Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 CDC This entire interview is bssically:

Helen: you guys should be doing -important infectious disease tracing step -

CDC: yeah! But we are not

Astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used to travel 80 kilometers every week from the Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago, where he taught a course attended by only two students. When asked why he spent his time this way, the professor replied…

My take on Australia's big $600m bet on PsiQuantum's plan for a mega quantum computer by 2027: semafor.com/article/04/29/…

Wow... these numbers are getting harder to wrap one's head around than quantum mechanics itself:

thequantuminsider.com/2024/04/29/psi…

See more technical info at arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570

#QuantumComputing @Ψ Quantum
#ABillionHereABillionTherePrettySoonYoureTalkingRealMoney

Wow! Australia (the country, ie, the govt) is betting $1BN on photonic #Quantum computers. Visionary or crazy? There are no published working logical qubits in this platform! Good luck (they will need it)
afr.com/technology/lab…

Greater Manchester Police chief Stephen Watson, who unexpectedly reopened the investigation into Angela Rayner’s addresses, spoke at the last Tory conference.

The appearance raised questions about his political impartiality, as since the event he's garnered Tory support for…

Really great engineers don’t make wasteful, underwhelming products like generative AI; they design chips and systems that work in space for 46 years before failing … and can still be fixed when they are 15 BILLION miles away.

I cannot adore this idea enough. If they're right, it would be on par with Penzias and Wilson trying to get rid of that annoying hiss in their fancy antenna, and discovering the cosmic microwave background by accident.

The crappiness of the Humane AI Pin reported here is a great example of the underappreciated capability-reliability distinction in gen AI. If AI could *reliably* do all the things it's *capable* of, it would truly be a sweeping economic transformation.
theverge.com/24126502/human…

Staggering infant mortality rates are why you see quoted “life expectancies” of 30ish in medieval times, when in fact *if you survived childhood* you had about as good a chance of making it to 70 then as you do now. (Making it to 80, 90 or 100 is another story.)

It’s not that often come across a proper WTAF story but this is definitely one of those. From ⁦Billy Kenber⁩ in the Times this morning.
thetimes.co.uk/article/28f948…

The last nail in the coffin. 😂 Makes me even prouder of having learned coding on a C64 back when I was 14. 💻
tomshardware.com/tech-industry/…

Please check out this elegant summary of our Nature Communications paper nature.com/articles/s4146… by Isabelle Dumé Physics World! Anaerobic bacteria depend upon a single family of proteins to transfer extra electrons they produce to electric hairs on their surface physicsworld.com/a/bacterial-na…

Pretty sure my dad took our 1990s Toyota Camry over roads like that.

Here we go. I’m in Amman now. Jordan just closed their airspace. Iranian attacks on Israel have begun. Netanyahu acted incredibly recklessly and Iran took the bait. Zero adults in the room and the entire region now at risk.

(a) this is fascinating

(b) I hate to think how messed up science is going to get as people use LLMs for things they really shouldn’t, which evidently includes any kind of random sampling.

'I chose journalism, then wars chose me. Exposing war crimes — wherever they occur — is central to my identity as an American, a journalist and a Jew.'

From my latest article in the Washington Post (gift link)-- washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

Horrible previously unknown side effect of AI: people with large vocabularies getting accused of being AI

Did you see the total solar eclipse yesterday? Between the cloud cover and not being based in North America, we had no such luck, so we're living vicariously through our friends' experiences: ow.ly/VQzV50RbuV1

This is one of the best descriptions I've lately ran into.