ICanSleepWhenI'mDead

Thought this article from Wired was pretty interesting. It's essentially about how astrophysicists are being employed by consumer-oriented tech companies because their expertise in Big Data and machine learning can be used to predict customer preferences. “We were already in Big Data before Big Data became a thing,” says Sudeep Das, an astrophysicist who now works at Netflix. Here's an introductory excerpt from. https://www.wired.com/story/the-style-maven-astrophysicists-of-silicon-valley/?utm_source=pocket-newtab "Chris Moody knows a thing or two about the universe. As an astrophysicist, he built galaxy simulations, using supercomputers to model the way the universe expands and how galaxies crash into one another. One night, not long after he’d finished his PhD at UC Santa Cruz, he met up with a few other astrophysicists for beers. But that night, no one was talking about galaxies. Instead, they were talking about fashion. A couple of Moody’s astrophysicist pals had recently left academia to work for Stitch Fix, the online personal styling company now valued at $2 billion. Moody gawked at them. “They were like, ‘You don’t think this is an interesting problem?’” he says. Indeed, he did not. But when his friends described the work they were doing—sprinkling in phrases like “Bayesian models” and “Poincaré space”—predicting what clothes someone might like started to sound eerily like the work he’d done during his PhD. Quantifying style, he discovered, “turns out to have really close analogues to how general relativity works.”

https://www.peoples-law.org/home-improvement-resolving-disputes-contractors

So how do they calculate the rarity anyway? If this satellite has only been in place for a few years, and it already saw one example of this kind of event in one particular view direction, doesn't it make you question if the calculated rate of occurrence is way off the mark? Or do we have enough information about all star and black hole locations, trajectories and movement speeds to reliably make the kind of calculations that lead to the "rarity" prediction?

Somehow, this seemed like the appropriate thread for this little tidbit of space knowledge. From http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/seriouslyscience/2018/08/23/farts-an-underappreciated-threat-to-astronauts/#.XY-w9FD_rUo "On Earth, farts are typically no big deal — smelly, harmless, and they quickly dissipate. But if you’re an astronaut, every fart is a ticking time bomb."

Want possible relief (I stress possible)? WebMD is a respected medical information web site, so this isn't a joke - - it's real: https://www.webmd.com/kidney-stones/news/20160928/kidney-stone-roller-coaster

This article was written by Matteo Ceriotti, lecturer in space systems engineering at the University of Glasgow https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9095116/move-earth-asteroids-wandering-apocalypse-sun/

How could anyone possibly game plan for what the Bills offense did? I dunno, maybe expect the Bills to sometimes run and sometimes pass? Or would that not be enough to guard against all the flea flickers and double reverses and fumblerooskis (yes, I know that's not legal any more) and tackle eligible pass plays that the Bills ran? If you see that the Bills are overemphasiizing the pass early on, maybe tell your defenders to play the defense that you planned all week to play against the pass?

I'm not really in the market for a boat, but this one caught my eye:

All those years that we stuffed the roster with guys named Williams we shoulda been stuffing Johnsons.

Hey Exiled, If you want to see some actual survey data about the economics of law practice and what intellectual property lawyers made in 2012 (later data exists but may not be publicly available), read this - - many of these folks have both engineering and law degrees - - and they sometimes work on bet-the-company litigation for people who care more about results than what the services cost. From http://files.ctctcdn.com/e79ee274201/0a80a8a9-22e7-4249-ad04-6f7fa8140203.pdf "The median average billing rate for IP work was $330 in 2012, higher than the median of $320 in 2010 and $300 in 2008. Respondents at the largest firms reported a median average billing rate for IP work of $450 for 2012, 5.9% higher than reported for 2010." The best IP trial lawyers speak three languages fluently - - law to the judge, science to the engineers and scientists employed by their typically corporate clients, and common sense to jurors. You can have a cow now.

Couple questions about Wade: 1. Any of you English guys know whether 40 yard dash times (or some equivalent speed test) are available for rugby players like him? He looked extremely fast, but he was playing against Colts' scrubs, so it would be nice to know just how fast he really is. 2. Did the Bills have any input about which international development player got assigned to them? Or was it just blind luck that Wade got assigned to the Bills rather than some other NFL team?

Although this article apparently is a few years old, I was not familiar with the topic, and found the article very thought-provoking: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/make-mars-great-again?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I wonder what the record is for being on the most different teams' practice squads without ever being promoted to the final 53 anywhere?