pacbard

It looks like pasta shapes are patentable [1], but I wasn't able to find a patent for this specific pasta shape on Google Patents.

On the podcast, they talk more about the process of creating the cutting die and how much that costs, etc. Also, they had some trouble finding a pasta mill to make the exact shape they wanted. So, even if it's not patented, it might not be profitable to just copy it. After all, most other shapes are cheaper and no "real" pasta company is going to get into a PR fiasco just to sell a different shape out of the 100s they already have.

[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/patents-behind-past...

My biggest concern is that this will allow people to type a question and get a number back from the database, without being able to tell if the query is right or if the LLM just made up something.

It can work to support business analysts to crank out more reporters, but I wouldn’t roll it out to all my staff.

The idea is to coil the sewage pipe with the cold water pipe before it goes into the water heater. That way the cold water will pick up some of the excess heat from the sewage pipe from the shower and it will cost less to heat overall.

Maybe a better descriptor would be that peer review is a reputation-based system.

The peers that will review your work likely know about the paper you submitted already, because they work on related work themselves and sat through your conference presentations. Most of them want you to publish your work and will provide a good/non-adversarial review of a paper.

Sometimes though, your paper hits too close to home for them, then they will try not to get it published or will slow walk the review so that their own work can come out before yours or at the same time.

On top of that, you have journal editors who can see everything about the process and can decide to ignore a good/bad review to fit their ideas about the paper itself and to fit the overall vision they have for the journal for the coming publication schedule.

Oof, the paper is tough to read. The default word formatting is not the best for tables.

I am wondering how marriage/relationship plays a role into career choices. I believe that people from privileged accounts are more likely to be in a stable relationship, which could (at least in part) explain why one partner can pursue a low-paying high-prestige profession while the other pursues a high-paying one.

Yes, possibly. Publication bias is a known problem when using prior work (see [1] for some references on the problem and potential solutions).

One of the strengths of Bayesian methods is that you can use a less informative prior to model your skepticism of prior work.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/....

If drone’s open core is a problem, there is always woodpecker, which was forked from the original drone before they changed their license a few years ago.

As far as error bars are concerned, you could report some% credible intervals calculated from taking the some%tile out of your results. It’s somewhat Bayesian thinking but it will work better than confidence intervals.

The intuition would be that some% of your forecasts are between the bounds of the credible interval.

From what I learned from KSP, a high latitude launch site is helpful for polar orbit. That's why Vandenberg is used for this purpose over Cape Canaveral (or other equatorial launch sites) in the US.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out because there are other nations participating in ESA that have both land and launch sites that are at higher latitudes than Germany's floating launch site (e.g., [1]).

[1]: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/13/this-arctic-space-c...

It’s similar to sqlite but can open multiple file formats.

Not an expert, but isn't most classical music like that? Most long pieces (e.g., concertos?) start with the main theme that gets unpacked in later parts of the performance.

I use it for some webhook stuff to put together an RSS feed for a website that doesn't provide one. I didn't want to have to code up a web app just for it.

N8N comes with a webhook listener, and it was easy enough to cobble something together with the built-in nodes and coding custom ones with javascript (they just released a python node that I haven't tried yet).

Open access link: https://psyarxiv.com/ba7pe/download

When you work with state level education data, you do so under a research agreement. That means you outline your research agenda and the state agrees to provide data to you to answer your research questions.

You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data.

It looks like the state is interpreting that use of student data as part of the lawsuit to ve outside the scope of the prior approvals, therefore they are preventing Sean and Tom from using the data during the their testimony.

Nothing prevents the defense to subpoena the same data and have them use it for their testimony.

While inheritance laws in Southern Europe are weird, I don't think that partial ownership of buildings is the issue here.

The real issue is that old buildings are not useful anymore:

1. Buildings that are not longer needed. For example, you can walk in woods and see old, run down, metati [1] in Italy. While chestnuts still keep a sentimental value, mountain people do not rely on them for sustenance anymore. Therefore, the drying sheds and mills have been abandoned. 2. Buildings that are not just functional anymore. Our barn had 20 stalls. It was functional as of the 1800s, but it's no longer a viable building to host a herd of milk producing cows. It has small stalls, lack of windows, difficult sanitation. People just build new barns and abandon the old ones. The problem is that the barn is build of rock, so it won't decay so easily. 3. Buildings that are no longer comfortable. Similar to point 2, old stone houses are not that comfortable. Having 3-foot wide stone walls for each internal room seems like charming until you realize that you can't use wall space. A house with a regular footprint (maybe 100 sq. feet) is much smaller once you consider all the space that stone walls take up. Plus, old houses don't have plumbing, electricity, etc, are damp and cold in the winter (but somewhat pleasant in the summer). People just prefer to live in a modern place rather than fix up an old one (which might be marked as historical and will need much more money to fix up).

