jamesash

Indeed. My friends thought I was exceptionally smart to be able to recite a list of 875 north american bird species from memory, when in fact I'd just put in a lot of work building memory palaces. The book demystified a lot.

For a different source, Freeman Dyson's biography, Disturbing the Universe, is extraordinarily worthwhile. He has crazy Feynman stories too, and Dyson is a very sober witness to the bongo-drum-playing, picking-up-hitchhikers, getting-pulled- over-for-speeding Feynman that comes across in the books.

Regus is valued at about 10k per desk. Wework is valued at about 160k / desk (August 2017 numbers, see Aug 25 2017 WSJ).

What does Wework do that Regus doesn't, that accounts for 16x the value?

I will make you a long bet of $100 that no country bans the sale of new diesel or petrol cars by the end of 2025.

Sure, which is why environments like Europa are exciting.

A lot of the chemical reactions required to maintain life as we know it involve charged intermediates. These are not generally soluble in the gas phase as they have very low vapor pressures.

Was just wondering today how to build one, thank you.

>In addition to the other fine points: A fundamental job of a life form is to pump entropy out faster than the environment can pump it in.

Yes. From a chemistry perspective, this requires a membrane, or barrier, that separates "life" from "non-life". It also requires mass transport across that barrier in both directions, which would presume liquid inside that barrier. A third variable is the mass of the planet, which dictates which molecules can be present in the atmosphere, and the temperature, which dictates physical states. The requirement for a barrier and mass transport via liquid already imposes restraints on the chemistry that rule out most of the periodic table. Metals lose their electrons too easily. After metals, you're not left with much to work with. Carbon compounds in water is still the best idea we have. Simple long chain carboxylic acids spontaneously make membrane-like micelle structures in water. If anyone has any better ideas, there's a Nobel Prize for the first person to create life from non-life. Go for it.

A review of a biography of the Italian opera conductor Toscanini by Harvey Sachs. The reviewer compares this volume to Caro's Power Broker in its loving attention to minute factual details.

Would not have seen this had it not been posted to HN. Thank you.

Savannah Georgia is spending over a billion to dredge the harbor to make way for bigger Panamax container ships. Same with Charleston, about 2 billion. My point is that there are a fair number of billion dollar infrastructure projects that fly under most people's radar. Source: today's WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-panama-canals-big-bet-is-pa...

Current Latin learner here. I found the Great Courses Introduction to Latin by Hans-Friedrich Mueller to be helpful. 35 audio lectures, plus 35 chapters of exercises. It's a good introduction that covers all the basics, and has set me up quite well for working through selections from The Gallic Wars.

Not a news app but dead tree subscriptions to quality newspapers (WSJ, NYT) are seriously under-rated in my opinion. They don't interrupt you, try to get you to like or share, and it's extremely easy to skim while at the same time learn things you wouldn't get from click click clicking on articles from the website. Curation is worth it.

Maybe this comment points to a larger misconception: that some people will fall into the trap of analyzing Blue Apron as something of a tech company?

From yesterday WSJ: "Daniel McCarthy, a professor of marketing at Emory University, analyzed Blue Apron’s numbers and estimated that roughly 60% of customers stop using the service after six months." https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-chops-its-ipo-price-...

Metallurgical coal - mostly found in Appalachia - is <10% of the 800 million tons of coal mined annually in the USA, and commands higher premiums: about $161/ton versus $53/ton for "thermal" coal. Not trying to correct anything you said, just trying to add to the discussion by providing additional facts.

Quote: "The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”"

Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches?

A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....

I wish they used more specific language than the blanket term "scientists". Reproducibility is highly field-dependent. In organic chemistry, for example, the journal Organic Syntheses only publishes procedures that have been checked for reproducibility in the lab of a member of the board of directors. http://www.orgsyn.org A few years ago someone published a paper in a highly esteemed journal that was largely thought to be bunk (oxidation of alcohols by sodium hydride). A prominent blogger live-blogged his (unsuccessful) attempt to reproduce the experiment, as did others. The oxidation was in fact due to the presence of oxygen, not due to sodium hydride. The paper was retracted.

