"These mutations unexpectedly allowed the usually host-restricted avian influenza polymerase to use the shorter human ANP32A and B and thus partially adapted the viral polymerase for replication in mammals. Although unintended, this consequence clearly indicates the importance of a robust genome editing strategy and subsequent appraisal that includes challenge with multiple avian influenza genotypes at non-physiological exposure levels to rule out the opportunity for adaptive viral evolution."
Thank you for the suggestion, you may have spared me from one of the biggest regrets of my life.
However, I find it hard to say the words, it doesn't really need to be said, it is known. It's a cultural difference for me.
In return, all I can offer is the notion that you are not alone. This is something that probably all of us have to face one day.
Also, I recall the story of Richard Feynman in his old age walking with his friend joking about his surgery & illness, and his friend remarked that he is sad because Feynman was probably going to die soon.
Then Feynman said that he has told so many stories over his lifetime, and it feels like he's won't really be completely gone as long as those stories are remembered.
The 42 song by Coldplay encapsulates this.
"Those who are dead are not dead, they're just living in my head"
With regard to Nikola Tesla, I see some interesting parallels with Elon Musk. Below is an excerpt from his biography.
Elon exhibited all the traits of a curious, energetic tot. He picked things up easily, and Maye, like many mothers do, pegged her son as brilliant and precocious. “He seemed to understand things quicker than the other kids,” she said. The perplexing thing was that Elon seemed to drift off into a trance at times. People spoke to him, but nothing got through when he had a certain, distant look in his eyes. This happened so often that Elon’s parents and doctors thought he might be deaf. “Sometimes, he just didn’t hear you,” said Maye. Doctors ran a series of tests on Elon, and elected to remove his adenoid glands, which can improve hearing in children. “Well, it didn’t change,” said Maye. Elon’s condition had far more to do with the wiring of his mind than how his auditory system functioned. “He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world,” Maye said. “He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”
Other children did not respond well to these dreamlike states. You could do jumping jacks right beside Musk or yell at him, and he would not even notice. He kept right on thinking, and those around him judged that he was either rude or really weird. “I do think Elon was always a little different but in a nerdy way,” Maye said. “It didn’t endear him to his peers.”
For Musk, these pensive moments were wonderful. At five and six, he had found a way to block out the world and dedicate all of his concentration to a single task. Part of this ability stemmed from the very visual way in which Musk’s mind worked. He could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity and detail that we might associate today with an engineering drawing produced by computer software. “It seems as though the part of the brain that’s usually reserved for visual processing—the part that is used to process images coming in from my eyes—gets taken over by internal thought processes,” Musk said. “I can’t do this as much now because there are so many things demanding my attention but, as a kid, it happened a lot. That large part of your brain that’s used to handle incoming images gets used for internal thinking.” Computers split their hardest jobs between two types of chips. There are graphics chips that deal with processing the images produced by a television show stream or video game and computational chips that handle general purpose tasks and mathematical operations. Over time, Musk has ended up thinking that his brain has the equivalent of a graphics chip. It allows him to see things out in the world, replicate them in his mind, and imagine how they might change or behave when interacting with other objects. “For images and numbers, I can process their interrelationships and algorithmic relationships,” Musk said. “Acceleration, momentum, kinetic energy—how those sorts of things will be affected by objects comes through very vividly.”
How do you feel about acronyms? Do they improve or hurt communication?
From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that's bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck:
There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.
That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action - I have given enough warning over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past.
For example, there should be not "HTS" [horizontal test stand] or "VTS" [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A "stand" at our test site is obviously a test stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with "Tripod", which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name!
The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, e.g. MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.
They are detrimental to understanding. I hate them with a passion. I see people using acronyms without explaining them in context, which makes it even more difficult to understand what's written.
Some terms are jargon and are probably ubiquitous in the field, but unless I'm reading a text written for the professionals working in that field, I'd much rather see it explained.
Acronyms have a habit of mutating. Groups using industry-standard acronyms tend to, in my experience, create their own acronyms faster than groups using jargon. It’s too easy to add another letter.
Spelling out acronyms in written communication while dropping them when spoken is a good middle ground. If an acronym-compatible phrase is used more than twice, it can be defined at use and then compressed. Though I keep track of how many acronyms I’m forcing the reader to juggle at a time.
So does he propose that people always spell out the full name of all components? To me it comes across as selfish, he only wants people to use acronyms that he personally knows, even when they're not talking to him.
For instance I work on aircraft. Basically every component has its acronym. Yes, it's hard when you're new to the area. But nobody is going to take the time to write or say "Integrated Drive Generator", "Power Control Unit", or "Over-Pressure Shut-Off Valve" every time. Everyone spends their day referring to components.
Most documents have a lexicon however, and there's a web interface to search them.
> So does he propose that people always spell out the full name of all components? To me it comes across as selfish, he only wants people to use acronyms that he personally knows, even when they're not talking to him.
I'm curious what makes you attribute that selfish motivation to him? I thought he was pretty clear in saying that it's particularly tough for new employees:
"Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees."
"No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on [me]."
Selfishness is a bit too strong a word, but I'd bet he wrote this after a particularly acronym-heavy meeting where he was annoyed at feeling dumb for not following the conversation. So it's a good policy directive that's also self-serving.
Also this is a difficulty inherent in micromanaging large organizations, something Musk and Jobs are famous for. Leaders who trust their delegates don't need to understand jargon as much as manager-speak.
