Worse Tanks are better

In April of 1945 the Germans have 90 tanks on all of the Western Front. All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers. They had a handful of Tigers. They had 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that. So they had 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany. At that point in time the United States had 11k tank and tank destroyers. One reason there is 11k US tanks and tank destroyers is because the US decided to concentrate on a tank that was extremely reliable and relatively economical to build. And I don’t think anyone would claim that the Sherman was the best tank from the perspective of the tank crew, it didn’t have the best armor, it didn’t have the best gun, but from commanders perspective it was an excellent weapon. There were just lots and lots of them, so they gave the commander a lot of battlefield power. That can’t be said for a lot of the better German tanks because they simply were too expensive to be built in large numbers and they weren’t reliable enough, you couldn’t count on them.

Datacenter performance

How do you know how well your large kubernetes cluster is performing? Is a particular change worth deploying? Can you quantify the ROI? To do that, you’re going to need some WSC-wide metric of performance. Not so easy! The WSC may be running 1000s of distinct jobs all sharing the same underlying resources. Developing a load-testing benchmark workload to accurately model this is ‘practically impossible.’ Therefore, we need a method that lets us evaluate performance in a live production environment. Google’s answer is the Warehouse Scale performance Meter (WSMeter), “a methodology to efficiently and accurately evaluate a WSC’s performance using a live production environment.” At WSC scale, even small improvements can translate into considerable cost reductions. WSMeter’s low-risk, low-cost approach encourages more aggressive evaluation of potential new features.

Senior Cannabis

Taylor is now a commissioner on aging in Alameda County, and is 1 of 2 people in California certified to train physicians and nurses in medical cannabis. She speaks at churches and senior centers. “In the beginning, they’ll sit, frowning, with their arms folded across their chests. I tell them I’m not trying to convince anyone, I’m only here to educate you about the health benefits.” This summer, she plans to open iCANN Berkeley, a dispensary and wellness center, in a historically black neighborhood, which will cater to seniors. “Seniors are the most vulnerable population we have. People think they can give them a pill and not worry if it’s gonna kill them because they’re almost dead anyway.”

In silico labeling

The new deep-learning network can identify whether a cell is alive or dead, and get the answer right 98% of the time (humans can typically only identify a dead cell with 80% accuracy) — without requiring invasive fluorescent chemicals, which make it difficult to track tissues over time. The deep-learning network can also predict detailed features such as nuclei and cell type (such as neural or breast cancer tissue).

Beta Thalassemia Breakthrough

The researchers’ hope was that the modified stem cells would mature into red blood cells and produce robust amounts of healthy hemoglobin. That hope was realized. 9 of the 2 patients suffered from severe beta thalassemia, and, after treatment, the number of blood transfusions they required fell by 74%. 3 of the 9 no longer need any transfusions at all. The same is true of 12 of the 13 patients with the less severe version of the disease. So far, the subjects of the trial have been observed for a maximum of 42 months, but they will be monitored long into the future, to insure that the benefits of the therapy persist and cause no serious side effects. 1 early concern—that the procedure could disrupt the DNA of the stem cells, potentially triggering leukemia—has not, fortunately, come to fruition.

Paul Erdős Amphetamine

I began to wonder whether Paul Erdős (who I used as an example of a respected academic who used cognitive enhancers) could actually have been shown to have benefited from his amphetamine use, which began in 1971 according to Hill (2004). One way of investigating is his publication record: how many papers did he produce per year before or after 1971?

Red Hook Weed

The smell of maraschino cherries, not unpleasant but eye-wateringly strong, fills the factory, and the floors remain sticky even though they’re constantly mopped. Sometimes neighbors in apartments overlooking the building caught a few whiffs of marijuana along with the cherries. David Selig thought the smell of pot might be the result of workmen smoking it on their breaks. The police had failed to find suspicious signs. An increase in energy consumption consistent with the use of grow lights had not been detected, possibly because the factory had its own gasoline-powered generators, and a drug-sniffing dog had not been able to discover a definitive scent of marijuana. Independently, environmental investigators, acting on a tip, began to look into possible violations in the dumping of wastewater from the cherry-manufacturing process into the sewer. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office more or less forgot about the marijuana investigation.