SEIA says the millionth #solar #energy installation in the US happened in February after 40 years; the second million will take two more years, representing a 40% annual growth rate.
Capacity factors of industrial #solar #photovoltaic systems with north-south axis trackers “are reaching just over 30 percent at the best sites in the U.S.” at a cost of US$1.50 per watt.
Saudi Arabia maintains high #oil #energy production possibly in order to squeeze #Daesh revenues.
In 2014, by contrast, #Juan-Cole suggested high Saudi #oil #energy production would weaken the recognized government of #Iraq, providing opportunities to #Daesh. He also predicts, “By 2016, solar and wind will be grid parity everywhere in the US with coal and natural gas for heating and cooling buildings.” #predictions
46 clumps of copper needles are still in MEO in #space as of 2013 after a 1963 launch.
“An overview of #gradient-descent #optimization #algorithms” “This blog post aims at providing you with intuitions towards the behaviour of different algorithms for optimizing gradient descent that will help you put them to use”
“#Daesh said it would kill any official holding Daesh prisoners in #Saudi Arabia.” A page from FARC’s playbook.
China’s People’s Daily published this video of an elevator groper getting the shit beaten out of him by the woman he was groping.
Gerry Sussman explains that he and Abelson quit #teaching #SICP because now we just blunder around. As David Chapman summarizes, “#MIT no longer teaches anyone to understand #programming because software no longer makes any sense.”
#Saudi is getting out of the #oil business “and transitioning to being primarily an investor.”
“Adam Yedidia, a PhD student at MIT (but an MEng student when he did most of this work), has explicitly constructed a one-tape, two-symbol Turing machine with 7,918 states, whose behavior (when run on a blank tape) can never be proven from the usual axioms of set theory, under reasonable consistency hypotheses,” bearing somewhat on the question of #abiogenesis. This post includes a short #tutorial on #computability and Busy Beaver numbers. #cs
Milo #Yiannopoulos approves of a game where you can play a #Daesh character that throws him off a roof for being gay, but Google Play doesn’t.
the story of #Metafilter. Matt Cutts: “You were accidentally put in the bad pile.” I didn’t realize Matt (Haughey) had left MeFi a year ago; he went to go work for Stewart Butterfield (Flickr founder) at Slack.
Will #nsh be “ordered to surrender his encryption keys to the National Crime Agency” even though he is “not suspected of a crime”? (The result was, no, he was not.)
“#Al-Qaeda in Yemen threatened Wednesday to target the homes of officers and soldiers who took part in a government offensive that drove militants out of key areas.” The same tactic #Daesh and FARC have used: targeting soldiers’ families individually.
A #Raspberry-Pi 3 costs US$41.43 from Amazon at the moment.
Of course the #Raspberry-Pi Zero is out of stock.
The FBI wants to subpoena Isis, one of the core Tor developers, presumably for a grand jury investigation, but she was able to escape the USA first. “She’s not the target of investigation, but, uh… we uh… need her to clear up her involvement or… uh… potential involvement in a matter”
the #history of ASCII and related character codes
NSFW-detection #neural-networks for detecting nudity or porn