Microsoft Bing Shows My Little Pony Porn Gif as Top Result in Apple's Messages - <AUTHOR> https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-bing-shows-my-little-pony-porn-gif-as-top-result-in-apples-new-messages <comment><USER2> For anyone interested, going off from other news, this is it I think:

[https://i.imgur.com/GwtHkmf.gifv](https://i.imgur.com/GwtHkmf.gifv)

<comment><USER3> It could have been a lot worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is this an incorrect result, or what else do you expect if you search for "butt"? Searching "butt", unless you meant "boat", implies the desired result to be that of a rear. The alternative would be to show zero results.

<comment><USER5> Mmm, I dunno. If I search butt, I would expect an actual butt be the first result, not a fairly specific pornographic image. Google gives us a nice array of butts, and some are cartoon drawings, but it's just butts. Not butts being used in sexual acts, just a butt.

The fact that desktop Bing returns different results also suggests that this is not a correct - I'd expect the same results, or perhaps some NSFW removal since I'm guessing the device searches with the equivalent of Safe Search on since it has no idea on the user preferences.

<comment><USER3> Even with "Moderate" safesearch on, bing returns some fairly explicit results. With "Strict" safesearch on, there are 0 results. (With the "animated gif" option set).

<comment><USER5> I wasn't suggesting complete NSFW removal, but I would imagine that pony porn should be pretty easily detected. And again, it just seems odd to me that Bing would return pony gifs over the multitude of human porn gifs.

<comment><USER3> Detecting pony porn is probably an incredibly difficult problem to solve, considering that they are "naked" by default. The GIF in question is mainly made NSFW by the _addition_ of underwear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Relevant: [http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/theres-actual-hardcore- porn...](http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/theres-actual-hardcore-porn-hiding- in-ios-10-nsfw-1786670537)

<comment><USER4> This one was a real problem, but what gif am I looking for when I search for "huge". Huge what? Seems like Apple has blocked the "huge" for now, which only seems like a temporary workaround because there's nothing sexual about "huge" without being more specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The horror. Good thing Apple didn't invent the Internet yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft Bing is considered to be pretty good for searching porn, or so I've heard.

</comment><comment><USER9> My god think of the children!</comment>


Programming paradigms that change how people think about coding (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/04/09/six-programming-paradigms-that-will/ <comment><USER2> Original HN discussion (linked at top of article as well): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565153](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565153)

I find it interesting that the discussion on Dependent Types lists Idris and Coq as languages and discusses Formal Verification but mostly focuses on Idris and Scala with Shapeless... but to my knowledge, Coq has actually won out in 2019 for this, and Coq has even branded itself for this specifically[0].

[0] [https://coq.inria.fr/](https://coq.inria.fr/) \- Coq is a formal proof management system.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not strictly a programming language, but Scribble (a Racket language) is really the first document creation language that neither feels like a markup language with a programming language API nor a programming language with a document creation API. With this sort of setup, it is really easy to introduce arbitrary new constructs to avoid duplication or to better structure your document.

LaTex is the only system I know that comes close to this, but the language is pretty horrible to actually try and use (to be fair, LaTex has quite a bit of legacy it has to maintain).

<comment><USER4> Slight nitpick only: The language that LaTeX is written in is TeX. LaTeX is a library of macros.

I didn't know about Scribble. I know what I'm doing with my weekend now. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Prolog is declarative, but it's very different to SQL and it's a shame to put the two together. It is much more interesting to examine Prolog from the logic programming point of view.

Also:

1) The sorting example is O(n!) not because of limitations of the language, as the article suggests, but because the algorithm implemented is _permutation sort_ , which is O(n!).

A typical sorting algorithm example in Prolog is merge sort which is as efficient in Prolog as merge sort can be. Here are a few sorting algorithms in Prolog, including merge sort and quick sort:

[http://kti.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~bartak/prolog/sorting.html](http://kti.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~bartak/prolog/sorting.html)

2) The Sudoku example uses a Constraint Logic Programming library implemented in Prolog (from the looks of it, Gnu Prolog). CLP is a different paradigm than plain logic programming, where one programs by specifying constraints.

A Sudoku solver in actual Prolog can be found in "99 Prolog Problems":

[https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2009s2/pro...](https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2009s2/prolog/problemas/)

The sudoku solver is number 97.

</comment><comment><USER6> Out of order calculation based on dependencies: _mlet_ (magic let/mutual let) macro:

      This is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 212.
      Quit with :quit or Ctrl-D on empty line. Ctrl-X ? for cheatsheet.
      1> (mlet ((w 3)
                (x (+ z w))
                (z (* 2 w)))
           (list x z w))
      (9 6 3)

Obligatory macro-expansion:

      2> (macroexpand '(mlet ((w 3)
                (x (+ z w))
                (z (* 2 w)))
           (list x z w)))
      (let (#:g0011 #:g0012
            #:g0013)
        (symacrolet ((w (force #:g0011))
                     (x (force #:g0012))
                     (z (force #:g0013)))
          (set #:g0011
            (delay 3))
          (set #:g0012
            (delay (+ z w)))
          (set #:g0013
            (delay (* 2 w)))
          (list x z w)))

Circular dep naturally fails:

      1> (mlet ((x y) (y z) (z x)))
      nil
      2> (mlet ((x y) (y z) (z x)) x)
      ** (expr-2:1) force: recursion forcing delayed form y (source location n/a)

<comment><USER7> I wrote the exact same macro in Clojure a couple weeks ago !

      (defmacro lay [[sym expr & more-bindings] & body]
        (let [delay-sym (gensym (str "laid-" sym "-"))]
          `(let [~delay-sym (delay ~expr)]
             (symbol-macrolet [~sym (deref ~delay-sym)]
               ~@(if (empty? more-bindings)
                   body
                   `[(lay ~more-bindings ~@body)])))))

<comment><USER6> That expansion strategy won't work in TXR Lisp, because if we have

      (let ((#:g1 (delay y)))
        (symacrolet ((x #:g1))
           (let ((#:g2 (delay z)))
              (symacrolet ((y #:g2))
                 ...))))

the (delay y) expression is not in the scope of (symacrolet ((y #:g2)) ...). Local symbol macros are lexically scoped. They can shadow lexical variables and be shadowed by them and so on.

So y in (delay y) will not be expanded there as we need it to, which we need because the initializing expressions in _mlet_ can refer to all the variables (including their own, if they are careful).

This is why the code binds all of the gensyms first, and then initializes them by assignment in a scope in which the symacrolets are all visible.

Using _mlet_ plus some lazy structure like a lazy cons ( _lcons_ ) we can do useful things:

      1> (set *print-circle* t)
      t
      2> (mlet ((lc (lcons 1 lc))) lc)  ;; make a circular list
      #1=(1 . #1#)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It'll be very interesting to see if the symbolic programming model is as > flexible as Wolfram claims and can truly take advantage of all of this data.

Wolfram could have implemented his large standard library also for any other ecosystem. The magic of this library (which goes along with Wolfram's Lisp dialect but is considered as a unit) is that it is extremely high level, allowing rapid application development. But as with most libraries, it could have been developed for any language/idiom, such as a traditional object oriented python.

<comment><USER9> My 2 cents is that Mathematica and the Wolfram language are great for computational exploration (Ex: optimization, solving equations, plotting, statistics, calculus...etc etc). I think all the stuff that they really like to sell (Ex: the knowledge engine) are a gimmick. Yeah it can tell me how many calories are in spaghetti, but honestly...who cares? Normally, you would just get that in a dataset anyway which is more transparent. All my data is extremely private too, and they'll never have it available.

<comment><USER8> The explorative character of the MMA/Wolfram language is probably mostly due to the "REPL on stereoids". IPython provides a similar attempt but is "traditional" OOP (with explorable documentation and members/methods). Therefore, I am not that sure about the unique selling point of Mathematica. From my POV it is the pure size of the library and thus power of expression evaluation, like finding the algebraic solution to a complicated integral.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The dependent types example seems underwhelming; rejecting arrays of unlike length at compile time is something I'd expect from a Pascal compiler from 1975.

How about C90: pointer to array of 10 is not compatible with a pointer to array 20:

      int process_array(int (*pa)[20]);

      int main(void)
      {
        int array[10];
        process_array(&array);
        return 0;
      }

GCC:

      array.c: In function 'main':
      array.c:6:17: warning: passing argument 1 of 'process_array' from incompatible pointer type [-Wincompatible-pointer-types]
        process_array(&array);
                     ^
      array.c:1:5: note: expected 'int (*)[20]' but argument is of type 'int (*)[10]'
       int process_array(int (*pa)[20]);
           ^<comment><comment><comment><comment>

<comment><USER10> The goal is to get static time checking of dynamic types. For example, if I take two dynamic length arrays and loop n times, appending (optionally?) an element to each array, can you still provide a compile-time check that both arrays are necessarily the same length. It's much more powerful than what you describe.

