This week’s map shows the orbits of 18k asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter – 10k asteroids – as well as 8k randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years’ Eve 1999. All of the data for this map is shared by NASA and open to the public. However, the data is stored in several different databases so I had to do a decent amount of data cleaning. I’ve explained all of the steps in detail in my open-source code and tutorial, so I’ll just include a sketch of the process here in this blog post.
the Fourier transform tells you how much of each ingredient “note” (sine wave or circle) contributes to the overall wave. Here’s why Fourier’s trick is useful. Imagine you were talking to your friend over the phone and you wanted to get them to draw this squarish wave. The tedious way to do this would be to read out a long list of numbers that represent the height of the wave at every instant in time. With all these numbers, your friend could patiently stitch together the original wave. This is essentially how old audio formats like WAV files worked. But if your friend knew Fourier’s trick, you could do something pretty slick: You could just tell them a handful of numbers—the sizes of the different circles in the picture above. They can then use this circle picture to reconstruct the original wave.
2022-11-14: The nuclear origins of Fast Fourier Transforms
And this trick works even if the signal is composed of a bunch of different frequencies. If the sine waves frequency is one of the components of the signal it will correlate with the signal producing a non-0 area. And the size of this area tells you the relative amplitude of that frequency sine wave in the signal. Repeat this process for all frequencies of sine waves and you get the frequency spectrum. Essentially which frequencies are present and in what proportions. If the signal is a cosine wave, then even if you multiply it by a sine wave of the exact same frequency, the area under the curve will be 0. For each frequency, we need to multiply by a sine wave and a cosine wave and find the amplitudes for each. The ratio of these amplitudes indicates the phase of the signal that is how much it’s shifted to the left or to the right. You can use Euler’s formula so you only need to multiply your signal by one exponential term. Then the real part of the sum is the cosine amplitude and the imaginary part is the sine amplitude.
the major tech companies are much less of a threat to our actual privacy than is typically assumed. For most people, gossip from friends, relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances is a bigger privacy risk than is information garnered on-line. Gossip is an age-old problem, and still today many of the biggest privacy harms come through very traditional channels. Privacy is a real issue, but to the extent it can be fixed, most of that needs to happen outside of the major tech companies. Most of what is written about tech and privacy is simply steering us down the wrong track.
we should probably talk about the time that Ketchum found $1b worth of LSD, enough to “intoxicate several 100m people”, just sitting in his office—and the fact that it disappeared without explanation.
While Tupperware shares many common features with other cluster management systems, such as Kubernetes and Mesos, it distinguishes itself in the following areas: Seamless support for stateful services. A single control plane managing servers across data centers to help automate intent-based container deployment, cluster decommission, and maintenance. Transparent sharding of the control plane to scale out. An elastic compute approach to shift capacity among services in real time.
Efficient, reliable cluster management at scale with Tupperware
Things that are completely ridiculous at American costs – say, any future subway expansion – become more reasonable at average costs; things that are completely ridiculous at average costs likewise become more reasonable at Nordic or Spanish costs.
Our mouths are the size of the squirrel monkey’s, a species that weighs less than 1.3 kg. Chimpanzees can open their mouths 2x as wide as we can and hold substantial amounts of food compressed between their lips and large teeth. We also have puny jaw muscles that reach up only to just below our ears. Other primates’ jaw muscles stretch to the top of their heads, where they sometimes even latch onto a central bony ridge. Our stomachs are small, having only a third of the surface area that we’d expect for a primate of our size, and our colons are too short, being only 60% of their expected mass. Compared to other animals, we have such atrophied digestive tracts that we shouldn’t be able to live. What saves us? All of our food processing techniques, especially cooking, but also chopping, rinsing, boiling, and soaking. We’ve done much of the work of digestion before food even enters our mouths.
anecdotal evidence from some teams suggest a mental shift towards a data-centric view of ML, where the schema is not solely used for data validation but also provides a way to document new features that are used in the pipeline and thus disseminate information across the members of the team.
By making a kind of high-speed movie of a quantum leap, the work reveals that the process is as gradual as the melting of a snowman in the sun. “If we can measure a quantum jump fast and efficiently enough, it is actually a continuous process.” But there’s more. With their high-speed monitoring system, the researchers could spot when a quantum jump was about to appear, “catch” it halfway through, and reverse it, sending the system back to the state in which it started. What seemed to be unavoidable randomness in the physical world is now shown to be amenable to control. We can take charge of the quantum.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 