Hasnain says:

Just learning about this news and … wow. Columbia has risen to #2 in the US news rankings and it took some folks by surprise. Including, apparently, their own faculty - one math professor analyses the numbers and pretty conclusively shows fraudulent behavior on the part of Columbia to juice the rankings:

“There should be vigorous demands for changes, but changes will be hard to make. The incentives for bad behavior will remain as strong as ever. Columbia has come to depend, for example, on transfer students as a source of tuition revenue. Furthermore, a culture of secrecy, a top-down management structure, and atrophied instruments of governance at Columbia have hamstrung informed debate and policymaking.

It would not be adequate, therefore, to address the accuracy of the facts underpinning Columbia’s ranking in isolation. Root-and-branch reform is needed. Columbia should make a far greater commitment to transparency on many fronts, including budget, staffing, admissions, and financial aid. Faculty should insist on thorough oversight in all these matters, and on full participation in decision-making about them. The positions they arrive at should be shared and debated with trustees, students, alumni, and the public.”

Hasnain says:

“Since the beginning of the year, 550 children have died from Covid-19 in the US, compared with 1,017 children in the preceding 22 months, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

Hasnain says:

“So why is this meme becoming so popular (at least among some online communities)? Lars Doucet, a prominent land value tax proponent, explains that a big part of the reason is that for a long time the automobile made sprawling suburban development possible. That meant people could still access valuable labor markets even if they couldn’t afford to live near their jobs (as long as they were willing to suffer long commutes, that is).

“Now we’ve run out of suburbs,” Doucet argued. “We can’t push any further through expansion.””

Hasnain says:

“Then a few years ago, Penedones, Vieira and Guerrieri started talking about using the bootstrap method to constrain what can happen during particle interactions. They first successfully applied the approach to particles called pions. “We said, OK, here it’s working very well, so why not go for gravity?” Guerrieri said.”

Hasnain says:

Great read - it’s a mix of a career story and a history of streaming platforms at Netflix. Lots of great technical details in here!

“Raise abstraction by combining the best of both simplicity and flexibility. There is much value in understanding the deep internals of various data technologies, but not everyone needs to do it. This line of thinking is especially true as cloud-first data infrastructures are becoming commodities. Properly raising data infrastructure abstraction becomes the immediate opportunity to make all the advanced capabilities easily accessible to a broader audience. Technologies such as streaming SQL will lower the barrier of entry, but it’s just the beginning. Data Platform should also raise abstraction to the dividing boundaries (e.g., streaming vs. batch) are invisible to the end-users.”

Hasnain says:

“Additionally, physicists could study very large time crystals in the same way that more conventional, spatial crystals have been investigated for decades, says study co-author Krzysztof Sacha, a physicist at Jagiellonian University in Poland. Here, physicists could exchange space for time to investigate whether time crystals engineered with certain defects or bathed with excess energy display unexpected behaviors. Such behaviors are typically harder to detect in small crystals, so the ability to make its light-based system large potentially sets up the team for a foray into a fully new realm. "I think that is really opening a new [physics research] horizon,” Sacha underlines. Wilczek agrees. “This is a whole new class of states of matter,” he says. “It is very conceivable to me that, when you examine them, useful devices and other surprises will emerge. It’s virgin territory; we are discovering a new world here.””

Hasnain says:

Great read as always from Amos.

“But from the outside, all we see is that all requests are stuck.

All requests.

Not just the first one, not just for the first five seconds, all requests, forever.

And that's what my big bad dayjob incident was about: a bunch of in-flight requests got in a bad state, and so we'd be forever stuck waiting for them, long past any chance they'd ever complete, and never starting new requests.”

Hasnain says:

Fairly interesting and accessible read on quantum mechanics and the various interpretations of it. And on how the science has progressed through the years.

“Probing quantum physics is really, really difficult. It is, by necessity, an experimental science far removed from the scale of human experience. But it is also instructive to note that a century of technological progress has not helped answer my question. We essentially know nothing more than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg did about the actual nature of reality. We have created interesting technologies and philosophical conundrums, but little else. Is it actually possible to find out what the universe is made of?”

Hasnain says:

This was a great short read on process and company culture. I’ll have to revisit this a few times to really internalize it.

“But it’s always worth considering what process makes sufficient, and what you’re really aspiring for. Sometimes adequacy is the goal, but when it’s not, the process is usually the least of it. What are you optimizing for?”

Hasnain says:

“Because of these requirements, most theories about the origin of proteins have either centered on scenarios in extreme environments, such as near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, or assumed the presence of molecules like RNA with catalytic properties that could lower the energy barrier enough to push the reactions forward. (The most popular origin-of-life theory proposes that RNA preceded all other molecules, including proteins.) And even under those circumstances, Krasnokutski says that “special conditions” would be needed to concentrate the amino acids enough for polymerization. Though there have been many proposals, it isn’t clear how and where those conditions could have arisen on the primordial Earth.”