<comment><USER6>
      s/you describe/the submitted web page describes/

FTFY

What I describe isn't being posed as "dependent types".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Too bad Behavioral Programming isn't discussed as I find it to be the most fascinating one especially because its main objective is to better align programming to how humans think: [https://lmatteis.github.io/react- behavioral/](https://lmatteis.github.io/react-behavioral/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Another strange language feature I could imagine seeing here: Constraint Logic Programming

</comment><comment><USER13> Wolfram always impresses me but I can't help but feel like it will never go anywhere. How can it grow without being crushed under its own weight? As he stated in the video, its all hand crafted data set munging to fit it all together.

I'd love to see a world where wolfrom pulls on datasets out in the wild much like a search engine scrapes web pages but is such a thing possible? It begins to sound like a SOAP/WSDL fever dream when you think about automatic knowledge integration.

Maybe something closer to the open source package managers? Wolfram datasets could specify interfaces and dependencies? At least that would allow for new and exciting datasets to gain adoption in the community.

<comment><USER14> > _Wolfram always impresses me but I can 't help but feel like it will never > go anywhere. How can it grow without being crushed under its own weight?_

Why would it? It's not like a language pays for the storage of libs and datasets it has available.

> _As he stated in the video, its all hand crafted data set munging to fit it > all together._

It's also a system for symbolic math / functional programming language that's independent from all the "hand crafted data sets".

> _I 'd love to see a world where wolfrom pulls on datasets out in the wild > much like a search engine scrapes web pages but is such a thing possible?_

It can already pull anything you want (ingest CSV files, call remote JSON APIs and crunch the data, etc).

It's a regular programming language (lispy even), not some weird concoction.

It just comes prepackaged with an IDE and tons of libraries and datasets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could you please edit personal swipes out of your comments to HN? Your post would be excellent without the first bit.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER10> Good point, thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER15> Appreciated! I'll detach my comment above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone that has used a third-party API or written a parser understands all they need to about declarative languages...</comment>


The DIY Chip - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/robot-art

<comment><USER2> For 'physical computer' read 'micro controller' and it will make a lot more sense.</comment>


SPA in Elm. Back-End in Phoenix - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/knewter/time-tracker <comment><USER2> So cool!

</comment><comment><USER3> this is awesome!</comment>


Have Ideas to Help the NSA Handle All That Data? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/unsolicited_proposals.shtml

<comment><USER2> Obligatory why should I work for the NSA video:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know what their technology challenges are, but I can suggest a new slogan to help them with their PR problems:

"Lost all your data? Don't worry, we have a backup!"

<comment><USER4> Saw posted else where that people probably wouldn't care about privacy issues if the NSA offered free email, maps, video, storage, etc.

Which begs the question, if the NSA did offer such services, on their own systems, so great security, what would the take up be?

<comment><USER5> Depends, can I encrypt my data before I back it up with them?

I am reasonably satisfied with PGP/GPG. I don't assume that they absolutely cannot crack it, but I am confident enough that it is expensive to do. I would be willing to back up _some_ of my data with them, after encrypting it. (Mostly stuff the IRS could get anyway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> They say: "NSA is interested in receiving unique and innovative ideas or approaches for use in satisfying our technology challenges."

It would be useful if they tell us what those technology challenges are :)

</comment><comment><USER6> clapper@utdc:~$ sudo rm -rf /data/*

[sudo] password for clapper: No4thAmd

<comment><USER7> SELinux policy will prevent it

<comment><USER8> Spoken like a man who knows ;-)

SELINUXTYPE=mls

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dear NSA,

The most scalable way to collect your data is to pipe it to the quantum wormhole device called /dev/null. Please consider using this to transfer all data back to your data centers.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Securing the future", as in, keeping it for yourselves?

</comment><comment><USER11> "NSA will accept and evaluate unsolicited proposals submitted in accordance with the Guidance for the Preparation and Submission of Unsolicited Proposals..."

Proposal #1: Cut the crap. Just cut the self-inflicted bullshit out of the data collected - and you'll end up working with much less data.

</comment><comment><USER12> Proposal: Execute operation "Office Space" on all surveillance hardware (pursuant to article Youtube Video ID PywI0BOxJpI [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PywI0BOxJpI]](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PywI0BOxJpI\])).

No data? No problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> What about crowd sourcing ? Setup a big data server named NSAleaks. Change data like phone numbers, names and locations so that only NSA can map them back to the real value. Then let people search it. Offer a reward for finding abnormal patterns or terrorist plots from it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sure, pull the plug.

</comment><comment><USER15> From the guidelines of submission: "Type of organization: e.g., profit, nonprofit, educational, Historically Black College or University, Minority Institution, small business, small disadvantaged, small woman-owned, etc. 4"

So many questions about this....

<comment><USER16> As the example setter for curing social ills of all sorts, the Federal Government is actually required to prefer small businesses, minority-led business, etc. when possible on contractors of a certain size. This requirement extends to prime contractors as well for large enough contracts IIRC.

The requirement is easily evaded, of course. Big Contractors typically help a minority or disabled veteran start a business and land the contract at some inflated rate, and then the small contractor buys the service from Big Contractor and keeps the overhead costs.

<comment><USER17> I have known Big Contractors to actively seek out Small or Minority contractors in order to actually get the job. The little guy ends up with a agency type fee, once he hires the big contractor as a sub on the government job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlip7jZX9m0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlip7jZX9m0)

Jump to 3:00 and feel free to act on all that advice she gives.

</comment><comment><USER19> I was really, really hoping that this was a new posting (like, in the past day or two). That would've been amazingly funny in a dark sort of way.

Unfortunately, the footer suggests it dates back to 2009.

<comment><USER20> You mean the footer of the whole website?

<comment><USER21> No. It says "Date Posted: Jan 15, 2009 | Last Modified: Jan 15, 2009 | Last Reviewed: Jan 15, 2009" below the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> lol

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey, like when a recruiter found me a position with Huawei.</comment>


Nairobi Dev School Fund Raiser - Hacking Under the sun - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nairobi-dev-school/x/1787386

<comment><USER2> Have you gotten in touch with the iHub people in Nairobi? Seems like it'd be right up their alley

<comment><AUTHOR> I have spoken to the (community) manager. I'm hoping we will work together.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Join us in making Nairobi Dev School a reality! We all deserve to learn and be better programmers!</comment>


Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ <comment><USER2> I wanted to understand how Singapore's desalination capacity (which is known as our fourth tap for water sources), compares with this. The numbers are quite mind blowing, at the scale Israel is doing desalination.

Our current desalination capacity, with 2 plants, amount to only 100 million gallons per day which currently meets 25% of our needs [1].

[1] [https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/desalina...](https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/desalinatedwater)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cape Coral, Florida has been using a RO desalination plant to provide drinking water since the 1970s, currently they produce 18 Million Gallons a day

[http://fwrj.com/techarticles/0909%20FWRJ_tech2.pdf](http://fwrj.com/techarticles/0909%20FWRJ_tech2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> > One of the driest countries on earth

Average rainfall in Tel Aviv - 528mm/year, that's about 50mm less than Jerusalem - and _London_. Now, a lot of the country is a desert, but even Beersheba gets an average of 400mm. Only the far south is really dry.

Not that Israel didn't need its desalination system, it might be the only good and/or competent thing our government has done in recent years, but it's not a very dry country in its inhabited areas.

</comment><comment><USER5> While Israel does grow and export fruits and vegetables, it imports "water" in the form of grains and beef and other "red" meats. At least some of the beef is imported from Argentina.

According to one source 1 ton of wheat is 216,000 gallons of water.

Beef requires considerably more water per pound, at least 10 times as much and the documented source says much more.

Beef and other red meats are also imported as a rule. Turkey and chicken, which require less water, are grown domestically.

[http://www.vegsource.com/articles/pimentel_water.htm](http://www.vegsource.com/articles/pimentel_water.htm)

For many of the Middle Eastern countries with water shortages, importing grains and red meats to conserve on water seems like a good strategy.

Also, technology from carbon nano-tubules may make the desalination if much cheaper.

Couple this technology with ever-improving solar technology which is likely to be efficient in Israel's Negev Desert and this promises to be a water technology with no consumables.

<comment><USER5> A metric ton (1.1 tons) of #1 Winter Wheat ranges from $140 to $160. Israeli desal water is about $0.52 cubic meter or 260 gallons. Using the 1 ton wheat is 216,000 gallons of water, it comes to about $430 per ton using the desalinated water.

Thus, wheat imports water at $0.15 cents per cubic meter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to think that desalination was very expensive, but:

> Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents.

For comparison, the lowest marginal rate for water in a single-family residential unit in San Francisco costs $4.86/ccf or ~$1.72 per thousand liters. San Francisco has an excellent water supply, and they nonetheless charge about three times the cost of desalinated water in Israel.

This obviously glosses over a bunch of things (cost of maintenance of the SF water system, the fact that SF charges quite a lot of money for the privilege of having a water meter, the capital cost of the desalination plant (I don't know whether that's amortized in the 58 cent figure)), but still, desalination isn't terribly expensive.

I suspect the main issues blocking large-scale desalination in the US are:

\- Lead time. Desalination looks great during a drought, but it looks useless in wet years, and it takes longer than a typical drought to get it up and running.

\- Environmental impacts. You have to build the intake and brine discharge systems, and getting that through environmental review might be complicated.

The first point could be addressed to some extent by running the plant even in surplus years and using it for groundwater recharge.

