ProjectArcturis

Anecdotally, I've been getting a lot more recruiter spam lately.

That's awful! I was a postdoc then and the NIH standard was $40k.

I believe Andrew Left and Citron Research were the first.

Is there anything like an open source Magic emulator for optimization or ML purposes?

"Painting bullseyes around bullet holes" is the unofficial consultant motto.

Here's my story about counting blackjack successfully. It takes place in 2014, at the now-demolished Riviera. At the time, the Riviera was pretty run-down, definitely one of the cheapest places on the Strip. I was in Vegas for the first and only time.

They had single-deck blackjack that had a unique side bet. Basically you could make additional bets that you would get dealt a natural blackjack, with a couple variations like getting an extra payout for suited blackjack.

This side bet was even more amenable to counting than standard BJ. The morning after I saw it, I did a quick simulation and discovered that the odds turned player-friendly if you went a single hand without seeing an ace.

I went down and played it. There was a crowd on Saturday night, and the deck was shuffled basically every hand. No good. Sunday morning I had the table to myself. I bet aggressively, starting with $5 min bets and going to $50 if I went two hands without an ace.

The dealer knew almost immediately that I was counting. He made a few snide remarks, but didn't kick me out. No idea why not. Maybe because the side bets are usually suckers' bets, so that gave me some camouflage.

I had a great run of luck, doing way better than expected. In an hour or so I was up $1500. Along the way I hit a suited BJ for $250. The dealer called over the pit boss, who told him to pay me, and then side eyed me for the rest of the session. I left only because I had to get to my flight.

The cashier's cage gave me a hassle about cashing in brown $500 chips. I guess they rarely got any big winners there.

Overall great experience for me. I'm not at all surprised they closed the casino soon after.

This seems like obviously fraud on the part of Synapse/Yotta. Where else could the money have gone? There were no risky investments. The underlying bank didn't collapse. Why isn't there a federal prosecutor on this?

Bugs are unintentional. This was massive intentional theft.

I cuss, you cuss, we all cuss for asparagus!

The author's hypothetical octopus "civilization" lacks most of the characteristics we associate with civilization. He seems to assume that agriculture, in the sense of pastoralism, is the only criterion. If this is the case, then ants have been running aphid-farming civilizations for millions of years. Leaf-cutter ants have run fungus farms as well.

I wouldn't be at all surprised that octopi and many other animals have loose farming-like behaviors. This is a far cry from what we generally mean by civilization.

In particular, I believe the domestication of fire is the dividing line between humans and animals. This tool provides access to an enormous new source of energy, which opened a myriad of possibilities unavailable to animals. The tool use and motor skills needed to build, maintain, and use fire probably was a significant stimulus to human brain development.

Cephalopods, of course, would have no opportunity to master fire.

Source data is very wrong. A walrus is not 20% body fat.

I once asked a Korean MD/PhD about fan deaths. I was expecting her to say, "Oh, people don't really believe in that. It's just something a few grandmas worry about." What she actually said was, "Oh yeah, that's really dangerous."

I want to talk my input and read its output. Both are faster.

The point is, there are IPO shares available to sell, even to people who have never expressed any interest in the company. That never happens if there's genuine demand for an IPO.

The COVID vaccines have now been around for 4 years now, and there is no evidence they are appreciably more dangerous than those other vaccines that took longer to develop.

I would take that bet. I postdoc'd with a very accomplished researcher (he won multiple Nobel Prize "precursor" awards). He certainly understood the social aspect of science - you need to be able to convince people your theories are correct and important - but I wouldn't say he "gamed the system" in any significant way.

600 other papers cited it. Hundreds of other labs, professors, postdocs, and grad students had failed projects based on extending the research. Undoubtedly many of those people had their careers end in this hypercompetitive space due to this one paper.

A kid at my high school, who was on the swim team, died from swimming underwater. They did informal competitions to see who could swim the furthest underwater. He was practicing that by himself, and overextended himself, passing out underwater. There were other people in the pool but no one noticed until it was too late.

I'm sure that's not the only case. Between the risk of drowning, and the difficulty for a lifeguard to tell between someone holding their breath underwater vs actually drowning, I'm not surprised a lot of pools have "don't hold your breath underwater" signs.

Headline seems a bit overdone. The drug completed Phase 1 trials. Roughly 14% of successful P1 trials eventually get approved. It'll be probably another 5-10 years before this finishes P3.

The CEO of politico is a Trumpist. (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/politico...) This wouldn't have been published in Politico unless Trump's campaign knew about it and approved of it.

AOL, really?

It's the hardest way to make an easy living.

"When the facts change, I don't change my opinion."

Did we read the same thing? "The primary endpoint was achieved, mean change from baseline on the TOVA API was 0.93 in the EndeavorRx group versus 0.03 in the control group (p=0.006). "

In their largest study, they found that 4 weeks of treatment improved ADHD scores by 1 standard deviation, and this was highly significant. That's the equivalent of going from the 5th percentile to the 35th - definitely a meaningful improvement.

>I’m personally in favor of OTC availability of some kind of safe abuse resistant mild stimulant. Sure there are a few people who would try to get high with it but hard liquor and weed are legal.

Like caffeine?

This is false. The FDA does not grant approval to market anything solely on the basis of "low risk for adverse events." The game makers had to run studies demonstrating that it improved ADHD measures. The link you provided says that as well:

"The FDA reviewed data from multiple studies in more than 600 children, including studies that evaluated, among other things, whether participants demonstrated improvements in attention function, as measured by the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA), academic performance measures, and other assessment tools."

I don't think it's a coincidence that the two presidents in modern history who were most effective at passing major legislation (Biden and LBJ) had spent decades in the Senate.

Because there is a large industry based around sharing medical data, and that industry has lobbyists.

No. If there's a just peace, Ukraine will not continue killing Russians. And, honestly, if Russia ever does manage to conquer all of Ukraine, the resistance at that point will probably be low-level terrorism, similar to what the US experienced in Iraq.