tomarr

Some feedback: - found the image on landing page confusing, expected to be able to click the items in it - pricing 'free until we launch'. This would scare me off - if people are going to start using your platform they need some idea of pricing levels / tiered plans. No point joining up to something and using in action to find you are priced out

Do you have many transport projects on the go currently?

One that I always thought would be interesting is looking at optimisation of the distribution of the Santander Cycle Hire bikes. These are redistributed to expected demand, but movements are costly in terms of people and vans. I spent a week with the team a few years ago and they had a fairly rudimentary modelling system that a university had put together, which involved mostly manual tweaking of routes. This would make for an interesting Kaggle or similar.

Agree.

Also surely one of the limitations here is technical / usability. One of the big features of Zoom is transcoding streams from all manner of devices and sending them to all manner of devices. Doing this on the fly is still computationally demanding and not feasible for consumer devices (or the E's in the true E2E model).

Macro v micro behaviours

Well, it sort of did:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

Hence the change in tact.

"The transport HMS Chepstow Castle, carrying troops from New Zealand to the front, coaled at Freetown on August 26 and 27; within three weeks, out of her 1,150 men, influenza struck down nine hundred of them."

This doesn't sound right, so I looked into it. It could have been the HMS Chepstow (Chepstow Castle seems to have been cancelled from Wikipedia), but other sources [1] put the fatality number at 68 for that sailing which sounds more realistic.

900 out of 1150 would be above Ebola rates and that would have been very quick for such a mortality rate.

[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KYtAkAIHw24C&pg=PA38&lpg...

Edit: Actually your source was correct, you just cut them off early which gave a very misleading impression, it said 38 of them died. Always good to be critical....

Wouldn't you really need a log scale or further interrogation to make that claim? To me it seems mortality dropped about 40% in last 50 years which is quite substantial.

Designing high speed rail for large thermal ranges is non-trivial as the forces can be very large.

Solutions can be very expensive (e.g. slab track), and therefore it may not be appropriate to build this out for 2 weeks of the year.

Ah yes, they are both very nice structures that would have taken some good engineering at the time. I wonder what would have been used as the impermeable water barrier - puddle clay or similar?

I'm sorry but as an engineer there is no way aqeduct is from 1670, it looks mid 1800s (and definitely no earlier than 1800).

Edit: Google shows canal du midi is indeed from 1670 but this aqeduct section is later, completed in 1858 (the order was decreed by Napoleon himself according to wiki)

I suppose you could have 'trusted devices' where upon taking pictures/videos a hash of the file is committed to blockchain. Although a privacy nightmare.

This obviously wouldn't solve the 'no fake videos' problem but would least mean 'this video isn't fake' for a select subset. There could be tiers of information in the future where this audited media is weighted higher.

Alternatively they cost a lot and reduce flexibility (want to change your train fleet / door configuration?)

Unfortunately not and that is one of the main issues. Even if we had limitless carbon-free energy there would still be significant carbon outputs directly from the production process. The article shows one possible way of reducing this for steel, but cement is currently a different ballgame and is a substantial emissions source from its non-energy inputs.

It's not people voting against May, it's just that nothing _could_ command a majority at this point other than a fanciful option that takes the best of EU (no economic shock) but strips out unchecked migration and European courts.

Our gradient descent has ended in a local minimum, and noone can agree enough to climb the hill.

Immigration is a very powerful topic (fear and loathing?) in the mind of voters and much of the 'debate' is not based on reason on either side. It's probably worth noting since the referendum was announced it's unclear whether one person in a country of 60 million has changed their mind on what they preconceptually had locked in at the start.

2mm is fine and normally within measurement error.

However, buildings should be designed to not fail disproportionately, so there isn't sudden failure such as like with the Miami footbridge. Design errors can lead to sections being over reinforced or other issues which could lead to collapse with little warning, which is what the concern will be.

