Viva La Dirt League
Published 26 Apr 2021Adam experiences the utter frustration of when printers malfunction.
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July 26, 2021
When printers malfunction – Printer
June 25, 2021
QotD: Moore’s Law
Moore’s Law is a violation of Murphy’s Law. Everything gets better and better.
Gordon Moore, quoted in “Happy Birthday: Moore’s Law at 40”, The Economist, 2005-03-26
May 14, 2021
Recycling when it makes economic sense? Good. Recycling just because? Not good at all.
Tim Worstall explains why a new push to mandate recycling rare earth from consumer electronic devices will be a really, really bad idea … so bad that it’ll waste more resources than are recovered by the recycling effort:
[Indium is] the thing that makes touchscreens work. Lovely stuff. Normally extracted as a byproduct of getting zinc from spharelite. Usual concentrations in the original mineral are 45 to 500 parts per million.
Now, note something important about a by product material like this. If we recycle indium we don’t in fact save any indium from spharelite. Because we mine spharelite for the zinc, the indium is just a bonus when we do. So, we recycle the indium we’re already using. We don’t process out the indium in our spharelite. We just take the same amount of zinc we always did and dump what we don’t want into the gangue, the waste.
So, note what’s happened. We recycle indium and yet we dig up exactly the same amount of indium we always did. We just don’t use what we’ve dug up – we’re not in fact saving that vital resource of indium at all.
[…]
The number of waste fluorescent lamps arising has been declining since 2013. In 2025, it is estimated there will be 92 tonnes of CRMs in waste fluorescent lamps (Ce: 10 tonnes, Eu: 4 tonnes, La: 13 tonnes, Tb: 4 tonnes and Y: 61 tonnes).
That would be the recovery from all fluorescent lamps in Europe being recycled. In a few – there’s not that much material so therefore only a few plants are needed, meaning considerable geographic spread – plants dotted around.
That’s $50k of cerium, about $100k of europium, $65k of lanthanum, $2.8 million of terbium and $2.2 million of yttrium. To all intents and purposes this is $5 million of material. For which we must have a Europe-wide collection system?
They do realise this is insane which is why they insist that this must be made law. Can’t have people not doing stupid things now, can we?
Just to give another example – not one they mention. As some will know I used to supply rare earths to the global lighting industry. One particular type uses scandium. In a quarter milligram quantity per bulb. Meaning that even with perfect recycling you need to collect 4 million bulbs to gain a kilo of scandium – worth $800.
January 23, 2021
QotD: “Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm”
This side of the veil, instead of looking for the “gene for intelligence”, we try to find “polygenic scores”. Given a person’s entire genome, what function best predicts their intelligence? The most recent such effort uses over a thousand genes and is able to predict 10% of variability in educational attainment. This isn’t much, but it’s a heck of a lot better than anyone was able to do under the old “dozen genes” model, and it’s getting better every year in the way healthy paradigms are supposed to.
Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm. For years, basically all candidate gene studies were fake. “How come we can’t find genes for anything?” was never as popular as “where’s my flying car?” as a symbol of how science never advances in the way we optimistically feel like it should. But it could have been.
And now it works. What lessons can we draw from this, for domains that still seem disappointing and intractable?
Turn-of-the-millennium behavioral genetics was intractable because it was more polycausal than anyone expected. Everything interesting was an excruciating interaction of a thousand different things. You had to know all those things to predict anything at all, so nobody predicted anything and all apparent predictions were fake.
Modern genetics is healthy and functional because it turns out that although genetics isn’t easy, it is simple. Yes, there are three billion base pairs in the human genome. But each of those base pairs is a nice, clean, discrete unit with one of four values. In a way, saying “everything has three billion possible causes” is a mercy; it’s placing an upper bound on how terrible genetics can be. The “secret” of genetics was that there was no “secret”. You just had to drop the optimistic assumption that there was any shortcut other than measuring all three billion different things, and get busy doing the measuring. The field was maximally perverse, but with enough advances in sequencing and computing, even the maximum possible level of perversity turned out to be within the limits of modern computing.
