January 20, 2018 at 09:05PM

Today I learned: 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak If you care about the environemnt, and you haven't written to your congressperson about nuclear power, I highly recommend the above TED talk. Basically, we're killing about 7 million people a year around the globe by using fossil fuels instead of nuclear. For comparison, total deaths from all the nuclear disasters in the world are in the four-digit range, and something like 90% of that was deaths during unnecessary evacuations that had nothing to do with radiation exposure (i.e., traumatically moving people from nursing homes and emergency care facilities). Oh, and nuclear is also cheaper than renewables *and* generates less emissions and other waste. Honestly, I'm having a hard time thinking of a bigger failure of humanity than that of our not using nuclear power as our primary energy source. Maybe world war II? Any other suggestions? 2) ...how to test the power supply on a Raspberry Pi! There are a couple of test points you can stick a multimeter to that will tell you what kind of voltage the Pi actually gets. Sadly, my Pi is getting plenty of power and still won't boot. =( 3) So, according to George Church, the off-target mutation rate of Cas9 in humans is now below background mutation rate, using off-the-shelf tools and good, proper computational design. Gonna be honest, I thought it was a lot higher than that.