Not only are you ascribing ill motives without justification, you're doing it based on pure supposition. The whole story exists only in your head. Snap out of it.
It's not as if there aren't real reasons to think Musk is an ass. Wait for one of those to come up before you start the hate train.
I agree that it's unclear from the E-mail whether he actually means that these things should be fully spelled out or something else. And this is the problem I have with the E-mail: It's unclear. The details really matter when the edict comes from the CEO, and there will be senior people in the company that make and enforce huge, sweeping changes to the business that hang on the exact wording coming from the CEO.
I've worked at a company where the CEO (and sometimes SVP leadership too) was basically treated as a God-King figure. I mean that in a literal sense: People would walk behind him, writing down every word he said in the hallways and every meeting with him had multiple note takers. Kind of like those guys with the notebooks following Kim Jong Un around writing every word down. If a senior exec said something that wasn't clear or didn't make sense YOU DID IT ANYWAY because it came from [Person's Name]. In E-mail forwards, the words of top leadership would be quoted in a different color, and then scrutinized and interpreted until everyone thought they understood every little nuance of what was said.
I don't know if SpaceX and Tesla are like that but I have my suspicions :). When an E-mail like that comes from Elon, I'm positive there are dozens of people who make it their full-time job for the next few weeks to carry out to the letter exactly what he said. So if it's unclear or incomplete, there's a big problem.
You'll say or write "Over-Pressure Shut-Off Vale" once, and then context now makes it possible to say "valve" for instances after. Unless you're discussing several valves at one, why does one need to use whatever acronym (with more syllables than the word 'valve')?
Judging by that, Elon Musk is a seriously smart man. I've worked at places with that tendency, and he's described the issue well.
Used too generously, acronyms make it impossible to gauge the complexity of the thing they're describing. Say that my system compromises a CCP, a SBS, and a RCS. That could mean "an afternoon and $1000" to "we need to build an entire supply chain". How do I begin to budget that, financially or mentally, based on three letters? Cynically, is that difficulty the point?
If your budgeting process relies critically on the number of characters being a good proxy for the value of a service, I don’t think acronyms are the problem. :)
TLAs (Three letter acronyms) are indeed the worst and I try to avoid using any custom ones as well. I worked with a company where the code base was all organized into folders like "MCM" and "PCM" for every module... Of course this list of acronyms was nowhere to be found. It was just one example of many of how big a mess their organization was.
What's worse is multiple unrelated definitions for the same acronym. I worked for an international industrial manufacturer, and their lexicon of acronyms and abbreviations contained many entries with more than one definition.
It's not the hill I'm going to die on, but I've referred to this email a lot: I'd love for people to stop using acronyms.
A somewhat related pet peeve: generic "descriptive" names of projects, which often end up being acronymised eventually too. They're either too generic to be informative, or tend to become inaccurate as requirements change. Additionally, by some kind of regression to the mean they all start to look alike.
If there's not a logical short name that applies, then just think of some random name that you think sounds funny, or fits some category that you use for all your products (a coworker of mine suggested French cheeses). Still give as little information about what they are as the "generic" names, but at least they're easily distinguishable and easy to pronounce.
(This, too, is not a hill I'll die on, but I'd love to wave a magic wand that would convince everyone of this.)
If it's not an industry standard acronym or initialism, don't use it. Internal-specific acronyms and initialisms are a litmus test for smart stupid people: smart enough to build the systems, too stupid to realize no one will understand what they're talking about. See also: enterprise-level companies.
Anyone know the article that was about how with acronyms it slows the reading comprehension for the whole team whereas it saves you a few seconds to type it out? I really liked it.
i completely agree with that sentiment. even if the audience is familiar, acronyms and abbreviations put a cost on the listener/reader to "unzip" them. in code, in meetings, in communication generally, the priority should be on comprehensibility to the reader/listener, not the convenience of the writer/speaker. we read code at least 10x more than we write it. in a meeting, one person speaks and many people listen.
I suppouse I want to see more UN involvement with the Organ Harvesting. It's insanely barbaric and shouldn't be happerning. But I think people like Alex Jones have given it more credit. I don't have enough data to make valid conclusion about it. But the Falun Gong practitioners I have met scared the crap out of me. It felt a lot like Scientology vibes. Does that mean we should harvest their organs? No, clearly. That's insane to like the nth-degree.
e: also, as the wiki states, Ethan Gutmann's investigations are pretty striking. Same as the China Tribunal in London. This has moved on a lot since I last read up on it. Christ.
Vocodes is super cool and fun to play with, well done. I wonder if it's possible to turn it into a text-to-speech donations service for Twitch streamers? The current TTS voices are rather monotone. Some donators test how their text donations would sound like on this website: https://textreader.pro
P/S: Small typo on the first sentence on the about page.
Hmm, I'm not sure. On second thought, it could be a legal copyright issue to use famous voices in a monetary setting. Also, it could perhaps be abused somehow despite its huge entertainment potential.
There are 27,000+ partnered Twitch streamers that probably makes a decent amount of money. But the majority probably can't make a living with streaming alone. The top 0.01% of partners like Shroud or DrDisrespect can make millions.
"These mutations unexpectedly allowed the usually host-restricted avian influenza polymerase to use the shorter human ANP32A and B and thus partially adapted the viral polymerase for replication in mammals. Although unintended, this consequence clearly indicates the importance of a robust genome editing strategy and subsequent appraisal that includes challenge with multiple avian influenza genotypes at non-physiological exposure levels to rule out the opportunity for adaptive viral evolution."