(This is an oversimplification: if it were really maximally perverse, chaos theory would be involved somehow. Maybe a better claim is that it hits the maximum perversity bound in one specific dimension)
Scott Alexander, “The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-09-13.
January 9, 2021
QotD: Heinlein’s “Future History”
I’ve been planning to write about Elon Musk’s Bowie-blasting space car ever since the video footage was transmitted back to Earth in the middle of this week. But I did not even notice until I sat down to the job that I have also been rereading Robert A. Heinlein’s “Future History” short-story cycle. This is not exactly a coincidence: I go back to the Future History every few years. This time I had one of those “Surprise! You’re old!” moments upon realizing that my cheap trade paperback of The Past Through Tomorrow, a collection of the Future History stories, must be 30 years old if it’s a day.
Written between 1939 and 1950 for quickie publication in pulp magazines, the Future History is a series of snapshots of what is now an alternate human future — one that features atomic energy, solar system imperialism, and the first steps to deep space, all within a Spenglerian choreography of social progress and occasional resurgent barbarity. It stands with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a monument of golden-age science fiction.
In some respects the Future History has not aged any better than one might expect. Like other young nerds who created the science-fiction canon, Heinlein was interested in rocketry before it was thought to have any practical use. And Heinlein was really, really good at acquiring or faking expert knowledge of those topics in which he happened to get interested. The man knew his Tsiolkovsky.
The result, in the key story of the Future History, is an uncannily accurate description of the design and launch of a Saturn V rocket. (Written before 1950, remember.) But because Heinlein happened not to be interested in electronic computers, all the spacefaring in his books is done with the aid of slide rules or Marchant-style mechanical calculators (which, in non-Heinlein history, had to become obsolete before humans could go to Luna at all). Heinlein sends people to colonize the moon, but nobody there has internet, or is conscious of its absence.
Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.
September 17, 2020
Britain’s technological edge in the Battle of Britain
Over at The Register, Gareth Corfield lists some of the advanced technological kit the Royal Air Force had access to during the Battle of Britain in 1940:

Restored Battle of Britain operations room in an underground bunker at former RAF station Uxbridge.
Photo by Ian Mansfield via Wikimedia Commons.
Technology played its part, mostly behind the scenes – yes, we mean the backroom boffins – in equipping Britain to hold firm and defeat the Germans. As today’s commemorations focus on the pilots and ground crew who saw off the Luftwaffe, spare a thought for the technologists whose efforts also saved the western world.
Radar and radio
Chief among the technological innovations that gave the RAF the edge was radar. In the 1930s Britain was one of the world leaders in radar (thanks in part to a bizarre and unsuccessful experiment to kill sheep with a death ray) leading to the building of radar stations all around the British coast.
Sir Robert Watson-Watt, today regarded as the father of radar, was instrumental in devising a method of bouncing radio waves off a flying aeroplane to figure out its location. He turned that 1935 concept into the fully operational Chain Home and Chain Home Low air defence networks inside four years.
Without radar, the RAF was totally reliant on humans with binoculars spotting incoming formations of German bombers; radar gave the air force an early warning capability as hostile aircraft formed up over France before crossing the Channel.
Before radar came radio direction-finding. The RAF’s Home Defence Units were first established in the 1920s and mastered the art of pinpointing an aeroplane’s location from radio transmissions made by its pilots. Though less high profile than radar, the HDUs’ activities allowed the RAF to “see” beyond the range of radar as Luftwaffe bomber formations, transmitting to each other over France, formed up ready for a raid over British soil.
Signals intelligence and compsci
Not far behind radar was the crucial role of what was then the Government Communications and Cipher School (GC&CS), based at Bletchley Park. Today the site is home to the National Museum of Computing but in the dark days of the 1940s it was where codebreakers deciphered German military communications.
