+1 for Fastmail. Very fast, very reliable since I started using it in 2016. Absolutely the best webmail client I have used. UI not too unlike Gmail. The UI is fully keyboard-controllable for almost all tasks. Great search. Great calendar. Good amount of settings & security control for power users. Android app works well.
I work as a researcher and I try to publish full source code for all my publications. On the point of increasing surface for nitpicking, I agree in principle that's a risk, but in practice I have not experienced any such problems in my field. I am in a field of applied natural science where most researchers write terrible code, if any, and so I suppose there are not much expectations or even concepts of coding style.
There is a nice Perspective piece in Science from 2011 [1] touching on the question of cleaning up the code. It suggests basically the same thing as several of the comments in this thread: if you don't have time or motivation to clean up the code, don't.
"even incremental steps would be a vast improvement over the current situation. To this end, I propose the following steps (in order of increasing impact and cost) that individuals and the scientific community can take. First, anyone doing any computing in their research should publish their code. It does not have to be clean or beautiful (13), it just needs to be available. Even without the corresponding data, code can be very informative and can be used to check for problems as well as quickly translate ideas. ... The next step would be to publish a cleaned-up version of the code along with the data sets in a durable non-proprietary format."
Ha, well, thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. But I am 32 and hopeless when it comes to following popular culture. I was probably just focusing my attention on something else. I have a solid track record of not noticing stuff. So the nuance added to xkcd 1053 by this story is that the average value of ten thousand per day is just an average :)
(And another nuance is that I am not in the US and so also not part of the ten thousand per day average.)
Short motivation: I was thinking for a short moment to myself, "how hard could it be to support at least some limited reading and editing of .docx files?"
Now I know that I will probably never know: the "Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference" is >5000 pages!
Some comments have already touched on this, but it is important to realize just how much electricity we are talking about. The tl;dr is that replacing US wheat production alone would use five times the current total US electricity consumption. And that's for wheat, occupying about 10% of US cropland.
See p. 12 of the Supporting Information and you'll find the following: 2026647 kg wheat grown using 798417 MWh electricity means an electricity consumption of 0.4 MWh/kg wheat. In the US, the annual wheat harvest is 150-200 kg/capita/yr, which in this hypothetical system would use more than 60 MWh electricity/capita/yr.
For comparison, the US annually uses around 13 MWh electricity/capita.
That is, this hypothetical wheat production in the US would use about five times the _total_ present day electricity use.
Soybeans and maize together occupy more than three times the wheat area in the US, so that (very roughly speaking) adds another annual electricity consumption of ~200 MWh/capita. With just these three major crops, the US would have to increase its total electricity consumption about 20-fold.
Wow, that is a nice little tool. Just installed it and tested on some random files in my current data analysis project.
By the way, I installed it using pipx https://github.com/pipxproject/pipx by running `pipx install visidata`. To also read HDF and Excel files, I added the necessary packages by running `pipx inject visidata h5py openpyxl`.
Yes, you seem to be missing the light supply. Plants need a lot of light to grow. In a multi-storey greenhouse, the incoming solar radiation per unit floor area is smaller than in a normal (one-storey) greenhouse. Thus the need for artificial lighting and associated costs, both for hardware and electric power.
Not sure that would work, since pdfs are usually marked or prepended with some metadata about download time and the library upon download. At least that's the case with my uni library.
I sort of understand the design decision in Outlook to make the search folders a separate (and flat?) tree. What behavior would you expect from operations like copy, search if you put a search folder inside another (physical) folder? Anyway, I'm sure there are sensible ways to do what you're asking for, but it opens up questions about what a "folder" is and should be. Very interesting.
Notification settings agreed! I always turned all of the notifications off when I had Outlook.
Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that respect?
In fact, I think any quantitative measure of tangible results would be flawed, at least when it comes to open-ended and creative work (research, exploratory data analysis, software design, ...). In my work as a PhD student I often have a full day, damn, even a full week without any tangible result. But when the results eventually do arrive I usually realize that those seemingly unproductive hours actually were valuable, perhaps even necessary.
I'm currently a TA in a basic game theory for MSc students at a technical university. For the basic theoretical concepts we use as a course book Leyton-Brown & Shoham (2008) Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise, Multidisciplinary Introduction. This book is great because it is short and to the point, precise without diving deep into everything. Introduces most important concepts in less than 100 pages.
> Linux - I am frankly not familiar with a single Linux user, developer or not, who ever bought anything except for games.
I beg to differ. Grew up with Windows, but nowadays full-time Linux user. I paid some $40 for Sublime Text and it was worth every cent. Also donated to various services and projects, but maybe that does not count...
And now I also just paid $13 for fman, not because I'm sure about it, but because it's cheap, looks promising, and I sometimes miss Total Commander rather badly.
Replying to a number of previous comments on energy balances.
The reaction N2 + 3 H2 -> 2 NH3 is exothermic, giving off energy [1]. N2 is abundant and free (80% of the atmosphere), but H2 is not. The most common way [2] of producing H2 is from hydrocarbons (oil/gas products). In principle H2 can be produced from something else (e.g. water, through electrolysis), but that is very energy intensive [1], making the overall reaction N2 + 3 H2O -> 2 NH3 + 3/2 O2 a net energy consumer.
Point being, yes, it might be possible to save energy compared to the Haber-Bosch process, but the net production of ammonia from free/abundant materials will not ever be "for free" energy-wise.
Not sure if the following has already been mentioned in other comments, so apologies if I'm posting redundant information.
The "ride-sharing services" that make profits are already illegal in Sweden according to court decision, since it essentially means "taxi company without the annoying taxes". And consequently UberPOP has been suspended in Sweden along with several other EU countries (as also noted in the original post).
So the new proposal mostly seems like a way to clarify legislation: If you do something systematically to make a profit, we call that business and you pay taxes and follow all other relevant legislation (worker's rights etc). Makes very much sense to me.
Yeah, that's pretty disturbing. But I seem to get two different fingerprints. Refreshing the page 10 or so times, I usually get one, and then it switches to the other for another ~10 page reloads, and then back again.