<comment><USER7> Most water is used for agriculture, where the cost is much lower. Also, desalinated water isn't very good quality, in the mid-east, it's often not used for drinking or shampooing your hair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a fantastic development. Tying the climate change and water shortage to civil unrest, regional war, immigration disaster, and world security problems is something the US presidential candidates are failing to understand or at least communicate effectively.

This article was a hard read due to lack of editing. I hope they update it with fewer typos and cut and paste errors. Peer review people, at least.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't see a lot of discussion around the brine. In previous reading brine will eventually create areas in seas where fish and other life starts dying off because of the extreme salt content.

This article mentions the brine "is just pumped back into the Mediterranean", but don't they need to be concerned about killing fisheries?

<comment><USER10> The article mentioned one installation was going to channel brine back to the dead sea, so if you've got a super salty body of water nearby, brine problem = solved!

<comment><USER11> False. The Dead Sea is already rapidly drying up due to climate change; pumping even more salt in will only hurt.

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-dying-of- th...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-dying-of-the-dead- sea-70079351/?no-ist)

<comment><USER10> This is only true if the brine content being offloaded is greater than that of the Dead Sea now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As we know when a water source dries up in a Middle Eastern nation, the people who need it move to a different location and some get desperate. This leads to more refugees for other nations to take on, and a small fraction join a terrorist organization to survive. If this technology can bring fresh water to Middle Eastern nations, it can help fight terrorism, and end the refugee problem as they'd have no reason to flee if plenty of water and food are available as well as jobs.

<comment><USER13> What if war breaks out and the desal plants are targeted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've heard that just as big as their desalination efforts are their water reuse efforts. All that sewage we work so hard to get rid of? Turns out that's still fresh water. Sort of. It's just got some other stuff in it is all.

<comment><USER15> Israel recycles 86% of water from the sewers compared to the second most efficient recovery in the world is Spain at 19%.

<comment><USER16> That is the 2nd most interesting point i want to hear more about. And yet the article does not go into any details.

<comment><USER17> Everything you wanted to know and VERY interesting :)

[http://www.smartpeoplepodcast.com/2015/10/26/episode-214-set...](http://www.smartpeoplepodcast.com/2015/10/26/episode-214-seth- siegel/)

tldr; water was used as an excuse by the British to limit immigration to Israel, so from the earliest onset of the formation of Israel, Israel has been trying to tackle the problem of water use inefficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _> Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s._

How much of that price drop is due to lower energy prices? How sustainable is the power source?

Even with significant efficiency improvements (3X), shifting from local freshwater sources to desalination would have a massive energy requirements.[1] For such a bold claim ("the Desalination Era is Here"), this article has a rather lightweight examination of the environmental impacts.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Energy_consumptio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Energy_consumption)

<comment><USER19> > How sustainable is the power source?

Oil (and such and such) will last a 100+ years and obviously won't destroy the planet in that time.

I'd call that sustainable.

And given it's just a "power source", at any time we could swap it out for X, Y, Z.

Plus they specifically talk about efficiencies in the article?

Not sure your point at all?

I haven't seen huge drops in energy cost across the world? Electricity seems the same or more than the 1990s?

<comment><USER20> Two words: climate change

<comment><USER21> Yep. Three words:

Black flag weather

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> But ...

The Tampa Bay Desalination Plant produces 25 million gallons per day of drinking water to provide 10% of the region's needs. [1]

Americas' largest seawater desalination plant provides 50 million gallons (189 million liters) of drinking water for the San Diego area each day - 8% of needs

[1] [http://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater- desalination...](http://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination- plant.aspx)

[2] [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/02/world/florida- fl...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/02/world/florida-flop-new- california-seawater-desalination-plant-seeks-slake-san-diegos-thirst/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Where is the power coming from? Desalination can only be as efficient and sustainable as the power source. It's not surprising if Israel can build massive desalination plants dependent on cheap fossil fuel power.

This is just trading water now for more CO2 added to the atmosphere, worsening the underlying problem.

<comment><USER24> Solar is now significantly more economical than it once was and in the long term would be rather appropriate for these regions.

<comment><USER25> jinx! you owe me a glass of water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Dubai can't be making this situation any better.

</comment><comment><USER27> Another example worth checking is Isla de Hierro, in the Canary Islands (Spain). Not only they are using desalination to produce most of the fresh water they need, but the desalination plants and the whole island run 100% with renewable energy.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article states --

"Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58)."

But I saw nothing about where the energy comes from, the type of source, the scale. I'd like to compare this with local proposals, etc.

One of the biggest DeSal issues is cost of conversion and source, proximity of source, etc. play a huge factor.

<comment><USER29> The energy comes from the grid. The nice thing about the grid is that it lets you abstract out power, kinda like bandwidth on the Internet. Do you care which data center a new app lives in?

But if we must, I suspect the supply side (of electricity) I suspect most new supplies in Israel are solar PV located in the Negev, since peak demand there correlates with sun.

And what sort of local proposals are you imagining as alternatives to desalination?

<comment><USER30> Israel's grid is presently fed by coal and gas:

[https://www.iea.org/sankey/#?c=Israel&s=Balance](https://www.iea.org/sankey/#?c=Israel&s=Balance)

<comment><USER28> How do those costs compare with something in Northern or Central CA, with the same coal/ng source?

<comment><USER30> The breakthrough here (and I've only skimmed the article) is in 1) reverse osmosis 2) without organics-clogging of filters. That is, basically, keeping pond scum from fouling your molecular-differentiating filter system, which is what it takes to split water from salt.

That and various energy efficiency improvements.

Much of this comes down to questions of "what are the energy costs" and "how much energy can we supply".

I'm not a huge fan of desal generally, _especially_ where it's reliant on fossil-fuel energy. On the other hand, it actually plays into another area I've had some interest in -- seawater-based Fischer-Tropsh fuel synthesis (SFTFS). That's the task of taking seawater, separating carbon from it (mostly in the form of dissolved carbonate and bicarbonate -- the dissolved CO2 fraction is small), and electrolysis to split out hydrogen.

That problem divides into a few parts:

1\. Electrolysis of hydrogen. Essentially a solved problem at large scales. Example: nuclear powered submarines replenish their oxygen supply through electrolysis (I'm not sure _what_ they do with the hydrogen resulting). Since water is 89% oxygen by weight, the amount of water you need to process here is small. There's an energy cost (more below).

2\. Removing carbonate & bicarbonate from seawater. Here the fraction is far smaller -- a few fractions of a percent by weight. The reason you're looking at seawater is because energetically it's _far_ easier than getting CO2 from air. And yes, seawater is also necessary. The probme _here_ is getting enough water -- you've got to process tremendous volumes.

3\. Synthesising hydrocarbons from this (that's the Fischer-Tropsh bit). Fairly well established, and exothermic to boot, so it doesn't cost energy.

4\. Energy input. You only get out about 60% of what you put in to split out hydrogen. That normally isn't a very good bargain except for a few useful things about hydrocarbons, below.

The upshot is that desal and SFTFS have a few things in common: taking in gobs of water, purifying that so you don't gum up the works, and applying fairly hefty amounts of energy to it.

What desal offers is a proving ground for developing that seawater handling capability, at scale, and in particular the filtration parts. It would also be possible to combine the processing (though there might be other reasons for not doing so). In theory, you'd ingest seawater, electrolise some of it for hydrogen, capture the carbonate/bicarbonate (which aren't of interest for tapwater), feed your C & H to the FT synthesis process, and continue with the remainder of the water to your desal system.

Why bother making hydrocarbons? Because they're damned useful. Renewable energy has advantages, but it doesn't store or transport well. Synthesized hydrocarbons would be precise (and in fact, _more_ precise) analogs of methane, petrol, kerosene (a/k/a jet fuel), and deisel. For some applications, including standby generation, gas heat, some industrial processes, and powered air and marine transport, they're about the only real viable option. I suspect they may continue to see use in private / passenger transport as well, and possibly rail (electrification is an option, but has challenges). There are industrial processes which also utilise gas and oil feedstocks, notably Haber- Bosh nitrogen fixation (though alternate processes might emerge).

Even if we end up with a small fraction of total energy coming from hydrocarbons (marine and air would be ~12% of the present total), the process could prove quite useful.

Large-scale desal could be a proving ground for related technologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse ... the wells ran dry and Syria's farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose._

To what extent the current situation in Syria influenced by environmental changes, I wonder?

Unemployed farmers -> Social instability -> Civil Unrest -> War?

<comment><USER32> This SciAm article lays it out exactly as you do.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change- has...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-hastened-the- syrian-war/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder what the downside of desalination is. What does one do with the huge quantities of leftover brine (when operating at country levels) -- surely dumping it back into the sea can't be good for the surrounding marine environment. In nature, there is no free lunch.

</comment><comment><USER16> On the Subject of Water. > Sorek can produce a thousand litres of drinking water for 58 cents. I am guessing this is the cost to produce and not the final cost to Homeowners. How much further down can we reduce this cost? I am guessing this is close to the limit of efficiency, any more reduction will have to come from cheaper energy source? Since Nuclear Power requires lots of water, would the both makes sense working together?