Edit : also with cracks it depends on where they are and what causes with them. Cracks are normal for concrete and the size should be controlled through detailing. Where cracks are larger than this it can indicate whether there are issues in bending/shear. Structural design also often takes into account behavior of cracked concrete.

It definitely is true, these are electrified lines and rolling resistance is low. For equivalent distances elsewhere emissions are 80-90% lower with rail over air transport. With the potential for solar in SoCal there is no reason this could not be even better.

Dividing the landscape is a separate issue. It can be mitigated against (tunnels, habitat bridges, route planning), but alone it's not an excuse to stick with emission heavy modes of transport.

Misleading as this is just the direct marginal costs, you have to account for the indirect costs. Weather and water obviously play a massive factor in wear, a road would not last 1400x longer if used by 1 car rather than 1 semi.

Nothing stopping you moving to a low tax environment and conducting all your business there if you think this is 'unfair'.

The concept of fair is alien with civilisation and taxation; society/economy/governments services are all intrinsically linked.

"Assuming you're standing at a given spot in an urban area you would be at most 164ft (50m) away."

Not sure how they maintain a population if they remain 100m away from each other

The ducts get very large, so trying to fit them in existing infrastructure is a big challenge. Also consider that much of original 'spare' space has been repurposed for additional systems (CCTV, PA, additional power etc).

It's different for new infrastructure where this can be allocated more readily at a smaller marginal cost.

Grenfell's quite different to this. More similar is the Hammersmith Flyover where they recently had an issue with a post tensioned 60s structure, and corroded tendons snapping. In that case drastic action was taken, closing the structure (even though it carried arterial roads) and instigating a programme to replace the tendons gradually.

A common issue with many of the 1960s reinforced concrete structures is the difficulty of inspecting key structural members (e.g. encased tendons which may have also been the case with the Genoese bridge), lower standards than current (so the distance to reinforcement is less and corrosion is more likely) and maintenance regimes with lowered funding to repair an increasing number of deficient structures.

I've been involved in modular buildings in the past and one area that seems to end up informing design choices (in a negative way) is the size of elements that can be readily transported from a central facility to a site. Having bays of modules related to wagon width often, and regular joints/seams seems to end up driving basic ideas like wall loactions and floorplate thicknesses. Have you evolved much in this aspect?

Where does this size argument arrive from because it comes up consistently on USA v elsewhere arguments? 95th percentile densities are no more than europe. The population of USA is more than 30x Finland and we are talking about laser scanning (by EPA or equivalent)

The US actually did this extensively during its own industrialisation, stealing IP from Britain and shielding its own fledgling domestic industries (textiles was the tech sector of the day).

Britain took steps as extensive as banning skilled people from travelling to the USA.

All this is just historic and doesn't necessarily feed into what should be done in the present situation, but it is useful to note that this is a common path that developed countries have followed in the past:

- ignore/steal IP

- protect and subsidise domestic equivalents

- upon domestic industry being competitive, reciprocally lower tariffs

- once fully developed, lobby for free trade and strong IP protection

I mean not necessarily, although it stops data access to your computer you're still powering a device close to your computer which could have sniffer/camera/microphone

Well this isn't correct either. It's not fully automated in the sense that doors are still operator controlled. LIDAR is completely unrelated and is used for asset management rather than signalling.

I suppose the economics of it comes in to play in a similar vein to mailchimp, the lower the pricing the more scammier clients and the more IPs they lose to blacklists.

The article goes into this though, these challenges are something that comparable international projects have faced in much worse ground conditions (which extenuates the issue).

The magnitude of cost difference does not stem from engineering challenges.

Agree with the spirit but this isn't strictly true. Some in Japan do, even London will be paid for fully by fares in next couple of years as the government pulls the grant.

>You have to take robot scraping and indexing into consideration, and assume people will ignore robots.txt. (Certain bots, i.e. msnbot/bingbot are quite aggressive!)

Who owns LinkedIn again?