[1]: https://www.tuscany-exclusive.net/metato/

I was wondering about performance, but I cannot find any data on how these toroidal propellers are preforming compared to traditional airblades.

The two-pager just says:

> Achieves thrust comparable to that of a multirotor drone propeller

which isn't saying anything.

My gut reaction is that these propellers require more material than traditional ones, which makes them weigh more, which should make them perform differently than traditional propellers. At a minimum, they should spin slower and/or strain the motor more for the same RPM. Maybe I'm completely off base.

I found this other website [1] which reports thrust differences between traditional and toroidal propellers for boats. At least under the conditions reported in the graph, it seems that toroidal propellers might outperform traditional boat propellers.

Again, I'm not sure how much air behaves like water. My layman understanding of fluid dynamics tells me that air is different from water just because air propellers don't look like water propellers (e.g., they require longer, thinner, blades; air engines need to spin way faster than water ones; water probably requires more torque) and you can't turn a boat into a helicopter if you turn it sideways.

[1]: https://newatlas.com/aircraft/toroidal-quiet-propellers/

The number of users of an instance is not equal to the workload for the instance because of how federation works.

The frontend serves 30,000 users. The backend processes their posts alongside the posts of everyone that replies to them and all posts from people that the “home” users follow. So, while the home user base is 30,000, the effective load on the back end is much more, depending on how many followers/following a person has.

You can find posts from people who were hosting their own single user instance that went down because of a popular post that got federated across multiple instances.

Interesting question. They partially address it in the paper:

> Controlling for gender, ethnicity, and education did not meaningfully alter the relationships between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech, nor the mediating role of IH. Also controlling for participants’ ideology (separately or in addition to the demographic variables) did not meaningfully alter the results, which can be found at OSF. (p. 39)

I read that to suggest that, at least for study 3's results, the inclusion of education did not meaningfully change their results.

If we are thinking about possible confounders, something I am wondering about the extent to which their choice to use verbal cognitive ability (i.e., "a vocabulary test (i.e., Wordsum)" for study 1 and 2, and "a (verbal) cognitive ability measure, that is, the Ammons Quick Test" for study 3) could explain participants' preference towards freedom of speech, which arguably is usually discussed as a verbal form of freedom, either spoken or printed. As they are measuring verbal capacity, I would expect people who are better with words to be more drawn to freedom of speech. Maybe people who are more "outgoing" might be drawn more towards freedom of assembly.

I am also wondering how people who are drawn more towards non-written forms of communication (e.g., memes, videos, podcasts, etc.) score on their verbal cognitive test and whether they have similar/different views about freedom of speech.

According to wikipedia, electrolysis has an efficiency of about 70%, with a theoretical limit of 94%. Cracking water will always require more energy than it will produce, i.e. there is no free lunch.

The point of electrolysis is that it could be used as "clean energy storage" for other clean energy (e.g., solar). Hydrogen gas can be moved long distances, unlike other storage options that are more stationary (like a hydroelectric dam), and has higher energy density (120 MJ/kg for what I can find online) then even the best batteries available (2.54 MJ/kg for Lithium-ion nanowire?).

The problem with my experience in the Midwest (Michigan in particular) is that their power grid is so bad that I would lose electricity for an average of 1 week each year (the problem is so widespread that Michigan has laws in place to protect utility companies against customer claims for interruptions less than 5 days[^1]).

If you get a nasty February ice storm that cuts a power line, you can be without electric power in 0F weather for up to 5 days. I guess people can install natural gas generators for that occurrence, but that seems to be a little bit counterintuitive (also, would a gas company provide emergency-only service?). I am not sure if heat pumps can work off regular gas powered portable generators that people usually use for emergency power.

[1]: https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/mpsc/consu...

My read of the abstract is that it is about growing food without sunlight or aid the growth of food with sunlight plus their thing. This is the focal sentence in the abstract:

> Here a two-step CO2 electrolyser system was developed to produce a highly concentrated acetate stream with a 57% carbon selectivity (CO2 to acetate), allowing its direct use for the heterotrophic cultivation of yeast, mushroom-producing fungus and a photosynthetic green alga, in the dark without inputs from biological photosynthesis.