Most countries have leaky water around pipes. UK lose around 20%, US is a little above 10%. Are the any innovation that we can shrink this number? I dont see why this cant be within 98%+ region. What is stopping it?

<comment><USER33> The age and number of the pipes. It's easy to underestimate the scale of the problem. There's been a replacement process going on in London to replace ancient cast iron and wooden box piping on the mains supply for the past few years. That's mostly Victorian and earlier installations, but there isn't anything like a full inventory of where they are, and sometimes what they find is that the original pipe has completely disintegrated: the water is just flowing through the void in the clay.

I do know of one case (not in London) where complaints about the quality of a house's water led to the discovery that it was, via a somewhat convoluted plumbing route, still drawing water from the nearby river via Roman pipework.

If you can find a leak, stopping it is usually straightforward, but on a colossal, heterogeneous and patchily documented pipe network like the UK's, the best you can do is patch it up as you go along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What about climate changes and any other possible drawbacks?

Shouldn't this be considered having in mind that we're bringing water to.. where it's not supposed to exist, hence influencing a micro climate and making climate changes?

</comment><comment><USER35> I've said this for years here in Australia, when people talk about a "water shortage" \- there's no such thing. What there is, here at least, is a cheap power shortage and a water infrastructure shortage.

</comment><comment><USER36> And here Sim City had me thinking this was common place when I was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER37> "water can be a bridge" \- :-) Nicely worded.

</comment><comment><USER13> > _Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents._

In Los Angeles, the DWP tier 1 retail price for a cubic foot is very, very roughly 5 cents or roughly $1.75 for 1000 liters. And DWP's prices are going up (for a host of reasons).

<comment><USER38> Doesn't the DWP price include procurement, treatment, delivery to a house and sewage treatment, whereas the Sorek price is only procurement.

To compare them, it would have to be the price someone pays to obtain a kilolitre of untreated water at source.

California seems to have some water transfers, and I found a report listing prices from $50-$550/acre-foot, or ~1.25 million L (2012 [1])

That would give an upper bound of (550/1250) $0.44/kilolitre at source.

[1] [http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_1112EHR.pdf](http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_1112EHR.pdf)

<comment><USER13> I do not think the sewage treatment is included in that price. But the rest is, as you say.

<comment><USER38> You are correct, in LA, it's broken out into a separate line item.

From the DWP FAQ:

"The Sewer Service Charge (SSC) is based on metered water use"

[https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/wcnav_externalId/c-cs- sewe...](https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/wcnav_externalId/c-cs-sewer- charg;jsessionid=jtpbXczQjvtM6njrczJxY9LGF0Jvjn4q1zGTHBwBP6l5rTPj1ZyD!747476876?_adf.ctrl- state=j2xbb4sk6_4&ladwp/cms/ladwp000399.jsp&_afrLoop=603635808483886&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=null#%40%3Fladwp%252Fcms%252Fladwp000399.jsp%3D%26_afrWindowId%3Dnull%26_afrLoop%3D603635808483886%26_afrWindowMode%3D0%26_adf.ctrl- state%3D18bpvkygwi_4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There are some crucial details here I'm not understanding.

The article says Israel needs (or needed?) 1.9Gm³/year (60 kiloliters per second, 60kℓ/s) of water, of which it got 1.5Gm³/year (48kℓ/s) from natural sources; but now (or when the plants opened?) it gets 127Mm³/year from the 2005 Ashkelon desal plant, 140Mm³/year from the 2009 Hadera desal plant, and 150Mm³/year from the new Sorek plant. These total 417Mm³/year (13kℓ/s), but the article says Israel's current total is 600Mm³/year (19kℓ/s) from desalination plants, which is more than 417. Also, it says, Israel now gets 55% of its domestic water from desalination. But 55% of 60kℓ/s is 33kℓ/s, which is 14kℓ/s more than the 19kℓ/s it says Israel gets from desalination. I suspect there's some confusing mixing of categories here leading to these numbers not adding up properly.

The other really crucial questions are about capex and opex. How much do these plants cost to build, and how much do they cost to run? How much of that is the energy cost?

They give the figure that the Sorek plant's reverse osmosis runs at 70 atmospheres (7.1 MPa; fucking Christ on a stick, why do people keep inventing new non-SI units?) which means that each liter of output water requires 7.1kJ of mechanical energy to force it through the membrane. There are presumably some other energy costs, but that may be the bulk of it. At US$100/MWh (US$28/GJ; fucking non-SI units again), which is a reasonable ballpark for the levelized cost of electrical energy, that's about 200 μUS$/ℓ or 200 US$/Mℓ. Irrigation water is commonly quoted in US$ per acre foot in the US; this is US$240 per acre foot, which would be a very competitive cost.

But it says the cost is US$0.58/kℓ, which is 580 US$/Mℓ or US$715/acre foot, about three times the cost of the mechanical energy and high enough that many crops are uneconomical. It is crucial to understand where that extra cost is coming from.

One of the comments on the Ensia version of the story claims that the new Carlsbad desal plant is selling its water for US$2000/acre foot. I don't know if that's true, but it's about 150% higher than the projected costs.

Links, in case the Scientific American web site is lost:

Original article: [http://ensia.com/features/how-a-new-source-of-water-is- helpi...](http://ensia.com/features/how-a-new-source-of-water-is-helping- reduce-conflict-in-the-middle-east)

Bar-Zeev et al.'s article about their bioflocculation anti-biofouling prefiltering apparatus: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236137883_Biofloccu...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236137883_Bioflocculation_Chemical_free_pre- treatment_technology_for_the_desalination_industry) DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2013.03.013

"Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought": [http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.abstract) doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421533112

</comment><comment><USER40> We need nuclear desalination and district heating

</comment><comment><USER41> What about the environmental costs of desalination though? The article doesn't mention them, but they are significant.

<comment><USER30> Any specifics on that?

<comment><USER42> I assume it's about the salt that is dumped back into the ocean after removing the water from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> For some perspective: LA county uses about ~50 Million cubic meters of water per year. The largest Israeli desalinization plant is ~225 Million cubic meters per year. The entire state of California uses ~50 Billion cubic meters of water per year. Very rough numbers

<comment><USER44> But only a few percent is for residential use, right? So ignoring agriculture, a few large plants should provide enough water for humans to be happy in Cali solely off of desal?

<comment><USER18> I'm guessing people in Cali would not be very happy living without agriculture, so no.

<comment><USER45> California's GDP is estimated at 1,800 billion. Economic activity coming from agriculture is estimated at about 100 billion. Given an average economic growth rate of 2.5% per year for California, losing all agriculture would set California's growth back about 2 years.

Nobody wants to do that, and there are all sorts of complex legal issues around water rights. But push come to shove, California could survive just fine without its agricultural sector.

<comment><USER46> Agriculture brings may bring in only 5% of the state's economy, but if every single piece of food eaten in California had to be imported, it would cost a lot more then 5% of its economy.

If food were grown by magic, without employing any people, and it could all be sold at cost, it would contribute 0% to the state's economy. Does that mean that it would make economic sense to immediately stop growing all that food? Of course not! The fact that growing food is so cheap is a good thing!

<comment><USER47> To amplify your point, excepting water, the San Joaquin Valley in particular has the best climate and input factors in the possibly the world for producing high value crops at low cost and low environmental impact. If we could supply another 50-100M acre feet of water to the aqueduct system amazing thinks could happen.

My quick calculation is the biggest of these desal plants would only feed 25,000 acres of almonds. There are 1M acres +/\- of almonds in California, if we wanted to double nut protein production in California (the leading global exporter of almonds) you would need about 50 of the plants described not just three.

Who wants to build the giga-desal plant to feed the Clifton Court Forebay?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Thank you, Israel; Please also amend [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel)

</comment><comment><USER49> Honestly, I had always assumed Israel was much more advanced than this article points out. In the 90s I was a kid in the middle east. We had a "sweet water" tap in the kitchen for drinking. Everything else was recycled. We didn;t flush our toilets with drinkable water. And low-flow appliances were the norm. I find it shocking that Israel hadn't started such measures until 2007.

<comment><USER50> Israel has been recycling most of its wastewater since the 60's, today it reclaims over 86% of its wastewater this is a huge margin over the next closest contender which is spain at 17%. The water in the toilet is drinkable, that doesn't mean it's wasted there is no need to overcomplicate your water management systems if you can reclaim most of the water back and reuse it, including as drinking water. Countries with "dual feed" water systems don't do it for efficiency or water preservation, they do it because the main feed water quality is below drinking levels, so larger municipalities can supplement the main water system by providing a "drinking" tap into homes, in some places the drinking tap is communal for the building, block, or even the entire village while the rest of the water should not be drank without boiling or treatment if at all.

<comment><USER49> That isn't the system we had. The drinking water line supplied the "sweet water" taps and and dishwashers. Interestingly, the hot water tanks also got 'sweet' water as dishwashers often use hot water. The non-drinking water in homes was recycled water and was more heavily chlorinated, making it safe for bathing but not great for drinking. It wouldn't make you sick, but drinking a large amount could be uncomfortable. Then we had a third standard for irrigation of lawns and such. That water wasn't as heavily chlorinated.

