Dailies - Observations (Page 12)

Engineering Career Stories

A set of interviews [https://staffeng.com/stories] with senior engineers at tech companies.

COVID-19 Super Spreader Model

Typical infectious disease modelling is done with an SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) model. We assume members of the population are either Susceptible (not infected yet), Infected (currently infected and capable of infecting others), or Recovered (immune and unable to infect others). The average number of people

Note Taking Advice

This article [https://fortelabs.co/blog/how-to-take-smart-notes/] has some really solid advice on effective note taking.

Debugging Distributed Systems

Some solid advice [https://blog.nelhage.com/post/systems-that-defy-understanding/] on how to debug and in general make sense of complex distributed systems. Deductive reasoning is unlikely to work; we need to rely on empirical methods instead.

Aphantasia

TIL [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/science/aphantasia-minds-eye-blind.html] that some people are incapable conjuring mental images.

How Owls Fly

How [https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2020/how-owls-fly-without-making-a-sound] owls are able to fly without making a sound.

Good News About COVID-19

Refreshingly, there is some good news [https://80000hours.org/2020/04/good-news-about-covid-19/] on the COVID-19 pandemic.

As We May Think

Vanevar Bush's vision [https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/02/23/as-we-may-think/] of machines that would augment human knowledge.

Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing

This article [https://fermatslibrary.com/s/douglas-carl-engelbart-developing-the-underlying-concepts-for-contemporary-computing] discusses the life and work of Douglas Engelbart, who played a major role in modern computing – he invented the mouse, hyperlinks, and text and graphics editing, among other things. He demonstrated all of these inventions in a

Paper: Inventing The Randomized Double-Blind Trial

This article [https://fermatslibrary.com/s/inventing-the-randomized-double-blind-trial-the-nuremberg-salt-test-of-1835] tells the story of the first known randomized double-blind trial. It was conducted in Nuremberg in 1835 to discredit a homeopathic treatment. Besides a bias in selection of participants (that may have had a considerable impact on

Physics Intuitions

Physics Travel Guide [https://physicstravelguide.com] is an incredible resource for learning basic concepts from Physics and Mathematics. The killer feature is that each topic is explained with three levels of difficulty so it's easy to digest: intuitive, concrete and abstract. Here&

COVID-19 Shortages

An interesting theory [https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0] on why supermarkets have run out of essential supplies during the pandemic. Focuses on the toilet paper shortage but applies more broadly. In a nutshell: Hoarding is not to blame. > There’s another, entirely logical

Paper: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Statistical testing is hard. Some of the common dangers are well known; repeat a study twenty times and there's a good chance you'll see a significant result at least once. The Replication Crisis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis]

The Best XKCD

https://xkcd.com/2287/

More COVID-19 Simulations

Here's [https://www.meltingasphalt.com/interactive/outbreak/] another COVID-19 simulation that can be instructive to play with.

The Math Behind Social Distancing

A good illustration [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-math-behind-social-distancing/] of why social distancing works.

Face Masks

A list [https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/] of questions you probably wanted to ask about face masks, with answers.

Taiwan and COVID-19

Taiwan acted with incredible agility to the Coronavirus pandemic: * Jan 5: The government had implemented restrictions on flights from Wuhan. * Jan 30: Factories were producing 4 million masks a day. * Feb 6: all cruise ships were banned from docking at Taiwanese ports. * Feb 24:

Ventilators 101

There's been a lot of interest in ventilators as they're in short supply during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article [https://hackaday.com/2020/03/25/ventilators-101-what-they-do-and-how-they-work/] goes over what ventilators do and why they are needed right now.

Herbert Hoover

American history is filled with rags-to-riches stories. Herbert Hoover's story is as great as any of them. He is born in poverty, orphaned at 10, goes to Stanford on a scholarship, gets rich mining in Australia and Britain, saves Belgium from famine,

Missile Guidance Computer Internals

Someone got their hands on a missile guidance computer for a 70's Titan nuclear missile and took it apart [http://www.righto.com/2020/03/inside-titan-missile-guidance-computer.html]. It's incredible how you could do sophisticated things with such primitive computing technology.

Peto's Paradox

Why don't blue whales die from cancer in ridiculous numbers? The probability of one cell turning cancerous in a organism should surely be proportional to the number of cells in that organism. Within species, we do see larger organisms are more likely

Paper: Hints for Computer System Design

Butler Lampson [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Lampson] worked on several ground breaking computing projects at Xerox's PARC laboratories – the laser printer, Ethernet, and WYSIWYG editors among other things. At PARC he wrote a paper: Hints for Computer System Design [https:

Mammoth Bone Houses

The most interesting and bizarre thing I've read [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/60-mammoths-house-russia-180974426/] in a long while is that people during the Ice Age used to build houses out of.. mammoth bones. Life is truly stranger than fiction.

COVID-19 Scenarios

A group of researchers have built a simulation [https://neherlab.org/covid19/] for the spread of the Coronavirus outbreak. I'd say it's fun to play with but almost every combination of parameters seems to result in a massive overflow of