My understanding is that they take CO2 from the atmosphere, run it through an electrolyzer to create acetate, then add the acetate to the plants' environment to skip the need of sunlight in and/or aid photosynthesis.

Note that I am not a biologist so this could be completely wrong.

> Academic researchers often pay either zero...

Not completely accurate. Every time you get a grant, your institution get a percentage of it to pay for indirect costs. These costs include office space, office personnel, and other expenses that the grant doesn't pay for directly. So, if you are getting "free" stuff from the department closest, it is very likely that your (or some else's) indirect expenses are paying for it.

Overhead percentages are set by each institution. My current one is set at 54%, meaning that for each $1 of award, I get to keep 64 cents and the university takes 36 cents (more or less).

I don't think that is accurate.

Most post-doc are funded through soft money (i.e., grant money or other non-earmarked department money) to a principal investigator. The PI wrote the grant and budgeted for post docs. Meaning that they set the salary for the postdoc in advance at the time that they wrote the grant (most grant applications I was part of required approval from the University's finance office before submission). They can increase the postdoc salary if they want.

The problem is that if they pay more for a postdoc, that money will need to come out from something else and usually that's from other personnel expenses (as most funding agencies have set amounts that they will allocate to spending categories, so you cannot propose a grant with only personnel expenses for example). That means that increasing the postdoc pay will either (1) reduce the number of postdoc that can be hired on any specific grant or (2) reduce the amount of compensation that a PI will get from the grant. You can see how both of those option are a non-starter as (1) will reduce the manpower on the grant, leading to less productivity, and a reduction in likelihood of future funding and (2) is just a non-starter as most PIs feel like they should get something out from getting a grant (i.e., they don't do research just because is fun).

Plus, there is a close to infinite supply of recent PhDs in pretty much any field that cannot get a faculty position and that will apply for postdocs, so there is really no market incentive to increase base postdoc pay.

Note, I have only applied to NSF grants so other funding agencies (i.e., NIH) might have different budgetary requirements. Private foundations are the Wild West of funding and each one has its own requirements.

So basically it's a gas canister filled with hydrogen instead of propane gas (which, by the way, is available almost everywhere at least in the US). It seems that they might have implemented a "quick" swap locking mechanism but that's pretty much it.

What I am wondering is:

1. How is this different than just using H2 canisters that are already available for welding (for example)? I wouldn't want to do a "hot swap" for a gas tank in a car as there are a ton of things that can go wrong, but that's pretty much what these canisters are trying to do anyways.

2. For home use, big propane tanks are already commonly used in places where there is no municipal natural gas line, so why would someone use theses small canisters instead of just installing a big tank for hydrogen outside?

3. Isn't the energy density of H2 way lower than other gases that could be used for automotive purposes? For example, in Europe is common to have after market conversions to propane or natural gas. Both have more energy density than hydrogen, leading to either smaller/lighter tanks and/or higher range with the same volume of gas. I get that hydrogen has the potential to be green with electrolysis (but we are not there yet and most H2 available now is made from hydrocarbons anyways) but it seems to be trying to be solving a problem in a convoluted way and/or mimicking the "electric battery" hot swap technology but for hydrogen without getting complete tech parity with it.

I agree that LaTeX has not the best syntax, but that is a better alternative?

I mostly write in Word and I can tell you that it is not that much better than LaTeX. Sure, the editor is WYSIWYG so you can see right away the title, abstract, text, etc.

The problems I have with Word are mostly solved in LaTeX. For example, references are automatically managed in LaTeX. In Word, that's mostly a manual process (I know there are integrations with Zotero/Mendeley/whatever, but those are a little wonky on a long paper---I have never used the built-in citation manager). I sometimes feel bad for the editors that have to check all my reference lists. They usually find 1-2 papers that are either missing or included and no longer cited.

Tables are also a problem in Word, especially if your collaborators use an older version that breaks the formatting (Moving between Google Docs -> Word -> Google Docs also breaks a lot of things). I can't tell you how many times I had to reformat tables that a collaborator broke. Making complex tables is also wack sometimes, like adding a simple sub-rule between cells requires some column hacks in Word.

