Month: April 2008

70 ka Human bottleneck

From one of my favorite projects, the Genographic Project.

Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70 ka BP. The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought. The number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2k before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.

2023-08-31: And an even more severe, earlier bottleneck

Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction 900 ka BP. It suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to 1280 and didn’t expand again for 117 ka. “98.7% of human ancestors were lost”. The fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950 ka and 650 ka BP is patchy and that “the discovery of this bottleneck may explain the chronological gap”. “Of greater surprise is the estimated length of time that this small group survived. If this is correct, then one imagines that it would require a stable environment with sufficient resources and few stresses to the system.”

Spaced Repetition

Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

need to check out supermemo. it sounds very intriguing.

Railroad Resurgence

The freight railway industry is enjoying its biggest building boom in 100 years, a turnaround as abrupt as it is ambitious. It is largely fueled by growing global trade and rising fuel costs for 18-wheelers. In 2002, the major railroads laid off 4700 workers; in 2006, they hired more than 5000. Profit has doubled industry-wide since 2003, and stock prices have soared. The value of the largest railroad, the Union Pacific, has tripled since 2001. This year alone, the railroads will spend $10b to add track, build switchyards and terminals, and open tunnels to handle the coming flood of traffic. Freight rail tonnage will rise 90% by 2035.

a resurgence. it should be straightforward to fully automate trains, overcoming the industry workforce problems

Friendly botnet

Their system, called Phalanx, uses its own large network of computers to shield the protected server. Instead of the server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of “mailbox” computers.The many mailboxes do not simply relay information to the server like a funnel – they only pass on information when the server requests it. That allows the server to work at its own pace, without being swamped.

how about a cleanup worm that auto upgrades people’s installs with fixed version of winders?