Breaking Nazi Germany’s encryption was a vast task, and in the days before computers extremely labour intensive; between 9,000 and 12,000 personnel worked at Bletchley during the Second World War. The demands of RAF and other military commanders for speedy decryption of enemy messages directly contributed to the development of early computer science; Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park, helping devise improvements to electromechanical crypto-breaking machines that resulted in the Bombe, a very early computer.
May 27, 2020
The Battle to Crack Enigma – The real story of ‘The Imitation Game’ – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 26 May 2020For the British, breaking the Germans’ seemingly unbreakable codes is one of the most vital battles of the war. If they fail, there is litte to stop the German U-Boats hunting down Allied shipping in the Atlantic.
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Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
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Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
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Picture of Enigma G model, courtesy Austin Mills https://flic.kr/p/2bQ9Q
reconstructed bombe machine at Bletchley Park, courtesy Gerald Massey
Picture of Enigma M4 model displayed at Bletchley Park, courtesy Magnus Manske
Picture of John Herivel, courtesy GCHQ
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Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme 3”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
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World War Two
4 hours ago (edited)
Hopefully you’re all staying safe in these difficult times. We’re still marching on so that we can keep all of you entertained when you’re stuck at home. But we can only continue doing so thanks to your ongoing support. Ad revenue has dropped significantly because of COVID, and we rely on your support now more than ever. If you can, please support us on www.patreon.com/timeghosthistory or https://timeghost.tv.Please let us know what other specials you’d like to see. And if you would like to know something about a smaller topic, make sure to submit that as a question for our Q&A series, Out of the Foxholes. You can do that right here: https://community.timeghost.tv/c/Out-of-the-Foxholes-Qs.
Cheers,
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May 23, 2020
QotD: Computer trade show tchotchkes
[Computer] convention attendees have no […] problem being showered with promotional gifts from all sides as they totter up and down the rows of booths.
You can see them staggering back to their hotel rooms, arms full of corporate-branded freebies, where they have prepared an empty suitcase specifically for shipping it all back to their BOFH Central at the end of the show.
Sure, it’s all crap. It’s usually the likes of childish desk toys, cable tidies that will snap within the week, pencils and logo-shaped erasers (as if you use such items all the time, right?), and Swiss army knives that will be routinely confiscated as you pass through airport security for the trip home. No matter, just turn up to the expo and companies will toss gifts at you like you were the GitHub messiah taking a seaside donkey ride into sysadmin Jerusalem.
Well, nobody tosses any in my direction. No blotchy ballpoint pens for me. No evil-smelling pads of sticky-notes that don’t stick to anything. No spongey stress balls. No smartphone stands. No sharply angular keyfobs that stab into my bollocks when I sit down.
Me, when I visit an IT exhibition stand on the cadge, I have to provide evidence of my media accreditation, two forms of photo ID, an electricity bill, birth certificates of my family going back four generations (originals only, please) and a DNA swab before I qualify to receive a boiled sweet.
Alistair Dabbs, “‘Don’t tell anyone but I have a secret.’ There, that’s my security sorted”, The Register, 2020-02-21.
April 15, 2020
“Experts” and their “models”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, after offering us his current favourite mixed drink recipe, L. Neil Smith gets around to discussing our modern dependence on “experts” wielding their intricate and convoluted computer models to guide our lives:
Start with a tall glass of Mott’s Clamato over ice. Many people can’t stand the idea of tomato juice enhanced with sweet clam juice (and some spices), and I won’t try to sell you on it, here. But if you relish it the way I do (I used to buy it by the gallon), then bon appetit! Throw in a healthy shot of tequila — mine is Cuervo Gold, but your mileage may vary. Add a fat slice of lime on the edge of the glass, a slice of lemon, and a slice of orange. The citrus really dresses it up. These are all ingredients I like very much, and together, they take the edge off a day I spent writing 1000 or 2000 words (my record so far is 3200) and let me relax.
