Favorites January 11th 2023

Estes Park, Colorado, June 2019

jamie @gnuman1979

Dam.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Texas is building much more clean energy capacity than California (even though TX has a significantly smaller population than CA)

California has a lot of shore, where's our offshore wind? Is there just no wind off California coasts? That doesn't sound right...

CNN Politics @CNNPolitics

There are clear distinctions between the two classified documents cases involving President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump cnn.it/3QJb0Rz

The whole 'handling of top secret documents' situation seems to be pretty sloppy all around, but the difference is the response when it happens.

Shek Azizi @AziziShekoofeh

Excited to share Med-PaLM, a large language model aligned to the medical domain to generate safe and helpful answers. Our work advances SOTA in 7 medical question-answering tasks, including achieving 67% on MedQA USMLE improving prior work by >17%. arxiv.org/abs/2212.13138

It's surprisingly close to performing on the level of a clinician! Here's a longer thread if you're interested.

Sam D'Amico @sdamico

Just wanted to put this out there -- gas stoves are a Northeast/California/Eastern urban midwest thing. This is also where major cities used gas for lighting in the early 20th century - the infra started at that point. Almost opposite the map of the red/blue political divide.

I did not realize how concentrated gas stoves are. The income distribution is less surprising but still significant (wealthy people tend to be more likely to use gas).

Stan Oklobdzija @stan_okl

Despite the huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that building with mass timber provides over steel and concrete, the LA City Council is currently weighing a ban on this type of construction just because the concrete industry lobby told them to.

Andrew Katz @katzdevelops

Platte Fifteen is Downtown Denver’s first mass timber building. The cost premium over concrete or steel was less than 2%. The embodied carbon savings was significant. The office was nearly fully leased at TCO with some of the highest rents in the market. https://t.co/n169ow6YYv

What a beautiful building! I regret to inform you that Los Angeles is planning on banning mass timber like this. You may have guessed, but it's because of pressure from a concrete industry lobby.

Randall Munroe @xkcd

Outdated Periodic Table xkcd.com/2723

Threads

• A lecturer was fired for showing a painting of the Prophet Muhammad from the 14th century in an art class. Jill Filipovic has a thread on all the people in this situation whose actions are deplorable. One reply summed it up well: "Being a social conservative for someone else’s religion/culture is still being a social conservative"