Might be associated with worse air quality however. Denver is particularly bad in terms of ozone.
“at high altitudes, atmospheric pressure is reduced, and oxygen is less available (commonly referred to as the air being “thinner”). This has a couple of effects on air quality for the people in the area. First, combustion engines perform less efficiently than they do at lower altitudes, causing an increase in emissions. Second, UV rays from the sun have a greater impact at high elevations, leading to an increase in photochemical smog, the result of airborne pollutants reacting with sunlight.”
https://www.aprilaire.com/blog/altitude-and-healthy-air-air-...
We also have to consider that temperatures feel different at altitude (and the mountain west is generally very dry). A dry 20F at 10k' feels more like 40F at sea level on the East coast.
I imagine the 20th century was the worst time for it because we had more sophisticated data collection and analysis methods, but failed to recognize our own inadequacies when using those tools to draw conclusions.
A team from UC Santa Cruz used the data from the Swope telescope in Chile to locate the source of the gravitation waves and observe the light from the event. The data provides evidence of how gold and other heavy elements formed in the universe.
It's a field in which international collaboration is forced - no amount of intelligence or money will let a nothern-hemisphere observatory get a shot of southern-hemisphere stars, for example.
That's a nice feel-good position to express, but is there any empirical evidence for it? There are plenty of very smart people (in academia) who are narcissistic, paranoid of potential rivals, and generally the opposite of cooperative and collaborative.
Narcissistic, paranoid are not traits what I call smart people. Humility on the other hand is. I guess studying and observing the universe makes people humble. The great physicians Einstein, Bohr and co of the beginning of 20 century worked together a lot for example. But anyway according the first fundamental of human stupidity there is fixed ratio of stupid poeple in any group of people. I think we can agree those you are referring to can be called stupid.
May not be admirable qualities, but they are often qualities of genius. The paranoia of Goedel was about as debilitating as it comes. And if you read a good Einstein biography, I think you'll discover more about him than you were expecting.
It might be more of a question of field. Based on my hopelessly incomplete view from the outside, in cosmology and closely-related subjects, it's impossible to work independently and accomplish much of anything. You need observations from many different sources.
Apologies, I'm not one of the researchers involved in the discovery. I'm just the web developer who built the announcement site for UCSC. Ryan Foley will participate in a Reddit AMA tomorrow (Tuesday, 10/17). I imagine your questions might get answered there.
This paper by one of the team members has more detail about the process used to narrow down the search field to a list of galaxies and identify possible locations of the event:
Not involved in this, I'm guessing this is how it goes: there are algorithms that automatically register the image that was just taken, diff it with a reference image of the sky from before, and if there's a significant difference that passes some false positive tests, then there's some notification for human intervention.
Indeed there could be events we are missing right now. Astronomers are building instruments that have larger fields of view (e.g., LSST), so that they can scan the sky ever few days.
Yes, but we observe more gold and other heavy elements than can be attributed to supernovae alone. Events like neutron star mergers might help explain where the rest comes from.
is that really significant? There are about 10 supernovas in the universe per second; neutron star mergers must to be at least 2 orders of magnitude rarer, estimating based on the percentage of stars that wind up becoming neutron stars
I once had a job making ice cream and it bothered me that I had to add yellow food coloring to the banana ice cream. We used real bananas and didn't add banana flavor. But I was told to add yellow color anyway.
Banana flavoring is also based on the flavor of Gros Michel bananas, which is why it doesn’t taste like the Cavendish bananas commonly available today.
If you want to see a very yellow inside of a banana, get a very ripe plantain (completely black peel) and fry slices.
It is not in Facebook's monetary interest to identify or remove fake or questionable news from our news feeds. By it's nature, fake news is emotional. It causes an emotional, gut-level reaction ("OMG, must like and share this!") that promotes virality. Virality === $$$ for Facebook. I imagine they have already experimented with news feed filters that reduce noise and I'm sure the result was reduced engagement. As long as Facebook profits from attention, we should expect them to be tepid at best about any change that reduces their share of our attention.
I think they see this as a key differentiator between iOS/iCloud and Google services and they want the public to know about it. In a post-Snowden world, it's worth noting the difference between platforms that prioritize user privacy and platforms that share user data with advertisers in return for additional services.
Just curious, as you moved from language to language do you think there were any patterns as far as the timing of your moves? Did you jump into new languages as they emerged or wait for them to reach a stable mindshare within your peers? Or perhaps waited until you needed to pick up a new language in order to pay the bills?
Basic was what I started with, as did a lot of people from that era and after, just because it was simple and available. FORTRAN I tried on a lark, then got serious with it when I moved to the University mainframe. That's where I picked up the first of many assembly languages, after finding out it was the only way to take full advantage of the OS and achieve the best efficiencies. It's also where I learned Pascal, which was an up-and-coming teaching language, and it soon became my go-to language for many tasks. Between Pascal and assembly I was good through about 1990, when my job required me to use a Unix server, and of course the natural language there was C. That led to C++, first on my own time then at my next job in 1997. There was a short period where I found myself applying OO concepts to assembly code! C# was a recent addition for a job-related task where it was an obviously better choice than C++.
Python is the interesting one of the bunch. I was exposed to it about 1995, when a coworker selected it as an embedded scripting language for our product. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, as it was outside of my immediate responsibilities. It was selected again as an embedded scripting language at my next employer around 2003. This time I paid attention, and came to love it. It's the language that lets me turn my thoughts into results the fastest.
Thanks for asking the question, I've never stopped to think about my programming history in this much detail.
Thank you for a thoughtful, detailed response. It seems like a mix of job exposure and natural curiosity led you from language to language.
Throughout this thread, I've noted a distinct lack of dogma about everyone's evolution as a programmer. While I imagine there was some of it during the popular phase of many of these languages, it's nice to see mostly pragmatism in everyone's career journey.