At the end of that day, when my lovely and talented wife quits work and comes home — from the dining room, these days — we have a nice, comfortable cocktail hour (she drinks Cuba Libras) and watch Tucker Carlson. Ordinarily, three giant cans of the Budweiser concoction (which is also made with Clamato) will make me the tiniest bit silly. This drink, the Bloody Mermaid (ick) is surprisingly gentle and I have had two and a half so far without embarrassing myself. I love the taste of tequila neat (many don’t), and I would still be doing shooters, except that my loving bride of 36 years won’t let me eat that much salt.
Please enjoy this silly little drink if you can until we’re all free again.
Oh yeah — I couldn’t resist after all. There’s something I need to get off my chest. I’m sure you remember the way “experts” with computer models warned us all about Y2K, and the way it meant the end of Civilization-As-We-Knew-It. Then there was Global Warming — more experts, more computer models — there are still gullible morons out there who believe it’s not an obvious hoax. Now experts and their — increasingly failing — computer models are all telling us we are in the middle of the worst health crisis since the Black Death.
I happen to be, as you know, a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment that you will ever read. Therefore, I cannot endorse the suggestion I’ve heard that whenever an “expert” testifies about anything before any legislative body anywhere, and the words “computer model” come out of his mouth, the Sergeant-at-Arms should smash his face in, drag him out into the street, and shoot him him the back of the head. Perhaps millions of lives could be saved that way, but, as a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment you will ever read, I cannot endorse that position.
So drink up, my dear friends and readers and have the best time — under house arrest — that you possibly can!
July 16, 2019
Bitcoin mining’s massive carbon buttprint
Lincoln Swann explains why Bitcoin has become a huge environmental liability as its per-unit cost-to-mine has risen:

“Bitcoin – from WSJ”by MarkGregory007 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Bitcoin is more than a rather volatile imitation currency, it is also a huge energy monster.
The digital “mining” to create more Bitcoins and the recording of transactions uses up vast, crazy, amounts of electricity – something like 70TWh a year. That is about the same as Austria, say 20% of UK power consumption. As an added horror much if it is done in China where most of the power is coal generated.
All that adds up to a CO2 output from Bitcoin stuff of about 35mt a year. Planet friendly it definitely aint.
May 8, 2019
Your electronic devices and the Canadian Border Services Agency
A few years ago, many civil libertarians were upset that the US government allowed warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border, but it was less well known that the Canadian Border Services Agency does the same at the Canadian border:

“Canadian Border Sign” by jimmywayne is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
According to the CBSA, it has the right to search electronic devices at the border for evidence of customs-related offences — without a warrant — just as it does with luggage.
If travellers refuse to provide their passwords, officers can seize their devices.
The CBSA said that between November 2017 and March 2019, 19,515 travellers had their digital devices examined, which represents 0.015 per cent of all cross-border travellers during that period.
During 38 per cent of those searches, officers uncovered evidence of a customs-related offence — which can include possessing prohibited material or undeclared goods, and money laundering, said the agency.
While the laws governing CBSA searches have existed for decades, applying them to digital devices has sparked concern in an era where many travellers carry smartphones full of personal and sometimes very sensitive data.
A growing number of lawyers across Canada argue that warrantless digital device searches at the border are unconstitutional, and the practice should be stopped or at least limited.
“The policy of the CBSA of searching devices isn’t something that is justifiable in a free and democratic society,” said Wright who ran as a Green Party candidate in the 2015 federal election.
“It’s appalling, it’s shocking, and I hope that government, government agencies and the courts, and individual citizens will inform themselves and take action.”
March 19, 2019
The dangers of over-relying on new technology
Ted Campbell discusses one of the potential problems when military organizations depend too much on new tech working as advertised by the developer:
I have been a constant critic, in these pages, and in other fora, of the Canadian military’s command and control (C²) superstructure. I believe it is overly complex and bureaucratic, too top heavy and it is ‘fat,’ even, I have said, morbidly obese. I think Canada has far, far too many admirals and generals, almost all (except for, perhaps, a half dozen, at most) being one or two ranks higher than is needed for the job they do, in too many headquarters that do little of value except talk
toat each other. I believe our C² has more do do with trying to emulate our (equally grossly obese) neighbour to the south than with meeting the needs of Canada.