Table/figure numbering is also another thing that I loathe in Word. Manually renumbering is a pain and the automatic numbering always breaks for me in a way or another (maybe still thanks to my collaborators).

All those things work pretty well in LaTeX with some backslash commands.

What Word really shines is track changes and commenting. I don't know if there is a LaTeX editor where you can track changes and comments like in Word (I know that Overleaf has something that kind of works).

Powerpoint vs. Beamer is a whole different ball of wax. Both have pros and cons. But with presentations with a lot of equations, beamer is definitely better but, as you point out, it doesn't play well when you want to put an equation in a specific spot in the slide. In powerpoint, you can just click and drag and you are done.

I'm curious to know which cheesemakers are using these chips. If you look at a wheel of Parmigiano (a whole one), you will see a number stamped on it. That's the cheesemaker's matriculation number in the consortium. There are 313 active ones right now. Some of them are very big (especially the ones in the lowlands) and some of them are very small (mostly the ones up in the hills). The small cheesemakers have trouble selling their current stock, so I doubt that they are putting tracking chips in their wheels. I can see a few big producers that work with the international market adding tracking chips to their wheels, but that's about it.

Another fun fact, most cheesemakers are farmer coops and act as a sort of bank for the farmers. Most of them can borrow against their "share" of the cheese that is aging if they have a big capital expense that it coming up and they can't wait 2-3 years for the cheese to age and sell.

> there was also some Duck app for macOS?

You are thinking of Adium (https://adium.im). I believe it was a port of pidgin/libpurple to cocoa/aqua (or whatever the macOS gui framework was back then).

The argument seems to rely on measurement data. That is, all the intelligence measures we have are correlated, therefore there is a single intelligence factor. What this argument misses is the fact that not observing something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. For example, we weren’t able to observe atoms for a long time time but they were there all along. Gardener tried to make this argument in the 70s regarding multiple intelligences but I don’t know about the measurement evidence backing that theory up.

My impression of what makes the debate about gifted education and (to an extent) the new California math standards is the issue of the negative externalities in the decision to segregate high achieving students from the general population of students.

The linked articles cites some evidence that moving high achieving/gifted students have a positive effect on their math and ELA achievement. I don't believe that anyone is contesting that having a classroom for gifted students has a positive effect on their learning.

On the other hand, there is a growing concern of the negative externality of this decision on the other students in the larger school community. In other words, we know that having high performing peers have a positive effect on students learning (this is a positive externality of having a desk mate that is gifted). The theory goes that removing these gifted students from regular classrooms has a negative effect on everyone else that remains. Again, this is a process that makes intuitive sense.

The tough sell in this argument is that, at the end of the day, this remains an externality for gifted students. Helping your desk mate does not directly impact you and, in all honesty, might even hurt your chances for a perfect SAT score or of admission at a top university because you took a lower division courses than your peers that were scooped away to a gifted classroom. Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students or even more remote, long term outcomes of (maybe) less crime or increased tax base 20 years after graduation. I am not sure if this is a viable demand to place on parents/families given how competitive society at large is.

The analysis seems to be somewhat simple (just rank states by union strength and COVID measures), then conclude what is reported in the title.

The conclusion seems to suffer from severe endogeneity problems as teacher unions are correlated with other factors (e.g., being on a coast) that are also correlated with COVID response. Just making the link between unions and COVID policy is naive (at best) and misleading (at worse).

One thing to keep in mind when doing research in education in the US is that you have to account for its distributed structure. That is, local education agencies (usually school districts) make most of the decisions. For example, there is no California teacher contract; instead, contracts are negotiated between local teacher unions and local district. The California teacher union could have lobbied the California governor to extend school closures, but the eventual decision to how (and maybe when) to go back in person probably fell to the individual superintendents. Another example is to see what happened in Chicago Public Schools. The local union went on strike to negotiate covid-related measures. Those had nothing to do with the larger Illinois education policy.

A better design for this study would have been to try to measure the strength of local unions at the district level (maybe % of membership that contributes to the political fund now that teachers can opt out from that) and try to correlate it with local COVID restrictions (like more days of teacher paid leave, mask policies, possibility of online or hybrid instruction). I suspect that there is a patchwork (read, heterogeneity) of policies that were negotiated between the union and the district that could give a better picture than what is reported in the paper. As a secondary result, you could even observe whether strong and weak unions have different preferences. Maybe strong unions prefer a safer work environment (i.e., less in person, more masks) while weaker unions prefer one-time bonuses?