Month: November 2018

Terrible Victorian Detectives

Defensive, condescending, full of made-up knowledge, and absolutely lethal to patients — these are the hallmarks of the occult detective, such as Algernon Blackwood’s Dr. John Silence, probably the biggest jerk in weird fiction. Like Batman, Silence vanished for 5 years of international training, only to return well-versed in being obnoxious and making things up. His first adventure was “A Psychical Invasion” (1908) in which a humorist overdoses on marijuana and loses his sense of humor. Silence uses a magical collie to fight what he claims is an evil ghost lady, relays a bunch of pseudoscience as patronizingly as possible (“As I told you before, the forces of a powerful personality may still persist after death in the line of their original momentum…If you knew anything of magic, you would know that thought is dynamic…etc.”), then he has the humorist’s house torn down.

AWS Ground Station

Amazon EC2 made compute power accessible on a cost-effective, pay-as-you-go basis. AWS Ground Station does the same for satellite ground stations. Instead of building your own ground station or entering into a long-term contract, you can make use of AWS Ground Station on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. You can get access to a ground station on short notice in order to handle a special event: severe weather, a natural disaster, or something more positive such as a sporting event. If you need access to a ground station on a regular basis to capture Earth observations or distribute content world-wide, you can reserve capacity ahead of time and pay even less. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service. You don’t need to build or maintain antennas, and can focus on your work or research.

A Business With No End

His parents had been receiving mysterious packages at their house. The packages were all different shapes and sizes but each was addressed to “Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC.” I looked into it and found that a company called Valley Fountain LLC was indeed listed at his parents’ address. But it also appeared to be listed at 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 350, in downtown San Francisco. So were 140 other LLCs, most of which were registered in 2015. The names of many of these other companies were baffling and surreal. They included Bropastures, Dreamlish and Your Friend Bart LLC. And on further inspection, each one was associated with an Amazon seller (usually based in a European country) with an equally bizarre but unrelated name, like Ipple Store, DeepOceanStoreuk and GiGling EyE. There was little pattern or theme to what these Amazon shops sold. They had everything from hemorrhoid cream to desk lamps, and there were varying levels of inventory. On sale at DeepOceanStoreuk (a storefront on Amazon.uk associated with Bropastures LLC), I found a book on industrial electricity, a set of fake facial wounds and a “No Stress Tech Guide to Microsoft Works 8” Another storefront called Kingdom Kber, this one on Amazon.de and associated with Agapao LLC, advertised a miniature whale, nail gel and a copy of “Undocumented Immigrants and Higher Education.” When I clicked on these items, though, none of them were currently available. A good number of the storefronts were completely empty.

Inside Bruegel

“New imaging technology, created by a project known as “Inside Bruegel” offers some insight into these questions, by allowing us to pull the painting’s layers apart. “It’s a huge advancement if you want to look at Bruegel. You can actually see the creative process. You can follow the artist in how he makes decisions.”

Japan Village

The 2k m2 market at 934 3rd Ave. delves into Japan’s food culture with several stalls that sell everything from soba and udon noodles made daily to Japanese street food like takoyaki. A liquor store has Japanese sake and whiskey on its shelves, and the izakaya restaurant and bar dishes out options like grilled chicken skewers and sashimi. And at Sunrise Mart — the same grocery store run by Japan Village owners Tony Yoshida and Takuya Yoshida — shoppers will have a varied selection of Japanese products, plus it comes with its own butcher shop and tofu market.

536 was the worst year

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest 10 years in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse

ML: Careful What You Wish

I’m not going to stand on the sidelines shouting for a fight, though. This whole episode has (I hope) been instructive, because machine learning is not going away. Nor should it. But since we’re going to use it, we all have to make sure that we’re not kidding ourselves when we do so. The larger our data sets, the better our models – but the larger our data sets, the greater the danger that we don’t understand irrelevant patterns in those numbers that we didn’t intend to be there, patterns which the ML algorithms will seize on in their relentless way and incorporate into their models. I think that the adversarial tests proposed by the UCSF group make a lot of sense, and that machine-learning results that can’t get past them need to be put back in the oven at the very least. Our biggest challenge, given the current state of the ML field, is to avoid covering the landscape with stuff that’s plausible-sounding but quite possibly irrelevant.