Sapere Aude
Month: September 2016
this is extremely impressive.
This post presents WaveNet, a deep generative model of raw audio waveforms. We show that WaveNets are able to generate speech which mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing Text-to-Speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50%.
RAND’s calculations plus my own Fermi estimate suggest that prescription drug price regulation would cost 1B life-years, which would very slightly edge out Communist China for the title of Worst Thing Ever.
what should happen instead is to automatically approve drugs that have gone through european regulators in the us and vice versa
psa for you dummies
“Yes, the established publishing companies that belong to the AAP are selling fewer e-books. But that does not mean fewer e-books are being sold. Of the top 10 books on Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list when I checked last week, only 2 were the products of major publishers. All the rest were genre novels (6 romances, 2 thrillers) published either by the author or by an in-house Amazon imprint.”
“‘Big 5′ publishers’ share of Kindle unit sales fell from more than 40% at the beginning of 2014 to 23% in May. Because they tend to sell their e-books for a lot more than $4.99, the Big 5 share of gross revenue is still around 40%, but it’s falling fast, too. And self-published “indie” authors — in part because they get a much bigger cut of the revenue than authors working with conventional publishers do — are now making much more money from ebook sales, in aggregate, than authors at Big 5 publishers.”
If the attackers could steal all of this sensitive data and go undetected for so long, could they not also have granted security clearances to people who not only didn’t actually warrant them, but who might have been recruited in advance to work for the attackers?
If that beacon is transmitting radio waves in all directions, the energy it would need to produce is a whopping 10^20 watts. “That’s a big energy bill even if you’re getting a bulk discount from your local supplier. It’s 100s of times more than all the energy falling on the Earth from sunlight.”
That means the hypothetical beings responsible might be what SETI scientists call a Kardashev Type II civilization, so advanced that they can tap all of the energy being produced by their host star.
Around Christmas in 2013, a friend of Merrihue’s alerted him to a Bloomberg News piece about an unranked contender, which Bloomberg called the “most exclusive restaurant in the US” It described a gourmet operation—in Earlton, New York, 30 min south of Albany—in the basement of a woodland home. Once called Damon Baehrel at the Basement Bistro, the place was now simply called Damon Baehrel, after its presiding wizard and host, who served as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper. Baehrel derived his ingredients, except meat, fish, and dairy, from his 48K m2 of yard, garden, forest, and swamp. He made his oils and flours from acorns, dandelions, and pine; incorporated barks, saps, stems, and lichen, while eschewing sugar, butter, and cream; cured his meats in pine needles; made 10s of cheeses (without rennet); and cooked on wooden planks, soil, and stone. He had christened his approach Native Harvest. The diners who got into the restaurant raved about it online. But at the time it was booked through 2020. “We spend our lives looking for places like this”.
The book is motivated by an intense desire to see: to reveal the underground circuits of utility tunnels, sanitation services, transportation networks, and everyday labor that writhe beneath the surface of the urban world. By doing so, it hopes “to foreground the connections between space and politics that converge underground.”
it was fun to go back to burning man after a 13 year hiatus. so many amazing things to see and do, the pictures hardly do it justice.
https://goo.gl/photos/Fb4v476HXkmA63Am9
Walker’s urban plan for Burning Man simply improves upon the original by applying setbacks along certain streets and intersections for different cultural and urban uses. he built out a “kit of parts” for simple streetscape interventions that he says can have a dramatic impact on urban flow and cultural space. “There are interventions that cities have been using for 100s, 1000s of years”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 