thicknavyrain

5 ms·

1.
by thicknavyrain 11mo ago
This is so cool. I used to work on urban heat island analysis and now work in natural catastrophe modelling, and in both cases knowing the average heights/volumes of buildings is a very handy thing to have but is surprisingly difficult
2.
by thicknavyrain 1y ago
I know it's a reductive take to point to a single mistake and act like the whole project might be a bit futile (maybe it's a rarity) but this example in their sample is really quite awful if the idea is to give AI better epistemic
3.
Agency could be the next big idea(politicalwhiteboard.substack.com)
1 points by thicknavyrain 1y ago|0 comments
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by thicknavyrain 1y ago
That's true, it could just turn the writer's role into more of an editorial role. The main time-saving I have so far is being able to upload papers and get it to fact check for me. The editorial guidelines at SciShow are stricter
5.
by thicknavyrain 1y ago
I'm a popular science writer with eight year's experience doing exactly this (SciShow, Crash Course, Veritasium and recent winner of the Wellcome Collection Non Fiction Awards) without AI. Done right, the right coverage of even a
6.
by thicknavyrain 1y ago
Urban heat island analysis. The physical volumes of buildings is an essential input parameter into calculating the estimated impact of the built environment and possible interventions (e.g. greening, reducing traffic) against local temperat
7.
by thicknavyrain 2y ago
Just want to say, I recognised your name immediately when I saw it. Saw a talk you gave at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury back in 2010 when I was a teenager and it is still, to this day, one of the best popular mathematics talks I
8.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Well said, and not to mention the importance of common knowledge as a driving impetus for enacting a change. "Everyone knows Hollywood is full of abuse" was true for decades but when the Weinstein allegations finally came out into
9.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Land is a Big Deal is a great place to start (and his three articles summarising Georgism for SSC, also on his substack named after Henry George's book "Progress and Poverty", which contain much of the same content).
10.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk, a mostly even handed, sensible and necessary read for right now.
11.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Skyfield is very cool. For my wedding, I wanted to give my groomspeople personalised thank you gifts. The idea I came up with was to find or ask for precise dates significant to them each (their own anniversaries, birthdays, special events.
12.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
It's remarkable how many problems seemingly come back to Land Value Taxation.
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by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Everyone always misses the corollary to this "groupthink is why we have dark matter" theory which is that academics are very heavily incentivized to try and overturn conventional dark matter because it would be an absolute career-
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by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Certainly useful for thinking, but its lack of falsifiability, predictive power or validation is indeed why there's so much controversy around it and why it remains a hypothesised model rather than widely accepted scientific fact. The
15.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
I find this kind of sentiment a little vacuous. Charitably, we might say "Much of the non-human life on Earth will be just fine without humans" but the kinds of ecological disaster that would wipe us would would take a significant
16.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
The early research in support of this conclusion (despite the fact no subsequent research has born it out) was pure charlatanism, bad science and the theory is rightly derided because those who continue to propagate it do so out of naked se
17.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Yes, that was exactly it although I should have qualified that's what I meant.
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by thicknavyrain 3y ago
No because the marginal returns on utility to the average individual from working less is far, far, far greater than the marginal returns to utility to already insanely wealthy shareholders from squeezing a worker for all they're worth
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by thicknavyrain 3y ago
You're being downvoted, but you're absolutely right. Even though I personally enjoyed some of his books they'll never quite be in the same realm of those of my favourite authors because it's glaringly noticeable when cha
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by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Do you have any sources on ULEZ not improving air quality? The latest research I can find indicates yes, ULEZ did lower concentrations of several pollutants: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S
21.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
This was already being talked about in the mid-naughties in "The Rebel Sell: How The Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture" by Heath and Potter. Had a big influence on me as a teenager.
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by thicknavyrain 3y ago
Which, I should have pointed out in the original comment, relied on, yes, anthropogenic carbon emissions.
23.
by thicknavyrain 3y ago
I'm not entirely sure what your graphs are presenting, but the IPCC climate models have done a pretty damn good job predicting global temperature rises since the 70s: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-c
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by thicknavyrain 4y ago
So sorry for your loss. Thank you for posting, it's a huge and difficult situation so many of us will encounter and it's good to know. Best of luck getting through this moment.
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by thicknavyrain 4y ago
On average, yes, substantially, even _when_ you account for possible risks from accidents and potential pollution exposure: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.0901747
26.
by thicknavyrain 4y ago
If you're in the U.K., I'd highly recommend reading "Rethinking the economics of land and housing" which outlines the history of several clear policies decisions that _encouraged_ housing as an investment which (along wi
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No you aren't eating a credit card's worth of plastic every week(youtube.com)
3 points by thicknavyrain 4y ago|0 comments
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by thicknavyrain 4y ago
Knowing building volumes and surface areas can be really helpful for studying Urban Heat Islands since they give you a more accurate idea of the amount of impervious material/surfaces absorbing and emitting heat.
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by thicknavyrain 4y ago
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but that number seems really implausible to me. 172 kCal an hour is (assuming just waking hours consume calories) about 2700 kCal just from the cortex over the course of a day, which is more than the aver
30.
London Carpenters vs. Joyners 1632(pfollansbee.wordpress.com)
2 points by thicknavyrain 5y ago|0 comments

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