<comment><USER50> That's pretty standard in emerging water markets, the chlorinated water was actually most likely not the recycled one (you do not chlorinate water that is not near drinking quality, if you do it to unfiltered reclaimed water you create really nasty chemical reactions), it's most likely water that has been collected or transported at least partially in open air systems and the chlorine is used as a antiseptic. The drinking water is the higher quality water that has been treated and is transferred in a closed system with higher quality control, while the water used for lawns is most likely the reclaimed water.

When you can reclaim most of you water and ensure quality control throughout the system you simplify it, have one water feed for residential use, and usually another for agriculture and industry. Reclaimed water even drinking quality is usually not put back into the tap because the cost of ensuring water quality make it unfavourable, it's used for agriculture and industrial uses, when it ends up again as drinking water it's often as filtered bottle water simply because you can then transfer the cost of the additional water quality control to the industrial users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> "Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea."

I've heard this brine can have a pretty negative ecological impact, I wonder how that could be mitigated.

<comment><USER52> Explain why?

The ocean is say 99 parts water and 1 part stuff. We take out 1 part water and .01 parts stuff, keep the water, then put the .01 parts stuff back. Doesn't seem to really change the ocean concentration? I guess maybe if dumped too close to shore it could make a brine slick?

<comment><USER53> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Outflow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Outflow) gives an overview of the environmental problems in desal outflow:

> Desalination processes produce large quantities of brine, possibly at above > ambient temperature, and contain residues of pretreatment and cleaning > chemicals, their reaction byproducts and heavy metals due to corrosion.[45] > Chemical pretreatment and cleaning are a necessity in most desalination > plants, which typically includes prevention of biofouling, scaling, foaming > and corrosion in thermal plants, and of biofouling, suspended solids and > scale deposits in membrane plants.[46]

> To limit the environmental impact of returning the brine to the ocean, ...

> Brine is denser than seawater and therefore sinks to the ocean bottom and > can damage the ecosystem. Careful reintroduction can minimize this problem. > Typical ocean conditions allow for rapid dilution, thereby minimizing harm.

What's an example of not typical?

Here's an article which points out that the Arabian Gulf is shallow, with low circulation rates and high evaporation rates which make it naturally saltier. That, combined with the damming of freshwater and increasing number of desal plants places a limit on to how much it can be use as a water source: [http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae- news/environment/desalina...](http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae- news/environment/desalination-threat-to-the-growing-gulf)

<comment><USER54> From the article, "chemical-free method." [1] I'm sure the salt concentration isn't great, but it's a lot easier to spread salt around than remove heavy metals and cleaning chemicals.

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilana_Berman- Frank/publ...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilana_Berman- Frank/publication/236137883_Bioflocculation_Chemical_free_pre- treatment_technology_for_the_desalination_industry/links/00b4951976edf67426000000.pdf)

<comment><USER53> More details at [http://www.filtsep.com/view/44376/success-behind-advanced- sw...](http://www.filtsep.com/view/44376/success-behind-advanced-swro- desalination-plant/) :

> Minimizing the plant's environmental impact: Pipe jacking .... Other > measures: the potential impacts of the Sorek Plant's operation on the > environment were thoroughly assessed, and appropriate measures were taken to > prevent, minimize and mitigate these. The following are some highlights of > these measures:

> – The feed water pumping station is located far (2,400 meters) from the > coastline, and feed water flows by gravity to the on-site pumping station.

> – Entrainment and impingement effects at the intake system are minimized, > thus minimizing the consumption of electricity and chemicals (especially > CO2) and reducing the emission of related greenhouse gases, air pollutants > and noise.

> – Environmentally-friendly antiscalants, and inorganic and treatable > cleaning solutions, are used.

> – Brine is discharged back to the sea approximately 2 kilometers offshore, > and at a depth of 20 meters through a specially designed outfall system > (diffusers) that enhances quick brine dilution to the seawater body. The > critical parameters of the brine disposal are monitored online, 24/7.

> – The plant is equipped with a special sludge treatment system to treat any > effluents generated in the process. This system removes all suspended matter > and only clear water is discharged to the sea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've used reverse osmosis unit for years. new unit is less than $100usd it paid itself in months. maintenance is cheap.

my RO has kinda low efficiency. 4 units of water in, i get 1 unit of clean drinkable water. 3 units are 'waste' (don't believe what socmed says, it's not dirty). the waste water is used for laundry, aquarium and gardening. my fishes and vegs are thriving.

to test purity, just plunge the ohm meter probes into a cup of ro water. if the resistence is in 1MOhm, it's pretty pure. mountain/mineral water bought from store is about 150kOhm. after drinking ro water for a while, store-bought water tastes slightly salty.

my house pumps water from ground (well-pump). for a family of 6, i need 1m3 of water. that's about half hour of 500W pump. an ro unit (40W) runs about 3 hours for 5gal bottle. so give or take, 1/2kWH or about 15KW per month. that's about $1 or $2 for my water need per month.

if i must buy raw water (such as living in an apartment), it's about $1 per m3, so about $30 per month; however, i get drinkable water too. ro units are portable. i saved $28/mo in water expense after moving from apartment.

flashing back from memory, i used to lug around 3 5gal water-cooler bottle from stores to my apartment every 3 days (i had 3 bottles). it was not pleasant and wasted time (go to store, queue, lug heavy bottles back)

ro unit has relay so you don't have to sit and wait for it to fill. it automatically cuts power to the pump when its internal clean-water-tank is full.

<comment><USER56> I was instructed (from professional chemists) to NOT drink 1 MOhm ( or other highly-purified) RO water. At that purity, particularly when hot, it will leach metals and other compounds from pipes, pots, cups, etc. Maybe it's worth dropping a little salt into the water after purification?

I'm also surprised that you use the waste water on your aquarium. In my experience, fish are MUCH more sensitive to water quality than humans are. This is particularly true for corals in saltwater tanks. In fact, many aquarium stores sell RO-purified water for fish tanks!

<comment><USER57> I do not see why extremely pure water would leach metals any more than tapwater would. Chemically it should not matter. All species will reach equilibrium between the surface of the container and the liquid and if dilute they will not care about one another. That equilibrium will be reached faster if the temperature is higher.

What is true is that you should not drink hot water from pipes because hot water does leach metals, tapwater or otherwise.

<comment><USER58> Was this not the issue in Flint, Michigan with the water leaching lead because it DIDN'T have something in it?

<comment><USER10> No, the water there was more acidic than the prior water the system used, causing leaching.

<comment><USER58> I see; thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> In Israel, it's mostly a triumph of politics over economics - Jordan, Israel, and the PA have cooperated in developing desalination plants [1] in part in order to defuse conflicts over water. Water allocations have historically been a zero-sum competition in the region, so when there's a chance (however expensive) to just throw money at the problem to make it go away, everyone's willing to play along.

[1] [http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press- release/2013/12/09/se...](http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press- release/2013/12/09/senior-israel-jordanian-palestinian-representatives-water- sharing-agreement)

<comment><USER60> I agree that there's a triumph of politics over economics on the water issue, but I'm not sure that it's in the direction we think:

Israel blames Palestinians for West Bank water shortage [http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Israel-blames- Pal...](http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Israel-blames-Palestinians- for-West-Bank-water-shortage-457814)

<comment><USER46> I'm sure Palestine would love to be in Israel's position right now. Given how Israel, depending on the Palestinian policy of the time, alternates between stealing Palestinian land, bombing it, or preventing goods from entering or leaving, it's in no position to complain about poorly maintained infrastructure.

<comment><USER61> This is factually false.

In fact Israel ships tons of goods every day.

Furthermore:

* a lot the land that is Israel today is bought.

* Jews that left neighbouring countries for Israel lost their property there vut this is never mentioned

<comment><USER61> Would the downvoters please enlighten me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This technology could be a boon to country like India where huge population relies on rain and some of the reservoirs are at about 40% despite decent rainfall this year. On the other note will desalination and consumption of sea water by humans balance the rising sea level ?

<comment><USER63> Pretty much all the desalinated water that is "consumed" will just flow right back out to sea.

<comment><USER64> Eventually, according to the water cycle:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Watercyc...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Watercyclesummary.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I've never been as afraid of fresh water shortage as a lot of other people seem to be precisely because it is exactly the kind of shortage that is solved by market forces. Freshwater getting scarce? OK, so the price goes up. Now there's more incentive to conserve water by replacing fixtures for low-flow variants, letting your lawn die (why do you really need one in a desert anyway), and using more efficient irrigation methods in agriculture. The price of water still keeps going up? Then the price of meat goes up because growing crops to feed animals become more expensive, and people eat less meat. Meanwhile, increased price makes desalination more profitable, and more plants come online.

I don't see it as anything rising close to a civilization-ending threat. Seawater is abundant. Freshwater can be made cheaply enough. We are extravagantly wasteful with water as it is, and that can be fixed easily enough as it becomes more expensive.

<comment><USER66> I'm in the UK, and recently tried to make sense of my water bill as I've a change in how our waste is managed. We are off the sewer network with about 50 houses with a treatment works. An annual water bill from average figures for our region (different water companies), is about £400 for a two person household and £600 for four. You pay more for your waste removal than clean water intake. Waste is measured against clean water intake.

