Month: October 2019

Poker Cheat

But then I start to see things that seem so obvious, but I wonder whether they aren’t just paranoia after hours and hours of digging into the mystery. Like the fact that he starts wearing a hat that has a strange bulge around the brim — one that vanishes after the game when he’s doing an interview in the booth. Is it a bone-conducting headset, as some online have suggested, sending him messages directly to his inner ear by vibrating on his skull? Of course it is! How could it be anything else? It’s so obvious! Or the fact that he keeps his keys in the same place on the table all the time. Could they contain a secret camera that reads electronic sensors on the cards? I can’t see any other possibility! It is all starting to make sense. In the end, though, none of this additional evidence is even necessary. The gaggle of online Jim Garrisons have simply picked up more momentum than is required and they can’t stop themselves. The fact is, the mystery was solved a long time ago. It’s just like De Niro’s Ace Rothstein says in Casino when the yokel slot attendant gets hit for 3 jackpots in a row and tells his boss there was no way for him to know he was being scammed. “Yes there is. An infallible way. They won.” In 69 sessions on Stones Live, Postle has won in 62 of them, for a profit of $250k in 277 hours of play. Given that he plays such a large number of hands, and plays such an erratic and, by his own admission, high-variance style, one would expect to see more, well, variance. His results just aren’t possible even for the best players in the world, which, if he isn’t cheating, he definitely is among.

Falling Emissions

On average, the 30 cities identified by C40 have curbed emissions by 22%. Some of the most significant reductions came from London, Berlin, and Madrid, with 30% reductions, while Copenhagen lowered emissions by a dramatic 61%. Granted, when Copenhagen hit its highest emission levels to date in 1991, it was only releasing 4m tons of emissions, compared to, say, the 50m tons from London in 2000.

The China Cultural Clash

I am not particularly excited to write this article. My instinct is towards free trade, my affinity for Asia generally and Greater China specifically, my welfare enhanced by staying off China’s radar. And yet, for all that the idea of being a global citizen is an alluring concept and largely my lived experience, I find in situations like this that I am undoubtedly a child of the West. I do believe in the individual, in free speech, and in democracy, no matter how poorly practiced in the United States or elsewhere. And, in situations like this weekend, when values meet money, I worry just how many companies are capable of choosing the former?

New York Breweries win

7 New York state breweries, including 1 in New York City, took home medals at this year’s Great American Beer Festival in Denver this weekend. Barrage Brewing Co. in Farmingdale, Community Beer Works in Buffalo, Great South Bay Brewery in Bay Shore, Gun Hill Brewing Co. in the Bronx, Heritage Hill Brewhouse & Kitchen in Pompey, King’s Court Brewing Co. in Poughkeepsie, and West Kill Brewing in West Kill all scored wins in the 33rd annual edition of the competition, which featured nearly 9500 beers from nearly 2300 breweries across the country in 107 categories. This was New York’s best showing at the festival since 2013, when the state’s breweries also won 7 medals.

Unread citations

How often do authors not read their cites? This might seem near-impossible to answer, but bibliographic analysis offers a cute trick. In olden times, citations and bibliographies had to be compiled by hand; this is an error-prone process, but one may make a different error from another author citing the same paper, and one might correct any error on reading the original. On the other hand, if you cite a paper because you blindly copied the citation from another paper and never get around to reading it, you may introduce additional errors but you definitely won’t fix any error in what you copied. So one can get an idea of how frequent non-reads are by tracing lineages of bibliographic errors: the more people copy around the same wrong version of a citation (out of the total set of citations for that cite), the fewer of them must be actually reading it.

Such copied errors turn out to be quite common and represent a large fraction of citations, and thus suggests that many papers are being cited without being read.

Paris Through History

In 2012, a company called Dassault Systèmes launched an interactive application that allowed you to move about in a 3D historical reconstruction of Paris at different points in its history. The application seems to have fallen into disrepair so that you can’t actually use it, but the 13-minute video above offers a tour through several time periods, including: 52 BCE. The area was home to a Celtic group called the Parisii, just before the Romans conquered the settlement. 2nd century CE. The Romans ruled here until 486 CE; they called the city Lutetia. 1165-1350. The medieval period. Paris was one of the largest cities in Europe. 1789. A look at the Bastille during the French Revolution. 1887-1889. The construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair. It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for more than 40 years (eclipsed by the Chrysler Building).

AI New Yorker

Can a machine learn to write for The New Yorker?

On first reading this passage, my brain ignored what AI researchers call “world-modelling failures”—the tiny cow and the puddle of red gravy. Because I had never encountered a prose-writing machine even remotely this fluent before, my brain made an assumption—any human capable of writing this well would know that cows aren’t tiny and red gravy doesn’t puddle in people’s yards. And because GPT-2 was an inspired mimic, expertly capturing The New Yorker’s cadences and narrative rhythms, it sounded like a familiar, trusted voice that I was inclined to believe. In fact, it sounded sort of like my voice.

Airlines gone by 2060

Starting around 2030, SpaceX reusable Starship rockets will start providing a replacement for long international flights. The speed will be increased 20x. It will be anywhere in the world in 1 hour. SpaceX will be able to have 1000 people in reclined seating arrangements. The cost will be about $500-1000 per seat per flight. The key enabling factor is increasing the safety of rockets.

SpaceX success in this area would cripple the main financial strength of existing airlines. Business travel and first-class travel and international flights will be replaced with reusable rockets.

A bit more detail:

The reality of SpaceX mass production rockets is unfolding before our eyes. SpaceX Starships will cost over 10x less than current cargo planes, have over 2x the range and will be 30x faster. These massive advantages will give SpaceX dominance of the cargo business.

Not only that, they may also become price competitive by weight. Air freight is 1-5$ per KG, Starship could get to 10$ / KG to LEO, presumably less for ballistic flights. With airlines struggling in general, this could be a huge opening, and remodel the world economy for true just in time delivery.

America’s aerospace industry is regenerating:

If there ever was an example of Schumpeter’s creative destruction, this is it. Traditional aerospace companies have a hoard of capital and talent, providing poor returns to customers. Startups are siphoning the best talent and raising money. Market potential and technology are converging to create an ecosystem that looks more like the aerospace industry pre-1970, including the exploding prototypes, crazy ideas, and swarms of new companies. That aerospace industry took us from the first flight to the moon in ~65 years. The latest batch yearns to take us further.

2022-04-15: If airlines survive, here’s a look at the state of hypersonic flight.

High-speed flight is no longer a game of national prestige, subject to the whims of politics. It’s become the domain of private industry, where the technology is mature enough that entrepreneurs can focus on designs that reduce business risk. In the next decade we anticipate commercial high-speed flight will return to the market, regulations around overland sonic boom will be changed thanks to NASA’s X-59 program, and hypersonic technologies will transition from military to civilian flight. The future is faster!