Airplanes are strange places. Whatever you have on board when you take off is the most you'll have until you land. Want a sandwich? You can only have one if there's one on board. There are many things people reliably want, such as some kind of food, drink, and entertainment. Perhaps headphones, a pillow, or a blanket. Airlines provide these, either for free or at some fixed cost. But people's desires are broad, airlines would like to make more money, and economically inclined people want to turn everything into auctions and markets. So...

Imagine you load up your seatback entertainment, and one of the options is a burrito. But there's only one. You can put in a bid, and 1/3 of the way into the flight the person who bids the most gets it. Surely on an airplane of two hundred people there's at least one person with an unusually strong desire for a burrito at 30k feet. And it's not just burritos: other meals, decent headphones, headphone splitters, airplane pillows, diapers, charging cables, cozier blankets, a range of snacks, etc. Anything airlines don't typically provide where there's a high chance that someone might want it.

People often think 'affordable' housing is much more expensive than it actually is, and then conclude it's a scam to make housing for rich people. But this is often based on a misunderstanding of how the prices are set.

Let's say a unit is "50% AMI" somewhere with an area median income (AMI) of $100k. You might think, and I've seen a bunch of people with this confusion, that units would rent for 50% of $100k: $50k/y ($4,170/month), but it's much cheaper than that.

Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook.

Manufacturers often give optimistic estimates for how much data their systems produce, but performance in practice can be pretty different. What have we seen at the NAO?

We've worked with two main sample types, wastewater and nasal swabs, but Simon already wrote something up on swabs so I'm just going to look at wastewater here.

We've sequenced with both Illumina and Oxford Nanopore (ONT), and the two main flow cells we've used are the:

Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook.

This is something I wrote internally in late-2022. Sharing it now with light edits, additional context, and updated links after the idea came up at the Microbiology of the Built Environment conference I'm attending this week.

Metagenomic sequencing data is fundamentally relative: each observation is a fraction of all the observations in a sample. If you want to make quantitative observations, however, like understanding whether there's been an increase in the number of people with some infection, you need to calibrate these observations. For example, there could be variation between samples due to variation in:

I've been a heavy user of dictation, off and on, as my wrists have gotten better and worse. I've mostly used the built-in Mac and Android recognition: Mac isn't great, Android is pretty good, neither has improved much over the past ~5y despite large improvements in what should be possible. OpenAI has an open speech recognition model, whisper, and I wanted to have a go at running it on my Mac.

It looks like for good local performance the best version is whisper.cpp, which is a plain C/C++ implementation with support for Mac's ML hardware. To get this installed I needed to install XCode (not just the command line tools, since I needed coremlc) and then run:

I recently flew through CLT and spent more time delayed than in the air. There were summer thunderstorms, and with the lightning it wasn't safe for workers to be out. This meant no loading, unloading, docking, refueling, anything. On the way in we sat on the tarmac for 3hr waiting for lightning to let up; on the way back we sat in the terminal (much better) while the incoming flight suffered through our prior fate.

Ground delays due to electrical storms are common, and each minute of closure is extremely expensive for the airlines in addition to being painful for the passengers. We don't stop inside work when there's lightning, why can't we get the same protection for ground workers? This is something we know how to do: give the electricity a better path to ground.