twitter for earthquake related tweets and notifies me when a certain threshold is hit. It pretty reliably notifies me 20-30s post-quake. Main problem is that very few tweets actually have location data associated with them. I try to grab the location string users can specify in their bio and infer the location based on the most common occurrence in a body of tweets- works decently well although its usually a broader region.
Agreed, but climate change is a monumental issue and even if we assume the government can act in a timely manner to shift the economic model to one that is more environmentally friendly, that won't be enough to fix the problem. I don't think this should be viewed as a cop out, or an alternative to economic change, but rather as something that augments it and moves us in the right direction.