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#capacity

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P.E.I.'s entire health-care system over capacity, hospitals facing increased wait times
Hospitals across P.E.I. are over capacity, leading to hours-long wait times in the province's emergency rooms and limited bed availability, Health P.E.I. said in a news release Thursday afternoon.  
#healthcare #capacity #system #PEI #News #Canada
cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edwa

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@Tathar I mean, #FPGA|s ain't that user-friendly in terms of setup and tooling, but #WebDevelopment as for #HDDVD should've been feasible for everyone who can make a site that doesn't look like shit on #InternetExploder 6!

  • Bad jokes aside, I wounder if HD-DVD has any sort-of "#CopyProtection" that prevents like self-recorded discs from being played.

Cuz #bluray players do accept #BDROM discs from like those #miniBD #Camcorders...

  • And even thos HD-DVD media and burners are basically #unobtanium these days, they should be able to use cheap #DVDROM since AFAIK most #DemoDiscs for HD-DVD were using #DVD media for cost savings as the #capacity of a #DualLayer-DVD is enough for the 15-30min looped #showreel footage and basically every HD-DVD drive I know does DVDs and CDs anyway so it's just #UDF 2.5 - ish.

And the whole "Copy Protection" - Pipeline with #HDCP & #AACS and the lice is only concerned about people duplicating #retail discs.

Espechally not on HD-DVD otherwise we'd not have this cool thing today!

#09F911 #029D74 #E35BD8 #4156C5 #635688 #C0 #09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0

Continued thread

Arıkan's new solution was to create near-perfect channels from ordinary channels by a process he called “#channel #polarization.”

Noise would be transferred from one channel to a copy of the same channel to create a cleaner copy and a dirtier one.

After a recursive series of such steps, two sets of channels emerge, one set being extremely noisy, the other being almost noise-free.

The channels that are scrubbed of noise, in theory, can attain the Shannon limit.

He dubbed his solution #polar #codes.
It's as if the noise was banished to the North Pole, allowing for pristine communications at the South Pole.

After this discovery, Arıkan spent two more years refining the details.
He had read that before Shannon released his famous paper on information theory, his supervisor at Bell Labs would pop by and ask if the researcher had anything new.
“Shannon never mentioned information theory,” says Arıkan with a laugh.
“He kept his work undercover. He didn't disclose it.”

That was also Arıkan's MO. “I had the luxury of knowing that no other person in the world was working on this problem,” Arıkan says, “because it was not a fashionable subject.”

In 2008, three years after his eureka moment, Arıkan finally presented his work.

He had understood its importance all along. Over the years, whenever he traveled, he would leave his unpublished manuscript in two envelopes addressed to “top colleagues whom I trusted,” with the order to mail them “if I don't come back.”

In 2009 he published his definitive paper in the field's top journal, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

It didn't exactly make him a household name, but within the small community of information theorists, polar codes were a sensation.

Arıkan traveled to the US to give a series of lectures. (You can see them on YouTube; they are not for the mathematically fainthearted. The students look a bit bored.)

Arıkan was justifiably proud of his accomplishment, but he didn't think of polar codes as something with practical value.

It was a theoretical solution that, even if implemented, seemed unlikely to rival the error-correction codes already in place.

He didn't even bother to get a patent.

Continued thread

Arıkan devoted the next year to learning about networks, but he never gave up on his passion for information science.

What gripped him most was solving a challenge that Shannon himself had spelled out in his 1948 paper:
how to transport accurate information at high speed while defeating the inevitable “noise”
—undesirable alterations of the message
—introduced in the process of moving all those bits.

The problem was known as #channel #capacity.

According to Shannon, every communications channel had a kind of speed limit for transmitting information reliably.

This as-yet-unattained theoretical boundary was referred to as the #Shannon #limit.

Gallager had wrestled with the Shannon limit early in his career, and he got close. His much celebrated theoretical approach was something he called low-density parity-check codes, or LDPC, which were, in simplest terms, a high-speed method of #correcting #errors on the fly.

While the mathematics of LDPC were innovative, Gallager understood at the time that it wasn't commercially viable.

