maxander

7 ms·

1.
by maxander 1y ago
It’s not that dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get you ~arbitrarily cold, as long as you’re giving up enough flui
2.
by maxander 1y ago
This is the basic concept of my favorite computer game back in the 90s (!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_(video_game_series...
3.
by maxander 1y ago
The interesting thing about this blog post isn’t the point it makes (which was endlessly made about cafes in all blue-state U.S. cities in the 00s) but that it’s an Iranian writing in English, and thus for an Western audience, about Iranian
4.
by maxander 2y ago
Sadly, I think the modern alternative for ncurses-based interfaces is javascript.
5.
by maxander 2y ago
Yeah I was unclear there - I meant the other use of the & operator, 'foo & bar' where bar starts after foo completes. AFAIK, if you ran foo by itself, there's no way to make bar automatically run after foo completes.
6.
by maxander 2y ago
My primary project the past couple weeks has been applying the AI interpretability technique from Anthropic's famous paper this past summer (you know, the Golden Gate Claude one) to single-cell RNA-seq data. What works on one huge, ins
7.
by maxander 2y ago
Location: Boston, MA Remote: Yes Willing to Relocate: Unlikely Technologies: Python, R, Javascript, AWS, GCS, Azure, SQL, pandas, numpy, scipy, Tensorflow, Keras, [Py]Torch, SQL, Nextflow, many others Resume/CV: http://alexa
8.
by maxander 2y ago
SEEKING WORK | Boston, MA | Remote or on-site I am Max Alexander, experienced data scientist and bioinformatics engineer, available for short- or long-term contracts. My background is primarily in data analysis and pipeline development for
9.
by maxander 2y ago
I don’t know whether this is a provocative or tedious thing to say, but the quintessential ‘enlightenmentware’ to have come out of the past several years is ChatGPT. Name anything that brings as much functionality with so simple an interfac
10.
by maxander 3y ago
The avenue towards making this a viable, routine cure for HIV is by performing a “transplant” of the patient’s own immune stem cells that have been genetically modified to carry the anti-HIV genes. That avoids (if done right) the horrific a
11.
by maxander 3y ago
I’d recommend mynoise.net ; most of the sounds are for-pay but white noise and a few others are free, and it includes an equalizer (and some presets for pink noise and etc.) An app, though, not a website.
12.
by maxander 3y ago
It’s not news to anyone that NATO could win a (conventional) war with Russia. The important result is that any sizable chunk of military force in Russia itself stands a good chance of it.
13.
by maxander 4y ago
SEEKING WORK | Boston, MA or remote Open to freelance/consulting work in bioinformatics. 8 years of experience in various areas of bioinformatics and computational biology, with particular expertise in the analysis of LC-MS proteomics
14.
by maxander 4y ago
Is this true? Flat rectangles pack more efficiently than tubes. With mattresses, afaik, the big difference was vacuum-packing reducing overall volume, not shape.
15.
by maxander 4y ago
It’s definitely not too old for anything, if you want to do it. Source: I transferred from local college to better college at 20 myself. There will be plenty of 20-year-olds where you transfer, and no one will care what year you technically
16.
by maxander 4y ago
I recommend Matt Levine’s blog Money Stuff [0] for analysis of just how bizarre Musk’s twitter saga is relative to usual day-to-day corporate acquisitions. I also recommend his twitter thread just now breaking down his reaction to today’s n
17.
by maxander 4y ago
Respectfully, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s entirely reasonable to publish what you have now. If later you make further improvements, you can simply publish again.
18.
by maxander 4y ago
A bit of black electrical tape, carefully applied, is pretty discreet on a typical black casing
19.
by maxander 4y ago
There’s no sign that you’ll be able to turn it off in the car ahead of you, though.
20.
by maxander 5y ago
Energy consumption would be limited by supply and energy dissipation, and energy dissipation (roughly speaking) depends on surface area and thermal conductivity. So, yes, for all devices made with a given shape and given materials, there is
21.
by maxander 5y ago
Indeed, Dyson spheres would need to release some amount of waste heat, due to the laws of thermodynamics. If there were too many of them that heat would be visible (at least to infrared telescopes,) so we know that’s not the explanation for
22.
by maxander 5y ago
It’s a nice idea; perhaps something along the lines of a mix between Kerbal Space Program, SimCity, and Satisfactory. There’s a big problem for making this a practical step towards Martian colony planning, though; making a simulation game a
23.
by maxander 5y ago
If you want to not be behind a screen, what you’re looking for might not be mechanical engineering at all. The guys/girls on the floor of a shop full of CNC machines and 3d printers aren’t usually engineers as such. Manufacturing/
24.
by maxander 5y ago
I don’t know, but there’s always a relevant XKCD, even for XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1159/ :)
25.
by maxander 5y ago
I've been interested in this field long enough that I'm still plenty happy with the fact we now have a longevity biotech field, despite it's issues. :) I agree with the author that longevity biotech is frequently tripping o
26.
by maxander 5y ago
Effective science communication has many forms! :)
27.
by maxander 5y ago
Most likely, a user of the New dialog was shown “right-click here and select this and now ‘Word Document’ and then…” and thenceforth has followed these instructions essentially as a mystic ritual which achieves a necessary result, without
28.
by maxander 5y ago
> I can't see how the New menu is a particularly good solution because it doesn't seem any more discoverable than the list of document-authoring programs in the Start menu. I think you’ve missed the key point of this article, w
29.
by maxander 5y ago
> So I guess they never got around to implementing adoption. If you think about this, it seems pretty obvious the reason they didn’t include adoption was that it’s overpowered . The CK series is all about managing dynasties, so the rand
30.
by maxander 5y ago
If we have full-on adult genetic modification capable of the, ah, dramatic example you provide, we’ve certainly figured out a way to get around in-vivo test difficulties. For better or worse, any biomedical advance comes up against that pro

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