Gregor J. Rothfuss
8,456 followers -
Maps Janitor at Google
Maps Janitor at Google
8,456 followers
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i'll be really impressed if saudi arabia buys tesla. if they can pivot the whole country from oil to solar, that will be remarkable.
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recently, i've been working on turning google maps from a tool that helps you not get lost to one that delights you with new discoveries about places to go to and things to do. we just launched, check it out and let me know what you think.
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what happens when chinese scale is applied to drugs. narcos was child's play: Fentanyl is a smuggler’s dream. It’s compact. It’s valuable. It’s fantastic for the smugglers and it’s terrible for law enforcement. There’s no need to grow vast fields of opium poppies, which must be defended against weather, competitors and government eyes. Raw materials and equipment are cheap. Synthesis takes about a week and requires neither heat nor skills more sophisticated than following a recipe. And in recent years, rogue chemists have unearthed instructions for analogues that researchers discovered decades ago but never put into legitimate use. Sellers offer these variations before governments can outlaw them. Potency and purity vary: One dose may produce a euphoric high, while another kills immediately. Fentanyl’s astronomical profit margins have driven its rapid spread. A kilogram from China sells for $3,800, which, when turned into tablet form, could fetch on the street up to $30 million.
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The world lacks a great all-around red. Always has. We’ve made do with alternatives that could be toxic or plain gross. The gladiators smeared their faces with mercury-based vermilion. Titian painted with an arsenic-based mineral called realgar. The British army’s red coats were infused with crushed cochineal beetles. For decades, red Lego bricks contained cadmium, a carcinogen. More than 200 natural and synthetic red pigments exist today, but each has issues with safety, stability, chromaticity, and/or opacity.
The Quest for the Next Billion-Dollar Color
bloomberg.com
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Each day, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet. Unimpeded by friction with the surface of the Earth, you can travel great distances, and so intercontinental travel is quite easy for viruses. It wouldn’t be unusual to find things swept up in Africa being deposited in North America.
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fascinating. so much land wasted for shitty burgers.
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as always, the NYT is a low-quality rag peddling the same fear as their competitors. not sure why they think they're somehow on a higher echelon. they're out of touch & incompetent.
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If the dolphins engaged in meaningful communication with near-human complexity, the frequency of these sounds would yield a logarithmic slope of -1—just like most human languages. Dolphin recordings had a gradient of -.95. This suggests that “dolphinese” may exhibit syntax. In comparison, the squirrel monkeys’ Zipf slope was never lower than -0.6, meaning the signals were too random to exhibit syntax. The cotton plant, which communicates through chemical emissions, had a signal distribution slope closer to -1.6, meaning the signals were too redundant.
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He may not have gotten the real sense of trying to get somewhere on a tight timeline, waiting for slow elevators, or encountering broken elevators. I think he still got some good insights and learned a few new things. For instance, auto-gates, the emergency exits that double as a wheelchair entrances, only accept reduced-fare MetroCards. This was brand new information for him. The card reader was not working where we met at Times Square, and April pointed out that she wants to pay the full fare like everyone else. He also noticed that the signage to elevators also needs work and that there weren’t enough accessible areas on the train cars themselves. We were able to deliver our wishlist, and hope to continue the conversation. I believe he will continue to listen to people with disabilities
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the Facebook hearings are easily understood. Facebook is a very profitable monopoly that doesn’t benefit politicians very much. Although consumers aren’t upset by high prices (since Facebook is free), they can be made to be upset about loss of privacy or other such scandal. That’s enough to threaten regulation. The regulatory outcome will be that Facebook diverts some of its profits to campaign funds and to subsidize important political constituents.
Who will be subsidized? Be sure to watch the key players as there is plenty to go around and the money has only begun to flow but aside from campaign funds look for rules, especially in the political sphere, that will raise the costs of advertising to challengers relative to incumbents. Incumbents love incumbency advantage. Also watch out for a deal where the government limits profit regulation in return for greater government access to Facebook data including by the NSA, ICE, local and even foreign police. Keep in mind that politicians don’t really want privacy–remember that in 2016 Congress also held hearings on privacy and technology. Only those hearings were about how technology companies kept their user data too private.
Who will be subsidized? Be sure to watch the key players as there is plenty to go around and the money has only begun to flow but aside from campaign funds look for rules, especially in the political sphere, that will raise the costs of advertising to challengers relative to incumbents. Incumbents love incumbency advantage. Also watch out for a deal where the government limits profit regulation in return for greater government access to Facebook data including by the NSA, ICE, local and even foreign police. Keep in mind that politicians don’t really want privacy–remember that in 2016 Congress also held hearings on privacy and technology. Only those hearings were about how technology companies kept their user data too private.
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