“It was just too complicated for the cost of the logical operations that were needed,” Gallager says now.

Gallager and others at MIT figured that they had gotten as close to the Shannon limit as one could get, and he moved on.

At MIT in the 1980s, the excitement about information theory had waned.
But not for Arıkan.

He wanted to solve the problem that stood in the way of reaching the Shannon limit.

Even as he pursued his thesis on the networking problem that Gallager had pointed him to, he seized on a piece that included error correction.

“When you do error-correction coding, you are in Shannon theory,” he says.

Arıkan finished his doctoral thesis in 1986, and after a brief stint at the University of Illinois he returned to Turkey to join the country's first private, nonprofit research institution, #Bilkent #University, located on the outskirts of Ankara.

Arıkan helped establish its engineering school. He taught classes. He published papers.

But Bilkent also allowed him to pursue his potentially fruitless battle with the Shannon limit.

“The best people are in the US, but why aren't they working for 10 years, 20 years on the same problem?” he said.
“Because they wouldn't be able to get tenure; they wouldn't be able to get research funding.”

Rather than advancing his field in tiny increments, he went on a monumental quest. It would be his work for the next 20 years.

In December 2005 he had a kind of #eureka moment.
Spurred by a question posed in a three-page dispatch written in 1965 by a Russian information scientist, Arıkan reframed the problem for himself.

“The key to discoveries is to look at those places where there is still a paradox,” Arıkan says.

“It's like the tip of an iceberg. If there is a point of dissatisfaction, take a closer look at it. You are likely to find a treasure trove underneath.”

Arıkan's goal was to transmit messages accurately over a noisy channel at the fastest possible speed.

The key word is #accurately. If you don't care about accuracy, you can send messages unfettered.

But if you want the recipient to get the same data that you sent, you have to insert some #redundancy into the message.
That gives the recipient a way to cross-check the message to make sure it's what you sent.

Inevitably, that extra cross-checking slows things down.
This is known as the #channel #coding #problem.

The greater the amount of noise, the more added redundancy is needed to protect the message.

And the more redundancy you add, the slower the rate of transmission becomes.

The coding problem tries to defeat that trade-off and find ways to achieve reliable transmission of information at the fastest possible rate.

The optimum rate would be the Shannon limit: channel coding nirvana.

Continued thread

"This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean #energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable #externalities can no longer be ignored. To achieve #sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two."
mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508 @climate

MDPIThrough the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy TransitionWe add to the emerging body of literature highlighting cracks in the foundation of the mainstream energy transition narrative. We offer a tripartite analysis that re-characterizes the climate crisis within its broader context of ecological overshoot, highlights numerous collectively fatal problems with so-called renewable energy technologies, and suggests alternative solutions that entail a contraction of the human enterprise. This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable “externalities” can no longer be ignored. To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two. While it might be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for global society to succeed in this endeavor, history is replete with stellar achievements that have arisen only from a dogged pursuit of the seemingly impossible.
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@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic

This strikes me as enormously important and it reminds me of arguments we had in psych about #Risk assessment, #Capacity etc. These things are time/situation dependant - as practically everything is, to some extent.

Humans may diverge in terms of our own wish to belong to categories (I am not much of a joiner myself) but we seem to be almost universally, and rather dangerously, inclined to place other people and things into rigid categories, stable across time and context. Which almost nothing and nobody is.

We then feel threatened when things don't behave as expected, and we try to control everything to make sure that it doesn't #surprise us.

I suppose it boils down to #power struggle.

It is still unclear how #global #warming might be affecting likelihood for #atmospheric #rivers to hit #California in rapid clusters. A study last year found in nearly 4 out of 5 years between 1981-2019, half or more of all atmospheric rivers that affected the state were part of an atmospheric river “family,” or a rapid parade of storms.
Warmer atmosphere’s increased #capacity for holding #moisture is reason enough for California officials to prepare.
nytimes.com/2023/01/03/climate

www.nytimes.comHow Climate Change Is Shaping California’s Winter StormsBy Raymond Zhong