The solution to the C² obesity problem is about 99% political … it needs a minister who will direct the Chief of the Defence Staff to chop something between ⅓ and ½ of the admirals and generals and commodores and Navy captains and Army and Air Force colonels and many of the HQs in which they sit. Of course that will require a massive (and overdue) revision to the entire military remuneration system so that admirals and colonels and corporals and privates, too, all get paid, appropriately well, for what they do for Canada. That needs to be agreed, by the prime minister, before the Minister of National Defence orders give the order to “chop.”But that’s the top level problem and I have, I think, ranted on enough about it … my readers will either agree or not.
I believe, as I said the other day, that there is also a serious problem at the operational and tactical levels of the military, and it involves more than just command and control (C²), it involves the command, control and communications (C³) systems and, especially, the degree to which they are reliant on modern electronics and, especially, yet again, the electro-magnetic spectrum to establish a global information network upon which the military is nearly totally reliant. When, not if, “nearly totally reliant” becomes over-reliant, as I believe is now the case, and is most pronounced, the military sometimes uses the acronym C4I, meaning command, control, communications, computers and intelligence or worse, C4I2 which means command, control, communications, computers, intelligence and interoperability according to the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. The mere fact that we seem to want to assign fancy acronyms to a few aluminium and plastic boxes full of solid sate circuits seems to me to indicate that we don’t actually understand that, beneath the blinking lights and flashy displays is a process than, in many respects, is little changed from what we did 75 years ago. The need to manage and handle information is unchanged, the technology we can use to do those things has changed.*
The problem, as I see it, is that the modern military is fascinated with what technology can do ~ and it can do a lot of really useful things ~ but are less willing to understand its limitations.
Don’t get me wrong: I think computers are wonderful; they make many mundane but time consuming tasks easy to accomplish in the blink of an eye. Ditto for radios and radars which seem to erase distance as show us things that used to be invisible. But all technology comes at a price … sometimes, as in the world of electronic warfare (EW), the price is fairly easy to understand: if you say anything on your radio then a modestly sophisticated enemy can, quickly and accurately, locate your exact position and send artillery or sir strikes your way; or the enemy can ‘spoof’ your communications networks, feeding false information into it and spreading confusion. The enemy can, also, use the radio spectrum to gain access to (hack) your computer network and make you deceive yourself. Or the threats may be physical, like the anti-satellite networks, such as the Chinese are developing, which according to Lieutenant General Jay Raymond of the United Stares Air Force, mean that “soon every satellite in every orbit will be able to be held at risk.” Our, Canadian and allied, national surveillance and air defence systems use satellite networks as do our strategic command and control (C²) networks which manage Canada’s armed forces at home and overseas. Even the most modern “networked” systems might be rendered deaf and blind.
February 17, 2019
QotD: Nanotechnology and quantum computing
When I say Quantum Computing is a bullshit field, I don’t mean everything in the field is bullshit, though to first order, this appears to be approximately true. I don’t have a mathematical proof that Quantum Computing isn’t at least theoretically possible. I also do not have a mathematical proof that we can make the artificial bacteria of K. Eric Drexler’s nanotech fantasies. Yet, I know both fields are bullshit. Both fields involve forming new kinds of matter that we haven’t the slightest idea how to construct. Neither field has a sane ‘first step’ to make their large claims true.
Drexler and the “nanotechnologists” who followed him, they assume because we know about the Schroedinger equation we can make artificial forms of life out of arbitrary forms of matter. This is nonsense; nobody understands enough about matter in detail or life in particular to do this. There are also reasonable thermodynamic, chemical and physical arguments against this sort of thing. I have opined on this at length, and at this point, I am so obviously correct on the nanotech front, there is nobody left to argue with me. A generation of people who probably would have made first rate chemists or materials scientists wasted their early, creative careers following this over hyped and completely worthless woo. Billions of dollars squandered down a rat hole of rubbish and wishful thinking. Legal wankers wrote legal reviews of regulatory regimes to protect us from this nonexistent technology. We even had congressional hearings on this nonsense topic back in 2003 and again in 2005 (and probably some other times I forgot about). Russians built a nanotech park to cash in on the nanopocalyptic trillion dollar nanotech economy which was supposed to happen by now.
