Month: June 2019

Serious Eats

In 2006, when the biggest names on the internet still included MySpace and Geocities, a new site burst onto the scene that promised to be bookmarked by food nerds across cyberspace: Ed Levine — perhaps the ultimate food nerd — and his team of happy-go-lucky writers unleashed Serious Eats, and it was, in many ways, the “food blogger” trope made manifest. It didn’t take long before the site became a one-stop destination for the original deep-dive into In-n-Out’s secret menu; an exhaustive guide to Sri Lankan food on Staten Island; a column in which Levine grappled with dieting for 182 weeks; and 5000 words on perfecting chocolate chip cookies. (I interned, for free, and then freelanced for the website, though I try not to think about how little I was paid.) Now, Levine has released a new memoir and, to celebrate the site’s 12 (frequently cash-strapped) years in business, Grub Street talked to the culinary obsessives who toiled away in the site’s dumpling-strewn content mines during its earliest years.

Radio Occultation Weather

the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (or COSMIC-2), the mission takes advantage of a weird property of GPS radio signals: They actually bend and slow down slightly as they travel through the atmosphere. This bending doesn’t affect the accuracy of navigation on the ground; it’s only visible from the side by something else in orbit. radio occultation, as it’s known, is akin to launching 5000 additional weather balloons every day—that’s how many more measurements the 6 COSMIC-2 satellites will be able to gather.

Cell Compartmentalization

When compartmentalization was thought of as a singular feature of eukaryotes, experts were often forced to speculate about how it came about, what the biophysical constraints were, and what selective advantages it might have. “That’s where these prokaryotes become really interesting. If they show some features that are even mildly similar to what we see in eukaryotes, it allows us to broaden the question and attack from a different angle: Under what conditions might compartmentation provide some benefit? Or is it just the case that there’s no benefit whatsoever?” The bacterial cases “suggest that there are multiple ways to do this, and that there could be a strong evolutionary advantage to doing so.” That certainly seems to have been the case with energy production: The independent evolution of anammoxosomes in some kinds of bacteria and mitochondria in eukaryotes signify that “the compartmentalization of energy metabolism is beneficial to the cell. You see a trend in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes to compartmentalize certain traits or certain functions in order to better control them.”

2021-01-10: Biomolecular condensates are an emerging type of membrane-less organelle, and adding a lot to our understanding of cell compartmentalization.

Inside cells, droplets of biomolecules called condensates merge, divide and dissolve. Their dance may regulate vital processes. Biomolecular Condensates may explain the speed of many cellular processes. “The key thing about a condensate — it’s not like a factory; it’s more like a flash mob. You turn on the radio, and everyone comes together, and then you turn it off and everyone disappears”


2022-11-02: Condensates are getting more refined experiments to figure out what’s going on

After an initial rush to document the phenomenon in every nook and cranny of the cell, scientists are beginning to ask more detailed questions. They want to know what these globules are doing, how they form and, importantly, how to prove that these biomolecular condensates are really as widespread and essential to the cell as many reports have claimed. Researchers are also responding to critics who have questioned the accuracy of some descriptions of phase separation in cells, arguing that other forces besides phase separation could have created droplets.
Inside the condensates, enzymatic reactions were 36x faster. Condensates gave the process extra structure: they helped to organize the enzymes spatially, providing a molecular ‘scaffold’ so that they could more easily partner with their reactants. “You get this combined effect of increasing efficiency and increasing concentration”
Some in the community have sought to inject precision into the field and guide researchers in finding out whether a blob forms through phase separation or in some other way. Despite the debates in academia, drug hunters are embracing the concept. Most companies interested in phase separation are prioritizing drug development for cancer and neurological disorders, 2 disease classes frequently linked to condensates that have gone awry.

DNN parallelization strategies

Traditional approaches to training exploit either data parallelism (dividing up the training samples), model parallelism (dividing up the model parameters), or expert-designed hybrids for particular situations. FlexFlow encompasses both of these in its sample (data parallelism), and parameter (model parallelism) dimensions, and also adds an operator dimension (more model parallelism) describing how operators within a DNN should be parallelized, and an attribute dimension with defines how different attributes within a sample should be partitioned (e.g. height and width of an image).

Do Traditions still matter?

1 way to ensure survival is high-fidelity adherence to traditions + ensuring that the inherited ancestral environment/context is more or less maintained. Adhering to ancient traditions when the context is rapidly changing is a recipe for disaster. No point in mastering seal-hunting if there ain’t no more seals. No point in mastering the manners of being a courtier if there ain’t no more royal court. Etc. And the problem is that, in the modern world, we can’t simply all mutually agree to stop changing our context so that our traditions will continue to function as before because it is no longer under our control.

Amazon Surveillance State

Amazon wants you to be part of its dish network. Yes, it’s a play on words (and not a good one!). This network springs from Amazon’s Ring doorbell — the doorbell with a camera inside and a cozy relationship with law enforcement! What are your neighbors and strangers up to? Give the dirt to law enforcement and trust their better judgment!

Good times await those who find themselves looking dark or suspicious (but also suspicious because they’re dark) in front of a Ring doorbell. Have you ever wanted to be an internet celebrity, with or without your permission? Ring has you covered.