We are now looking at a figure of over a pound per day for waste removal. The figure feels steep to me. If I could separate liquids and solids easily, then actually I could dump both in the garden. If you have the space then composting seems like a great solution. And would save flushing all that clean water down the toilet.

<comment><USER65> Modern plumbing, freshwater, and waste removal is literally one of the top five inventions of all time for increasing lifespan and quality of life. You don't realize how good you have it until you go try to live in a village that doesn't have freshwater or wastewater disposal, where you have to trudge miles per day to fill up large heavy containers from sources that are already polluted anyway, and that needs to be further treated with boiling before it's safe to use.

So in that context, it's absurd to think that £1 per day is steep to get all of those benefits. Back when I had a house our water bill was way more than you're paying, and I would've been willing to pay way more still. Having fresh safe water available at the flick of a tap whenever you need it, and all waste products disposed of without spreading contagion, is a modern day miracle.

<comment><USER66> Rather than a miracle it's a partially solved engineering problem. Using potable water to transport poo seems rather wasteful, when a low tech composting approach is rather simple.

Or perhaps the sewerage network should be replaced with a multi-purpose, transport network, or some other innovation.

You can process your own waste by pumping air basically through black water, all very good. But at the same time you can just throw a turd on the compost heap if you have the room, and nature will do its thing, and you'll build up your soil.

Education of good habits and some simple practice goes a long way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A year of sponge - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephsmith.io/a-year-of-sponge/ <comment><AUTHOR> I decided to take on 2018 differently, which resulted in being able to quantify my year: \- 125 days learning to code \- 21 books \- 121 days exercising \- 4 side projects Etc.

I wrote about this experience which resulted in a "sponge framework" that I hope is helpful for others in 2019</comment>


Why some covid-19 patients crash: The body's immune system might be to blame - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/07/828091467/why-some-covid-19-patients-crash-the-bodys-immune-system-might-be-to-blame <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_release_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_release_syndrome)</comment>


How Backblaze bootstrapped itself to $20M ARR - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/backblaze-revenue-ceo-gleb-budman-interview-2017-4 <comment><USER2> Any questions about building the business from folks here? (Happy to try and answer.)

Gleb @ Backblaze

<comment><USER3> Ditto!

Yev @ Backblaze ;)</comment></comment>


Startup wants to build tools for lawyers to speed up legal services - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/09/14/this-silicon-valley-startup-wants-to-replace-lawyers-with-robots/?utm_term=.06c53eb71732 <comment><USER2> Headline is a little misleading. We started LTS, our legal tech company, with the goal of helping lawyers provide legal services to startups in a more speedy, transparent and price predicable way. To us, that means building tools that lawyers use, and not creating the Uber of lawyers or a master AI that replaces lawyers (I don't think the latter is possible right now).

Atrium, the law firm founded by two of my LTS cofounders, is putting that software to use to help startups now.

We are hiring engineers ([http://atriumlts.com](http://atriumlts.com)). Some reasons to join: learn from experienced founders who have done it before, and you can build on short iterations for a customer that's very thankful and you can just walk over and talk to.

<comment><USER3> > _Headline is a little misleading_

I guess you can't say "Your article hits a factual error before it even begins" to the Washington Post, huh.

<comment><USER4> I don't see why you can't. Most of their articles do that. Truth is often mundane, people wouldn't click through.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but my point was that justin probably doesn't want to antagonize a news outlet that's giving his project effectively free publicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a big unanswered question in the article.

It says that the company is a law firm, that only two of the four co-founders are lawyers, and that it raised $10.5 million dollars, presumably on an equity basis.

However, law firms are not permitted to have non-lawyers as owners. It is considered unethical as it would mean decisions would be made by people that aren't obligated to follow the cannons of legal ethics or subject to bar discipline. The only U.S. jurisdiction I'm aware of that doesn't follow this rule is the District of Columbia, but Atrium is based in California.

<comment><USER2> We raised $10.5M for our legal technology company, Legal Technology Services (LTS). My cofounders of LTS who are lawyers, Augie Rakow and BeBe Chueh, started a firm called Atrium LLP. Atrium LLP is LTS' first customer, and allows us to reduce our development cycle on building that software. I am not a partner at Atrium LLP (and am not a lawyer, nor do I give legal advice).

It's a complex story that has been a little misinterpreted and simplified.

<comment><USER6> Justin, with respect, there are many organizations working within the structure that you've put together. All of them get by on the basis that they argue the scope of what software does is not the practice of law.

My concern is that in order to secure regulator approval for this position most of these legal support contractors substantially misrepresent the scope and depth of the work they provide.

Do you have any plans in place to mitigate the risk of crossing the line, and how will that inform your product development plans?

<comment><USER7> AtriumLTS appears to be working on tools for lawyers, however; wouldn't you agree that's a much easier sell for regulators? As opposed to a LegalZoom or even Clerky model?

Now, if they're trying to gin up some "big data" tools, and using Atrium- client data as inputs for those tools, that raises really sticky questions. There would need to be a whole lot of education and disclosure about to clients about AtriumLTS's access to, and use of, the client's information, and the profits generated from that. You just can't monetize lawyer-client relationships like you do in the finance field.

<comment><USER6> In my experience, the regulators aren't really being sold in the first place. They don't have the resources or willingness to stir up a hornet's nest if they can get away with it.

Normally the key battle is in determining if the work in question falls within the definition of the practice of law. The more rote and mindless the work is (say, bates numbering a discovery compilation), the safer it is, but most of the low hanging stuff in this area is already done and most of the new entrants aren't trying to provide new tools in that area.

The big new wave is based on using ML and other tools to search, sort and classify documents for contract management, due diligence, discovery, etc. This is an area where support services already operate. As third parties, these support organizations allow firms to launder responsibility. They can claim that the primary firm is responsible for performing the legal work, which allows them to use non-lawyers to perform the work lawyers would, while simultaneously allowing the primary firm to claim that the searches they perform are defensible and therefore even if mistakes have been made that their efforts were sufficient to discharge their responsibilities.

<comment><USER7> Agreed that this is happening; laundering is pejorative, but AFAICT, the Bar has said it's all kosher so long a lawyer is ultimately responsible for the advice and making the effort reasonable.

So, for our friends at Atrium, whether or not their systems 'practice law,' as long as that product is 'given' by the client's attorney... doesn't that look like it meets the UPL hurdle? (At least at this oversimplified level, IANYL)

<comment><USER6> Depends on how the regulator interprets the bar on sharing billings with non- lawyers. Westlaw and Lexis have massive offerings that do a ton to make work easier, so there's obviously room to work with, but they aren't providing products that practice law. They provide tools to practice law with.

With ML-driven autonomous determinations of relevance, however, you're literally doing associate legal work 101, with a system applying skill and judgement to the facts of the matter to make a determination of a legal nature. That's a difference in kind. This becomes doubly interesting, because most of these platforms are cloud hosted, so they're not 'given' by the attorney in the way that a land registry look-up would be after being vetted by a clerk. They're a stand-alone service that functionally makes choices for you.

I have no clue if Atrium is going down that route, but that's where the million dollar cost savings are. Maybe they're just making snazzier client- focused billing software. I've asked before, but no one will tell me what products they're actually working on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > As anyone who has racked up legal fees due to lawyers' mounting billable > hours can attest, law firms remain almost surprisingly low-tech operations.

That's like saying programming remains surprisingly low tech because you walk into a tech company and everyone is hunched over an emacs window.

Even at the fanciest Wall Street law firms, 10-20% of billed time is written off. The largest clients who get sued a lot are demanding things like flat retainers (e.g. we pay a flat $5 million per month and you hanldle all our products liability work). There is a lot of pressure to get things done within certain budget targets, but time is routinely written off because those targets cannot be met. Plus, competition is high. Even at the top of the market there are dozens of firms in direct competition. If there was a magic way to do more with less firms would do it.

<comment><USER9> Rayiner,

Whenever someone on HN talks about bringing tech to law firms I inevitably hear they are opposed to improving their process. It would lead to less billable hours for the firm.

Is this true? Not specifically talking about the top firms but firms in general.

<comment><USER8> Clients are wise enough these days that they just care about the bottom line. They want to know: how much will this case that's in discovery cost me this quarter (and can you help me justify it to my boss)? Often you give a realistic number and the client pushes back, which is how you end up with 10-20% of time being written off. This is true at every level of firm.

Within this framework, lawyers have an incentive to be efficient. If you cut your hours so you write off 10% instead of 20%, you've freed up hours you could spend on new billable work. If you enter into a flat fee arrangement (which in various permutations are very common), the only way you come out ahead if by harnessing efficiencies. I think most law firm managers are numerate enough to realize these things by now.

The challenges to adoption are risk. Law firms can't push back the release date because the software isn't ready. That makes them very conservative about changing their processes. Cost-benefit is also an issue. Even the largest law firms are relatively small companies. All major business decisions are made by lawyers, and not even the managing partner works more than part time on administration. They don't have the bandwidth to implement software X that majorly improves some specific process Y. For the effort to be worth it technology has to deliver cross-cutting improvements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If this is an example of scratching one's own itch, Justin Kan needs new hobbies. Consider how much you have to interact with lawyers in order to want to automate them.