Similarly, “quantum computing” enthusiasts expect you to overlook the fact that they haven’t a clue as to how to build and manipulate quantum coherent forms of matter necessary to achieve quantum computation. A quantum computer capable of truly factoring the number 21 is missing in action. In fact, the factoring of the number 15 into 3 and 5 is a bit of a parlour trick, as they design the experiment while knowing the answer, thus leaving out the gates required if we didn’t know how to factor 15. The actual number of gates needed to factor a n-bit number is 72 * n^3; so for 15, it’s 4 bits, 4608 gates; not happening any time soon.
It’s been almost 25 years since Peter Shor had his big idea, and we are no closer to factoring large numbers than we were … 15 years ago when we were also able to kinda sorta vaguely factor the number 15 using NMR ‘quantum computers.’
I had this conversation talking with a pal at … a nice restaurant near one of America’s great centers of learning. Our waiter was amazed and shared with us the fact that he had done a Ph.D. thesis on the subject of quantum computing. My pal was convinced by this that my skepticism is justified; in fact he accused me of arranging this. I didn’t, but am motivated to write to prevent future Ivy League Ph.D. level talent having to make a living by bringing a couple of finance nerds their steaks.
Scott Locklin, “Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit”, Locklin on Science, 2019-01-15.
January 23, 2019
The value of boredom
I must have missed this Quillette essay by Caroline ffiske when it was published earlier this month:
In their book The Coddling of the American Mind Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wonder where it all went wrong. How did we get to a situation where so many of our kids see themselves as fragile victims, but at the same time throw their weight around, telling the rest of us what we are allowed to think and say and do? Haidt and Lukianoff have set up a website devoted to exploring the issue and finding solutions.
I have a suggestion. It hit me like a hammer blow when I read Joseph Brodsky’s essay “In Praise of Boredom.” This was delivered as a commencement address at Dartmouth College in July 1989. Here is the opening sentence: “A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom.” That’s right. Joseph Brodsky, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, assumed that these Ivy League graduates, in common with the rest of humanity since the dawn of time would face hours of the psychological Sahara of boredom that “starts right in your bedroom and spurns the horizon.”
How could Brodsky have guessed that the young people he addressed in July 1989 would be the last Western generation to live alongside boredom: in their bedrooms, on the bus, at the end of the day, and in the morning? That now, when the tiniest tips of our little fingers feel the first twinges of tedium, while the elevator travels between ground and first, we reach for our screens to become masters of fate, captains of souls, kings of new continents.
Even the vocabulary of boredom is disappearing. Brodsky lists these: “anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, accidie, etc.” Most of those can be excised from the Dictionary. Tell me honestly when you last used any of them?
[…]
Why? Because boredom represents your window onto infinity. And that is to say, onto your own insignificance. “For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life … the lesson of your utter insignificance.” Boredom puts your existence into perspective “the net result of which is precision and humility.” The more you learn about your own size “the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes.”
Is boredom the ingredient our “snowflake” generation is missing?
October 23, 2018
Quantum Computing – The World of the Future – Extra History – #6
Extra Credits
Published on 21 Oct 2018Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/
What does the quantum revolution mean today? We talk about quantum computing application possibilities in machine learning, cybersecurity, environmental science, and more.
A tremendous thank-you to Alexander Tamas, the “mystery patron” who made this series possible. We finally found room in our busy production schedule to create and air this series alongside our regularly scheduled, patron-approved Extra History videos. A huge thank you to the multiple guest artists we got to work with, to Matt Krol for his skillful wrangling of the production schedule and keeping everyone happy, and to our Patreon supporters for your patience and support.
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