A more skeptical take. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/11/121...

Tl;dr Alzheimer's is hard to drug, and the approach this company is trying has been tried before.

I run a site that teaches organic chemistry online. Started in 2010. 7 million visits last year. Most content is free, but has some "cheat sheets" and other study guides that are for sale. I have some contractors for various tasks but am the only employee. http://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/blog

Post WWII, an entire generation of soldiers who had seen some of the most horrific scenes of war entered university on the GI Bill and made it through their education without trigger warnings.

The students at the U of C will be fine.

Chemist here. Glassblowers are essential for certain chemists - like organic chemists - mostly for the purposes of fixing essential (and expensive) glassware like vacuum manifolds that often break during the course of daily use. It's less essential for several other fields that fall under the umbrella of chemistry, like theoretical/computational chemistry. The issue is whether it's in the department's interest to subsidize glassblower use for everyone in the department, or have labs outsource glassblowing to a third party. MIT decided to get rid of its glassblowing shop and machine shop about 10 years ago. We were lucky enough to be in Cambridge where a glassblower would come by the lab every thursday and pick up / return items we needed him to fix / make. Given the constant stream of glassware that is being broken, and the cost of replacement of certain items being >$1000 trust me when I say that university glassblowers are extremely busy people.

Around 1900, the "tin" in tin cans contained about 12% lead, which leached into fruits and vegetables. You have to wonder if there's any way of correcting for that. [Source: "The Great A&P" by Marc Levinson, page 50.][Edit: read the paper cited and they make no mention of this]

Thank you for explaining your point of view. Helpful.

Surprised by the downvotes. Promoting Holmes as the next Jobs gave the tech press a chance to show how it was trumpeting diversity and gender balance in its coverage of founders. To those that downvoted - would you completely disagree that this played a role here?

Chemist here. If there's one thing that being in a research lab does to you, it's that you feel dumb almost all of the time - and it's generally not because of your coworkers, it's because the vast majority of experiments fail. There are rare feelings of success, and many moments of feeling that you are in a dark hole trying to climb out. To make significant headway you need a thick skin, and even then it can be extremely hard dealing with failure after failure. My unpopular opinion is that, given that there is currently not a shortage of scientists in the USA, it is not a travesty that many people who feel "dumb" in the early stages of learning science opt out of a scientific career that will only exacerbate these feelings, and thus save themselves considerable opportunity costs by seeking a profession that is easier on the ego.

As far as typos go, it's a great one. "Flagrantly borrowed" is a cliche. "Fragantly borrowed" is a fresh turn of phrase. Did he sent Jason flowers for using this example?

People cheer for the marijuana-legalization underdogs now, but endgame, if it proceeds to all 50 states, looks like this: Altria and other players in the $112 billion US tobacco market buy up the little cannabis startups and start advertising and promoting marijuana use on large scale. The government steps in to regulate distribution and advertising. Is that what we want? Because that's where we're going.

Paul Bracher of ChemBark gave this field the highest odds of winning, at 7-1. Interestingly a commenter told him he neglected to put in Hell, about 3 hours before the announcement was made. http://blog.chembark.com/2014/10/08/predictions-for-the-2014...

Compare to Thomson Reuters' predictions. http://thomsonreuters.com/press-releases/092014/2014-nobel-l...

Funny, but necessary. The Zaentz company is notoriously litigious. From Zaentz' Wikipedia article: "In 2011, Zaentz's company began several legal actions against small businesses in the UK to enforce their "Hobbit" trade mark, including the Hungry Hobbit cafe in Sarehole, near Birmingham[13][14] and a pub in Southampton, England, which had traded as The Hobbit for twenty years.[15] This raised the ire of many British correspondents such as Stephen Fry, who described it as "pointless, self-defeating bullying."

Ditto for Cairo, worst traffic I've ever experienced. Noticed an unusually high number of people walking with limps, too.