Viewing profile — wombatpm

Night flying, mountain terrain, little moonlight. Pilots focused on distant landing point and hit intervening ground on descent. A crash is usually the end result of several previo…

Biology would greatly benefit. We barely understand transcription and protein structure. And the straightforward systems that we know like insulin have complex post translational m…

I stopped after Malloreon more because my interests changed. Finding out their history hasn’t changed anything for me. But Marion Zimmerman Bradley for some reason has and I have n…

It’s going to go back to the old boys club where personal connections between research groups and institutions will matter more.

Public data that can’t be adjusted like Glassdoor reviews? A way to keep recruiters honest? Is this for job xyz that has been reported filled as of Friday? I’d certainly use it in …

Then should be a paper trail of the position, and a final decision by a person to not fill the position. I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie b…

Converting from sour to sweet is easier than sweet to sour. Because the sulfur in sour is the catalyst killer. You may have issues in the early processing steps because of lower vi…

Can’t say enough good things about Database Design for Mere Mortals. I keep a physical copy on my desk to give to other developers to read.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organiz…

Lots of scientific code in Fortran has sparse arrays, so a NxN array that only has values on 5 diagonals will store that as 5xN array to save memory allowing you to run a larger pr…

Sulfur is produced when the H2S is removed from petroleum and natural gas. Elemental sulfur is burned to produce Sulfuric acid using the Contact Process.

Physical Chemistry (I think it was Chem 361 at UofI) took most of the semester to get to the point where we could derive the shape of the hydrogen orbitals. Probably the best lectu…

XML is like violence. If it’s not solving your problem, you need to use more.

Physics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.

Same problem with chemo and radiation. A tumor may start off with a single cancerous mutation, but by the time it spreads there may be several. Once the cell repair machinery has b…

You just need to get a breeding pair and you can raise as many as you need.

Wasn’t Tesla found to have FSD disengaging just before a crash so that the driver would be at fault?

Old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average everyone there is a millionaire

Police would just argue that the second datapoint was wrong.

But that is also a problem with structures derived from the methods you list. None of them are 100% equivalent to in vivi structures.

Bette White has an honorary degree from there for her Rose Nieland character on Golden Girls

100 years of science fiction clearly shows that unforeseeable consequences are not that unforeseen.

Screen share on slack or teams gives you the same. I’d routinely work with remote teammates that way, and we’d jump in a control each others machines as needed. We’d do hours of th…

Until there is a coordinated effort for every user to demand arbitration. Suddenly a corporation wants to combine all complaints into a single case, because each arbitration has a …

SpaceX is now an AI company with a rocket side hustle. At least that’s how the S1 looks.