 _" I've raised money. I've done a merger. I've been sued. And yet every time, bills would pile up and I had no clear idea what I was paying for. In Silicon Valley, we want everything to be transparent."_

From the sound of the story, their competition is not the Bar, but DoNotPay (mentioned in article), which tells me they're not automating lawyering so much as mechanizing Nolo Press.

<comment><USER11> What is Nolo Press?

<comment><USER12> Nolo Press is a publisher who specializes in books that help you do things without using a lawyer, such as writing your own will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My spouse is in-house counsel (lawyer) for a software company.

Her objective, and the reason she's on staff, is to get stuff done efficiently and cost-effectively.

When she writes a sales contract she tries to write it so everybody can say, "that's fair" and sign it, rather than send it off to some slow and expensive review. Sales people love that.

Same for smaller stuff like NDAs.

She did that stuff for some of my entrepreneurial ventures. Big win.

Litigation: she looks beyond the white-shoe gold-tie-clip downtown firms to handle that kind of stuff.

Escrow for code: If some source code needs to be held in escrow, she says, "look, I'm an officer of the court, answerable to more than just my boss. Suppose you put the thumb drive or DVD-R in an sealed envelope. I'll put it in another sealed envelope and hold it in my locked file cabinet." Many parties say "good idea!" because escrow services aren't cheap.

She has a rubber stamp that says, in some kind of legalese, "We don't pay unitemized bills. Please provide more detail and send this bill again." That can save a bundle of money. The concealed "bonuses" for partners sometimes evaporate from the bills. The "stamp" works well; the billing firm has no idea whether it's legal or A/P refusing the bill, so they just provide more detail.

Financings: not much leverage there. They still have to hire outside counsel with expensive lawyers and paralegals who can bench-press massive tomes of dense legalese.

I suspect a software service that inspected and tracked legal bills payable by tech companies might pay for itself pretty quickly. (Ingest pdfs? Look for keywords and numbers?)

</comment><comment><USER14> The legal industry is ripe for innovation. Just look at the amount of value Clerky has managed to provide with just incorporation and formation.

</comment><comment><USER15> Legitimately curious about this:

 _" Throughout the day, the lawyers field questions from a roster of start-up clients looking to execute routine legal tasks, like fundraising from venture capitalists and issuing stock options to employees._ _Engineers watch the dealings closely, extracting bits of information from the conversations and the documents exchanged._

So what happens to client-lawyer privilege, if engineers are watching / listening in / reading? Isn't that automatically waived, and isn't this a problem?

(Edit: formatting)

</comment><comment><USER16> Truthfully as a lawyer , well I am pretty close to be an ex-lawyer cause I now code for living we really dont need software so much. In my office we had an old database running on DOS when I became a lawyer in 2008. I got rid of it and replaced it with Dropbox. Used extremely simple folder structure and that was pretty much it.

I was even considering making specialised software for my father's law firm but I never saw the use for it.

99% of lawyer's work is not arragning meetings or organising documents. Even I who I was very new at the time I did a ton more photocopying documents and answering calls from clients than any form of organisation.

This is why law orientated software fails to become popular for lawyers. What we need as lawyers , what would be really appealing is an AI that can look through case law and help us formulate lega arguments. Unfortunately the technology simply is not at that level.

What makes it worse is that even though coding can be an extremely repetetive process law practices is not, you literraly dealing with diffirent problem each hour and you have to filter and combine various amount of information. You may think that organisation is the key here but because the main focus are legal arguments not so much evidence there is very little to do in that area other than having AI and feeding you ideas.

Problem is that lawyers are using a lot of thinking power and because their is not technical in some cases it can be called even philosophical , it would be very difficult for an AI to be actually useful in this area, unless there is a large leap in technology I am not aware of.

I am not a US lawyer , I am a Greek lawyer and yes we have plenty of legal software in my country as well, that almost none is using. DOS and a dual core at 2.0 GHZ is more than enough.

</comment><comment><USER17> Couple things regarding law firms and lawyers... based on my experience working at PageVault, a startup in Chicago that creates and runs an online evidence/webpage scraping and gathering service for case discovery for law firms:

1\. Lawyers actually don't want tools that will necessarily reduce their billable time. This does not mean they won't ever utilize or accept new technology but it has to be built up over a fairly long period of time before a mass of lawyers all decides they need to adopt whatever the "latest" tool is. Even fax machines took quite awhile to get rooted and they've taken longer to get unrooted (yes, there are still plenty of lawyers who love send and receive faxes, amazingly).

2\. For any tech that a law firm is expected to pay for, they want easy means of finding creative ways to bill it back to their client's accounts. This is why lawyers have the reputation they do for charging for things like 10 cents/page for making copies at the copy machine.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hey justin, good stuff, two questions for you.

A- How is your approach different than Axiom Law [1]

B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky [2]

[1] [https://www.axiomlaw.com/](https://www.axiomlaw.com/)

[2] [https://www.clerky.com/](https://www.clerky.com/)

<comment><USER19> > B- Why did you decide to target lawyers vs. directly to startups like Clerky > [2]

They didn't. Atrium's customers are (currently) startups needing legal services, not other law firms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> While a lawyer-replacing AI may not be possible yet, it has to be possible to use some ML techniques to aid in the search of relevant legal records, laws, regulations, and so on. I think the world may not be ready for "Uber for Lawyers" but it certainly needs "Google for Lawyers".

</comment><comment><USER21> Talking to the title for a second - (what they are actually doing seems quite different.)

This is funny, I think we might be underestimating the recalcitrance of human beings, and negentropic characteristics of life itself. (to say nothing of lawyers). After all there are still people operating the barriers at parking structures where I park in the morning, and they certainly cost more than a robot...

It seems that behind the recurrent question of automation and the anticipate crisis of salaried employment is a question of entropy and negentropy, not of autonomy and automaticity.

Law is distinctly negentropic and so is not the best candidate. Avoiding legal recourse would be a different matter ...

<comment><USER22> > Law is distinctly negentropic

Meaning? In a closed system of your choice, law decreases entropy, i.e. increases complexity? Your comment is quite cryptic to me.

However, negentropy seems to be in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, so you are really saying that the law can't be described as a closed system. Is that right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hope that automating a lot of routine legal tasks will feed back into writing laws in way that makes them more consistent and easier to automate. Most people's legal needs are very similar and should be possible to automate.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is a very big difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer. I hope Atrium has the good lawyers on their side while the machines are initially getting trained.

</comment><comment><USER25> In the meantime..... [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07328)

</comment><comment><USER26> I hope this leads to a reduction in legal costs, especially for start ups that have been sued for frivolous patent law suits, by patent trolls.

<comment><USER20> I hope it goes beyond just reduced costs. Increase supply enough so that it outweighs the demand. Until that happens, the legal system will remain mostly a place where the deeper pockets win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm wondering what kind of legal tasks they cover for poor startups. Incorporation and whatnot is mostly automated , trivial and inexpensive but if they can help out with lawsuits, patent, trademarks, and general legal inquiries in an innovative way, it'd be awesome, as those cost a fortune.

</comment><comment><USER28> I thoughts sales people would be the first to go. I mean, they are are often colloquially/affectiohally known as sales droids in the Valley :)

Kissing aside, if you got laws and said laws can be interpreted to the letter I.e deterministically then maybe this is bound to happen sooner rather than later.

</comment><comment><USER29> I like the fee structure!

However, I'm curious how they measure and ensure quality in their work. It seems like the fee structure (fixed bids) will incent them to reduce the time spent on work, which could be good or could be bad, depending on the answer to that question.

</comment><comment><USER30> The cool law startups are not all based in the valley guys and girls, we have [https://www.clocktimizer.com/](https://www.clocktimizer.com/) from the Netherlands, for example.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In a world where AI actually replaces or augments white collar professions, how does liability play out? Will the ability to sue for or defend against malfeasance depend upon an opaque box of algorithmic litigation?

<comment><USER24> This is a really important question. I wonder how insurance companies would price this as well. If the machines have access to all written legal data then are they allowed to pick and choose which information they include in their legal good or legal service? Will machines ultimately be depended on to develop laws which could then benefit the machines over the humans?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Good luck to you Justin, and to your team. I left law and became an engineer because I didn't see how the legal industry could keep up its bloated and inefficient structure. Shake it up!

<comment><USER32> Hello - I work at Atrium LTS and we noticed your comment here. If you have any interest in applying, we currently have two engineering roles we're looking to fill: [https://www.atriumlts.com/](https://www.atriumlts.com/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> First they came for the bodegas, and I did not speak out.

</comment><comment><USER34> Turre Legal in Finland is doing something similar. Albeit, not sure if their aim is to help other lawyers, just their own clients.

</comment><comment><USER35> Build an application better than iManage or NetDocuments and you're a shoe in.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's interesting because the article correctly points out the existence of barriers to tech adoption in the law — but, as justin and others point out, the coverage of real innovation usually misses the devil in the details.

