If you're interested in this approach, there's a similar spreadsheet-based pattern available for building trivia-style games for the Google Assistant platform:
I'm one of the founders of Tiny Farms. I think you're probably recalling an article published in PLOS ONE last year that suggested the sustainability of crickets might not meet the hype.
We were obviously very interested in the study! It turns out that the paper missed some crucial factors that make insects a sustainable, efficient protein source.
I guest-wrote this post with some details; do take a look if you're interested.
Sooo tl;dr: is that chickens use more water, produce more manure, and tend to be butchered away from the farms, but the study was still correct in it's food to protein conversions being almost the same between poultry and crickets?
I guess I'd summarize the feed conversion part as follows:
- Crickets are slightly better than poultry at converting poultry feed into protein.
- Crickets are great at converting processed grocery store waste into protein; poultry can't do this at all.
- Both species are awful at converting low quality food waste (a mix of chicken poop and straw) into protein.
- The efficient feed conversion of modern poultry comes only after years of research, development and breeding; the efficient feed conversion of insects comes "out of the box" and will only improve over time.
A British and Irish inquiry into BSE concluded the
epizootic was caused by cattle, which are normally
herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle
in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which
caused the infectious agent to spread
They were giving the cows feed that was salted with protein sourced from ground up sheep, of which there were trace amounts of neurological tissue containing the prions.
It's not unusual for farmers to add amino acids as a supplement to feed. It's one of the targets for high-nitrogen (amino acid) GM corn.
For one thing you can go more 3D with crickets, whereas with chickens you would have to build additional levels if you wanted to 'stack' them.
Also, many people care about the welfare of the animals they eat, such as making sure they have space to roam and live some kind of life before they are slaughtered. I doubt anyone will care if you cram crickets in so tight they can barely move. So at least in terms of space, I imagine you're going to need much less land for a cricket farm.
Criticizing a peer-reviewed study is both healthy and welcome, but it really should be done with peer-reviewed studies of one's own. Respectfully, all I see here are extraordinary claims without any evidence, extraordinary or otherwise.
Are we reading the same "critique"? I don't see much in the way of extraordinary claims. In fact, most of the claims come directly from the paper! None of that post was criticizing the paper -- it was primarily clarifying the one sided news coverage.
The study says that crickets are not that much more efficient converters of plants->protein. The "clarification" accepts and applies the information from the study. It then takes into account an understanding of current processes in chicken cultivation to argue that overall impact on the environment would still likely be substantially reduced, especially with better technology.
> "Proper machine learning systems would probably distinguish between someone doing something with a red flag only occasionally and a fanatic who does something based on a strong belief"
The point of the article was that even "proper" machine learning systems will generate either false positives or false negatives, either of which are damaging enough that they compromise the effectiveness of the approach.
Hey there - I'm a software engineer and web developer based in California. I write web apps and infrastructure for a living, and I teach basic web programming concepts at a local hacker space.
It's really inspiring to see this happening. I'd be more than happy to donate my time over the weekend of Feb 22nd-23rd, as a remote engineer, for any/all of the teams taking part in this event. Drop me an email at dan@situnayake.com if you think I could be useful!
Thanks very much DanI-S, I'll mostly ask you for help when the time comes, lots of thanks :)
(And BTW we have a Hackerspace in Damascus as well https://www.facebook.com/WikilogiaHackerspace, it belongs to Wikilogia - the community partner of SWDamascus, and I teach web programming there as well :D ).
Meat is expensive to produce. Insect protein is cheaper and more efficient, but insect farming technology is still very basic. http://www.openbugfarm.com
How does insect protein compare to plant protein with respect to cheapness and efficiency? What's the argument for inventing an industry when an industry already exists which provides plenty of healthy, cheap, and efficient protein for humans?
Insects are already eaten regularly by ~60% of the world's population. It's not so much inventing a new industry as improving the tooling of one of the oldest.
That said, there'll always be a demand for a variety of protein sources. We've had access to complete plant protein for thousands of years, but we consume more meat than ever. Vegetable protein will likely always be the cheapest, and that has been the case since the dawn of agriculture.
I've been hoping for years that the EU will eventually mandate that a service must be obliged to delete on request - irretrievably, not by merely flagging it as "deleted" - any data held about a given individual.
To me, this is a natural part of the concept of privacy. I can have momentary privacy: the assurance that nobody is currently watching through my window, listening to my phone calls, or reading my emails as I send them. But there's no assurance of future privacy if we don't have the right to destroy our old data, wherever it may be held.
When people provide an entity with information, they're doing so under the framework provided by current legislation regarding privacy and freedom of information. If these rules are subject to change - through new anti-terror legislation, for example - their information may become accessible in ways that they did not expect when it was originally provided.
