I grew up in the American South as the end of apartheid. I remember the first Black kid who showed up in my 3rd grade and how the teacher prepared us for his arrival the day before. I remember the race riots of the ‘60s and I remember where I was when I learned MLK […]
When I think of the places on the planet that seem optimized for solar and wind power generation, I think of deserts like the Sahara and the desert Southwest in the US. And yet Germany is generating a growing share of its electricity through these renewables: “Preliminary data by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen […]
It’s hard to keep generating fresh content every day for your edification and entertainment here at Angry Bear. The temptation is to use Chat GPT to do the heavy lifting, but so far, we’ve foresworn AI to rely on our own in-house I. If you begin to suspect that we’ve betrayed our readers, here are […]
New drugs go through clinical trials before they can be marketed. Phase I trials are for safety. Phase II/III trials are for efficacy. If a drug fails these trials, it can’t be sold. One challenge to drug testing is trial enrollment. Ideally, the subjects should be demographically representative. The problem is that there can be […]
Back when we lived in Chapel Hill NC, we made a few trips to the Outer Banks where my wife had an uncle who built fishing boats in Buxton NC. Back then, nobody was talking about sea levels rising because of global warming and yet it was obvious back then (early 1980s) that these sandy […]
Whenever Elon Musk says a thing, I reflexively mistrust it. So when I saw a video clip of Musk making this assertion, I wanted to think I learned something about the auto industry, but then I considered the source: “Large incumbent carmakers sell their cars at low to zero true margin. Most of their profit […]
There will never be enough human kidneys available to transplant all the patients in renal failure who are on dialysis. While there has been considerable interest in xenotransplantation (sourced, in this case, from pigs), the barriers to sustainable transplant have so far proved insurmountable: these include immune rejection and activation of cryptic viruses. Now, thanks […]
Let’s just start with the acknowlegement that most of the internet is porn. Make of that what you will. I ignore it. For the residual, well, there’s Facebook. I haven’t been sent to FB jail recently, so I am favorably disposed towards it. I get all my news online these days, so I like it […]
To follow up on an earlier post on the future of artificial intelligence, AI has been making serious inroads in radiological imaging for a while. Unsurprisingly, histological imaging is the next frontier, and AI is conquering that as well. A subset of lung cancer patients will see metastatic spread to their brains. A recent study […]
Noah Smith has a blog post arguing that AI won’t take away all the jobs from humans. It’s a clever and well-written post that deserves your attention. Here are some money grafs: “So as AI gets better and better, and gets used for more and more different tasks, the limited global supply of compute will […]