A number of possible explanations, but the most prevalent I've encountered:

• Differences between the variety of ways a given attorney goes about practicing create inherent barriers to a one size fits all B2B software solution. Attorney personas vary wildly based on factors such as practice area, firm size, region, jurisdiction, client demographics, the list goes on and on. This makes it very difficult to build out products that scale rapidly industry-wide. While this sort of end user diversity isn't inherently unique to the legal industry, it's probably where its most entrenched, dictated by regulation and long-standing custom, etc etc — all things very startup/entrepreneurial unfriendly.

• Even accounting for legitimate industry-based reasons, there's a second very real, risk-averse layer: both legal education and practice are very hierarchical, such that aspiring attorneys are being ranked and learning to guard their interests well before they ever begin practice. Once they do, protecting partnerships, colleagues (intra-firm / former pals), profits, rolodexes, business processes, etc is well entrenched in a given attorney's MO. News writeups usually include a bit about how the Great Recession started to prompt innovation, which it did, but it also created a margins race that further drives attorneys to protect their book of business and profits, further entrenching mindsets which reject disruption, consciously or not.

Regardless of whether you buy these reasons or have your own, the nuance quickly exceeds what captures readers in the mainstream or tech press. Yet the rise of automation in other industries does justify coverage of how those trends would be affecting the law, and the not-uncommon "Let's kill all the lawyers!" Shakespearean mentality fuels the fire. The result? Every new startup aiming to disrupt the law gets some pretty gloating coverage…and then they need to start acquiring users and scaling. In fairness, that's what real startups have to do, so not all sanity goes out the window.

Post-2008, the real driver for innovation has been client demand, so Atrium's approach makes sense there. Also, shoutouts to A2J nonprofits, they're doing really meaningful work for clients that need it most (albeit with their own set of complexities that aren't inherently tuned to startup culture)

 _Obligatory 1_ : Attorney, but IANYL. Work in the industry, currently building software for firm/legal services ops and biz processes. Previously involved in A2J efforts. Views above are my own, not those of my employer or previous initiatives.

 _Obligatory 2_ : If you're the type with a respect for the industry, but a drive to use tech, product, and entrepreneurial methodologies to break through these types of barriers — we're hiring! Engineers, product, QA, project, or attorneys that have some meaningful experience in both worlds: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885)

</comment><comment><USER37> Startup wants to replace lawyers

Startup wants to replace doctors

Startup wants to replace gym instructors etc etc

I think any kind of job which involves referring to established practices/information can be automated in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER38> How will you tell the difference?

<comment><USER39> I would have been much more interested if it were the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sadly, they can't obey the Threw Laws...

<comment><USER41> What are Threw Laws?

<comment><USER40> Sorry. Lack of context.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics)</comment></comment></comment>


British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins $3M award for pulsar work - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/06/jocelyn-bell-burnell-british-astrophysicist-overlooked-by-nobels-3m-award-pulsars <comment><USER2> In the 70's she said, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them." [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell)

The last paragraph of the article seems to give a brief insight into her position now on why she was excluded.

"The money will be handed to the Institute of Physics to fund PhD studentships for people underrepresented in physics. "A lot of the pulsar story happened because I was a minority person and a PhD student," she said. "Increasing the diversity in physics could lead to all sorts of good things"

She slighly expands on that in the BBC coverage.

"The former president of the Institute of Physics (IOP) believes that it was because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more than 50 years ago.

"I found pulsars because I was a minority person and feeling a bit overawed at Cambridge. I was both female but also from the north-west of the country and I think everybody else around me was southern English," she said.

"So I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and that is often a very productive thing. In general, a lot of breakthroughs come from left field.""

[https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/scienc...](https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/science- environment-45425872)

Giving all the winnings to the cause is impressive.

<comment><USER3> I see her point, but I disagree and think that given her contributions, she should at _least_ have shared the award.

Also, she's from Norn Iron which I didn't realize and am really rather pleased to see.

Lastly, I'd love to get Hewish's take on this:

"The discovery was so dramatic it was awarded the Nobel prize in 1974. But while Hewish was named as a winner, Bell Burnell was not."

What a mensch. This fine fellow sounds like a real David Drumlin.

<comment><USER4> It's not Hewish's fault. The prize, FWIW, wasn't just for the discovery of pulsars but for the aperture synthesis interferometry technique that made it possible. He didn't do the observation, but he did invent the telescope.

The guys's a legitimate Nobel winner on his own, and let's not tar his name with the Nobel committee's mistake in skipping over Bell.

<comment><USER5> > The prize, FWIW, wasn't just for the discovery of pulsars but for the > aperture synthesis interferometry technique that made it possible.

Ryle's participation in the prize was for aperture synthesis interferometry while Hewish's was for the discovery of pulsars. From [0]:

> The Nobel Prize in Physics 1974 was awarded jointly to Sir Martin Ryle and > Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for > his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis > technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars."

Aperture synthesis is useful for achieving higher angular resolutions than would otherwise be possible. But pulsars are unresolved and so angular resolution isn't as important for their study (the localization of pulsars can be done very precisely from the modeling of the arrival times of individual pulses). Collecting area (overall sensitivity of the telescope) is the driving consideration for pulsar science.

[0] [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1974/summary/](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1974/summary/)

<comment><USER3> I'll not pretend to be schooled on this topic, so I'm happy to defer to you folks on this.

In any case, it would be worth hearing from Anthony Hewish on this matter as I'm inclined to find Sir Fred Hoyle's criticism of the decision quite damning for Hewish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The signal from the first pulsar she discovered was later famously plotted as a stacked graph and ultimately became the cover to Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures"

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop- culture-p...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture- pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/)

<comment><USER7> Which leads to this piece of pure pop culture hilarity: [https://laughingsquid.com/what-is-this-unknown-pleasure-a- jo...](https://laughingsquid.com/what-is-this-unknown-pleasure-a-joy-division- album-t-shirt-for-the-tumblr-generation/)

(t-shirt with said graph and underneath it "What is this? I've seen it on tumblr")

<comment><USER8> "Oh cool, they made an album cover from that t-shirt."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quote from OA

 _" Having also ruled out broadcasts from "little green men", Bell Burnell gathered more observations until eventually she found three more repeating pulses of radio waves emanating from different spots in the galaxy."_

I remember reading somewhere that Dr Bell was labelling the traces on the pen- chart recording that showed the signal 'lgm'.

Really good outcome.

<comment><USER10> >> Really good outcome.

The best outcome would have been the confirmation of real lgm. That news will blow away everything else every done in astronomy and physics combined. Every time a new instrument comes online (LIGO) I cross my fingers, and then am disappointed as the known universe becomes a little more empty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I often wonder why Oliver Heaviside, John Von Neumann and Claude Shannon were not awarded the Physics Nobel.

<comment><USER12> For what discovery do you think they should be rewarded?

<comment><USER13> Heaviside and von Neumann are probably not eligible. There's no Nobel Prize in math, which more or less rules out von Neumann. Heaviside developed a lot of tools still used in electrical engineering, but there isn't a Nobel Prize in that either. And Heaviside's work was notorious for its lack of rigor, which caused him to lose out on a lot of recognition.

But Shannon... information theory is an Important Tool in physics. It led Stephen Hawking to predict Hawking Radiation, which was important for understanding black holes. And it has a lot of other uses in physics as well. He'd be eligible, I think. But it's still a marginal case; information theory, itself, isn't physics. It's still math.

<comment><USER14> >Heaviside developed a lot of tools still used in electrical engineering, but there isn't a Nobel Prize in that either.

For good or for bad, electrical engineering work has won Nobel prizes: Transistors, integrated circuits, etc. These were inventions and did not provide insights into physics.

<comment><USER13> That's true, and a good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't miss her first-hand account of her discovery (from 2009): [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/25/astrono...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/25/astronomy- revolution)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The BBC Archive on Twitter has a short clip of an interview with her after the pulsar discovery from 1971 [1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1037634162138800134](https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1037634162138800134)

<comment><USER16> I love the way she speaks in full sentences. I find sentences the says to be shorter. We sometimes shout out a short word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My favorite line from the article: "If you don't get a Nobel prize you get everything that moves."

<comment><USER18> And it gets better:

 _... Almost every year there's been some sort of party because I've got another award. That's much more fun."_

So any idea how not to win the Nobel prize? :)

<comment><USER19> Do Nobel-caliber work, and die before the award is given.

There have been so many great potential laureates who have gone unrecognized by society at large because entropy caught up to them before the Nobel committee got around to them.

Those who immediately come to mind: Debbie Jin and Ron Drever.

<comment><USER20> Rosalind Franklin is a huge one. Everyone thinks she missed out because she was a woman, which might have been the case, but we'll never know.

<comment><USER21> She was deceased by the time the Nobel was awarded. (She died of cancer in '58; the Nobel was in '62.) That's not to say that she wouldn't have lost out on the three-recipients rule being female, but being dead is an automatic disqualification.

<comment><USER20> That was my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And gives it away: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-45425872](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45425872)

</comment><comment><USER23> "Bell Burnell phoned her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish. He said, 'That settles it, it's manmade, it's artificial radio interference.'"

Justice comes creeping around, at last. Glad she's alive to enjoy it.

(Recently I read somewhere that justice may be on its way for Henrietta Leavitt ... for discovering, in the early 1900s, a way to measure the distance to stars.)</comment>