Researchers document their discovery of electrons in graphene behaving like a fluid. To make this observation, the team improved methods to create ultra-clean graphene* and developed a new way to measure its thermal conductivity. When the strongly interacting particles in graphene were driven by an electric field, they behaved not like individual particles but like a fluid that could be described by hydrodynamics. “Physics we discovered by studying black holes and string theory, we’re seeing in graphene. This is the first model system of relativistic hydrodynamics in a metal.”
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Cheap oil has consequences
cheap oil, while great for crushing odious regimes, does cause some collateral damage.
The sense that falling oil is bad for stocks is mostly a matter of timing and conspicuousness. The bad parts of the oil plunge are hitting now: the credit downgrades, the defaults, the investment cutbacks, the layoffs of roughnecks. They’re making news and rattling people’s confidence. Eventually, the money freed up by cheap oil will leak into other parts of the economy.
NYC visualized
stuff to send to your annoying friends who always claim they could never live here.
Florida is a Ponzi scheme
Florida resembles a Ponzi scheme. Everything is fine if a 1000 newcomers come tomorrow. The problem is, no one knew what would happen if they stopped coming
The art of the deal
hilarious and insightful.
But Trump of the book is more a-intellectual, in the same way some people are amoral or asexual. The world is taken as a given. It contains deals. Some people make the deals well, and they are winners. Other people make the deals poorly, and they are losers. Trump does not need more than this. There will be no civilization of philosopher-Trumps asking where the first deal came from, or whether a deal is a deal only by virtue of its participation in some primordial deal beyond material existence.
long lost, recently rediscovered at a yard sale: the art of the deal, the movie
Malware museum
Nice! Defanged malware.
Robot Friends
any given conversation and image will not be completely unique. There are 7B people in the world, but 1 piece of text will not generate 7B different responses. When 2 people are chatting, it is possible a similar conversation has already taken place—we just have to find it.
The Cause of RBF
The cues are understated, yet the machine detects and interprets them the same way our human brains do. “Something in the neutral expression of the face is relaying contempt, both to the software and to us.”
i’ve been diagnosed with RBF, and the root cause is contempt. sounds about right.
Gene Expression Modeling
ML uncovers unknown features of multi-drug-resistant pathogen
Even though the model built with ADAGE was relatively simple, it had no trouble learning which sets of P. aeruginosa genes tend to work together or in opposition. To the researchers’ surprise, the ADAGE system also detected differences between the main laboratory strain of P. aeruginosa and strains isolated from infected patients. “That turned out to be one of the strongest features of the data”.
“We expect that this approach will be particularly useful to microbiologists researching bacterial species that lack a decades-long history of study in the lab. Microbiologists can use these models to identify where the data agree with their own knowledge and where the data seem to be pointing in a different direction … and to find completely new things in biology that we didn’t even know to look for.”
Lists are the new search
This in turn reminds me of a story in the New York Times, many years ago, about small Japanese shops who wanted only word-of-mouth customers and so made themselves hard to find (even by Japanese standards). In particular, there was one denim shop in a back-alley of Tokyo called ‘Not Found’ – so as to be ungooglable. One can call this curation, or hipsterdom, or just a Veblen good. But in the past, such things were always geographically constrained – you had to live in a big city (while chain retail took homogenized versions of the same thing to everyone). I wonder, as ecommerce matures, how much will be carved out into exactly the kind of spectrum of large and small retail beyond the big aggregators, and how far this removal of geographic constraint might make it easier rather than harder for them to take sales from the giants, in part by removing that density problem. That is, there might be a lot more lists, they might be hard to find, and not be part of some global aggregator, and that might be OK.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 