I don't think it's possible to maintain any real sense of privacy while this remains the case. How can your data be considered private when it can be opened up for inspection at a later date, under a different regime? There's currently no way to participate in a connected economy without giving away your future right to privacy.
Edit: and the reason I've been hoping the EU will do this is that, realistically, nobody else will.
I'm fairly optimistic about the future of Bitcoin, and I own a few myself. However, I don't think this was a responsible post to make.
> When the price suddenly dives, you may want to consider buying. It's always paid off so far. It seems like a solid investment strategy
This isn't really an "investment strategy", it's just speculation - betting on the short term future and hoping it pays off. It's a fun way to gamble your money, but it's a lot riskier than the OP suggests. A "solid investment strategy" is putting a fraction of your paycheck into an index fund each month, not trying to predict the price of Bitcoin.
If you've really done your homework and you think the price of Bitcoin will go up in the long term, by all means buy a couple. Don't worry about waiting for the price to spike down; in fact, maybe stagger your purchase over a period of time to smooth out any variation (this is called 'dollar cost averaging'). Don't try to speculate on short term fluctuation; you will probably get burned.
> Consider this: If you have $10k lying around [...] your $10k will become $14,262 after fees
Or, the price could drop to $500 and you'll lose a few thousand. Can you afford to lose a few thousand dollars, even for a few months while the price recovers? Would you be better off investing it in something less risky? Do you know that you won't need that money in 6 months to pay for emergency surgery, or to fund 3 months' runway for your new startup idea?
You should try to think of investment return as compensation for taking on risk. If there's a large return in a short time, there's probably a big risk, too. Some people can afford to take big risks, but most of us can't.
> This is everything wrong with tech-startup culture
In my experience, this isn't really tech-startup culture, it's entertainment industry culture. If you know anyone who has ever worked in film, music or videogames, it's a fairly typical thing.
> "Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980′s vision of the future"
I'm British, living in the US, and I've always felt this way about America. I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain.
Not sure what to make of it, but it's interesting!
Only tangentially related if that, but I re-read Neuromancer recently and realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs. We tend to think of literature as timeless, but there's a very real, if small, slice of it washed out by the tide of shifting metaphors.
[1] "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"
I've heard it observed before that current generations will assume this meant that the sky was blue, or perhaps black, that being what many televisions display when 'tuned' to an inactive input.
Before i got to your comment, reading the grandparent about this being a 1980s future immediately put me in mind of something else William Gibson said in ~1993:
"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"
I like to think they'd envision a big blue box stretched across the sky, with the words "This channel only available to premium subscribers." If nothing else, it'd capture the cyberpunk aesthetic nicely.
> realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs
Meh, I don't think this is really a worry. We still read Shakespeare - we just have to make an extra effort to understand the nuances. In fact, that's part of what makes it so interesting.
I would assume that this comes from a general feeling of disengagement to the urban environment that person is living as the 1980's were a period of significant anxiety about the future. Science Fiction of this period tends to be quite dark.
After living in Honolulu, San Francisco, Berlin, Tokyo, and Singapore, I believe that only Singapore truly has a blue-print of the future laid out properly. A lot of green / smart housing developments. Deeply multi-cultural. Strong emphasis on education and personal development (plus world-class universities to support this). Of course living in an endless summer helps.
"I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain."
The "same", meaning he felt like Britain was stuck in 1980's version of the future? Or the past? Strange, my experience and I think the usual experience of Americans visiting GB/Europe is of feeling like you've timewarped into the past. How far depends on where you visit. Paris/London may feel twenty years back, other places fifty or a hundred.
Since I'm pretty sure I'm who DanI-S was referring to, I'll respond.
My impression was that something "modern" in Britain would tend to fit a stereotypical 1980s-era optimistic prediction of what the early 21st century would be like. Compared to the U.S., a "modern" space in the U.K. seems to me a little more ordered, neat, well-packaged, brightly lit, and perhaps a little more sterile than its counterpart in the U.S.
Of course, most spaces in the U.K. are not like this. But that may be why such "modern" spaces exist: if your town has an 800 year-old castle, and your pub is 150 years old and filled with well-worn, comfy furniture, having other more brightly-lit, ordered spaces is probably an interesting contrast.
My impression of the U.S. is that "modern" spaces are a little more warm, and less concerned with presenting an ordered and tidy facade. For example, it's easier to find "modern" spaces with exposed ceiling pipes, building supports, etc, in the U.S., whereas those seemed almost always hidden away in British spaces.
But at the same time, you don't have nearly the same amount of contrast between spaces. So it's hard for me to find a "pub" in the U.S. that has the same warmth and comfy feel as a U.K. pub.
https://triviatemplate.com/