Tag: science
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AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say?
Jason Gorman's summarised the state of the art in research into the efficacy of LLM-assisted software engineering, and I was reassured to see that it closely mirrors my own personal experience of these technologies, with which I've now experimented for several years.
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Wikipedia @ 25: Cirrothauma Murrayi
Today, Wikipedia introduced me to a mysterious deep-dwelling octopus. So cool!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Lake Baikal
Today's random Wikipedia article was about a kind of seal that lives only in Lake Baikal in Siberia, which turns out to be a really, really big lake. Like: it's got about a fifth of the world's fresh water in it; that's how big it is!
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FlipFlop Solitaire's Deck-Generation Secret
I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!
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The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
Minas Karamanis has produced a fantastic article about his experience of the use of LLMs for research in physics, and the concerns that he has about its use by less-experienced researchers just beginning to find their way in the field. I echo his thoughts, from my own field of software engineering, and wonder... how will we allow junior developers to gain experience in a world that may encourage them to use LLMs rather than trying and failing for themselves?
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Reading more rolled papyri
In kind-of local news, I see that the folks at Diamond Light Source (which I got to visit last year) have been helping the Bodleian (who I used to work for) to X-ray one of their Herculaneum scrolls (which I've written about before). That's really cool.
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Science Weekend
It was a weekend full of science, starting with a visit to the excellent open day at Harwell Campus and a trip to the Diamond Light Synchrotron, and finishing with a series of medical tests on my lungs and why they're not working as well as they ought to. With graphs!
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Water Science #2
For the second time, the kids and I had an outing to do some "citizen science" experiments on a local watercourse.
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Bumblebees surprise scientists with 'sophisticated' social learning
There are two - maybe three - things I love about the recent discovery that bees exhibit complex social learning behaviours. Allow me to drone on about bees for a while...
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Announcers and Automation
A friend of mine used to do railway station announcements and was so good that he could do it from memory. That job now belongs to a computer. And that's fine.
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Using every car parking space in a supermarket car park
Dan shares Gareth Wild's achievement of using every bay in his local supermarket's car park.
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Gratitude
Dan is grateful for a great many things, despite the current crisis.
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Water Science
Dan and the kids participate in some citizen science, testing the water quality in the Oxford Canal.
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Dan helps a 5 year-old launch stomp rockets to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.
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The man who made Einstein world-famous
A fascinating BBC News story about how astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington helped the world "discover" the genius of Albert Einstein.