azeotropic

This actually sounds like an honest (mis?)diagnosis. Confusing migraine and temporal lobe epilepsy is not a particularly egregious mistake, and the two conditions often occur together. A number of anti-seizure medications are prescribed to prevent migraines.

Wasn’t one of the early findings of the investigation that Reif had signed a thank you note to Epstein for his donations, and had sat in the meeting where the institute decided faculty could take Epstein’s money as long as he donated anonymously?

I always assumed that this disconnect was because most domestic u.s. air travel is business related, so that in general, the traveler is not the customer.

There was a lot of strange stuff going on with the FBI in the Tsarnaev case. Agents from the Boston FBI office traveled to Florida and shot Ibragim Todashev and then couldn’t get their story straight about whether he attacked FBI agents with a broom or a samurai sword or a table.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibragim_Todashev

Ah, where’s the latest orbital data?

This seems like an unlikely coincidence — if I’m reading this other link right, it had been flying over Syria.

https://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=39025

Edit: obviously I read it wrong. Still a strange coincidence though.

Yeah, aren’t most games single-threaded? I doubt this affects gaming performance very much.

Alternative (and to my mind more likely) hypothesis: poor brain health causes bad decision making and unstable income.

Yeah, the whole problem is that traditional publishing is designed around creating the best experience for publishers, not for authors or audiences.

The reference formatting thing is just one of the ways they make it obnoxious for authors (it would be better for authors if you could just send them a list of DOIs and their computers should make it look the way journal style dictates — ELife does this). Idiosyncratic rules about the naming of sections or formatting of methods or supplementary material make transferring article between journals (even at the same publisher) unnecessarily tedious.

From the audience perspective, nobody wants to vault over the paywall to click on the link to click on the link to get the pdf that displays in a pane of the browser window. Nobody wants an enhanced pdf, whatever that is. I don’t want to see a pop up with the articles you think I should read next because they happen to share a single word in the title. I just want to click a link in pubmed or google scholar and go direct to the pdf. A few months back someone posted an enhanced google scholar that just linked directly to the PDFs from sci-hub. The user experience was so good that it really highlighted how obnoxiously bad publisher sites are.

Except Ito wasn’t the only faculty member taking money from Epstein, and the Media lab wasn’t the only department. The thank-you letter to Epstein that Reif signed was for money Epstein gave to support Seth Lloyd — a professor in mechanical engineering and physics — and the earliest known money from Epstein after his conviction. The ‘if not for Ito’ reading doesn’t make sense.

Speaking of universities that can afford it, did the other university in Cambridge ever complete it’s investigation into Epstein funds?

Does “deceive the integrity” have some specific legal meaning wherever you’re from? I can’t find any hits for the phrase in DDG. What are you trying to argue?

I was not vindicating Ito of anything except the narrow charge (made in Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article) of attempting to hide the source of Epstein funds from MIT by marking them as anonymous. It’s clear now from Reif’s letter that this was actually done with MIT’s knowledge and at MIT’s request.

Both Ito and MIT decided to take Epstein’s money, knowing that he was a convicted sex offender.

So it looks like Ito wasn’t trying to deceive the administration about the source of Epstein’s donations by marking them as anonymous (as the New Yorker article implied), but rather he was marking them as anonymous because the administration was aware of and accepted Epstein’s post-conviction patronage, on the condition that it remained anonymous.

Do universities routinely do this (with money from Epstein, or other unsavory individuals)?

I'm not sure why having neurons enters into the equation at all when deciding whether something is conscious.

This is a hard question and the Feinberg-Mallatt definition of consciousness seems circular.

An artificial or alien life form might possess consciousness without having traversed the same evolutionary trajectory as animals, and will probably not possess animal neurons. Even a sufficently diverged animal might use novel strategies for organizing neurons (or alternatives to neurons?) to sense, move, focus attention, and remember.

I'll just leave this here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

Everyone who wrote and authorized this press release ought to be fired. The paper offers no evidence of relevance to epigenetic inheritance, and has nothing to do with nature vs. nurture.

All that's going on here is that people in the Philipenes have differences in environmental exposures that affect gene expression in their immune system, and this, unsurprisingly, differs by SES. No evidence that any of these marks are more than temporary marks of current gene expression patterns let alone anything as shocking as passing through the germ line to the next generation.

Sounds like it's only part of the reason, if I'm correctly parsing "... and the stimulation of gastric motility" as a second mechanism of action.

He may be a crackpot, and this book is not a well-written summary of the literature, but the idea of magnesium levels influencing depression is not a crackpot idea.

Magnesium is a cofactor for the enzymes that convert tryptophan into serotonin. Most of the body's serotonin is synthesized in the gut, where it helps control the muscles that move the bowels. (I assume this is why magnesium salts act as laxatives).

Magnesium is also implicated in other serotonin related disorders (e.g. Migraine).

Even broken clocks are right twice a day.

Animals need cholesterol for their cell membranes; particularly for neurons. It's a precursor for Vitamin D, testosterone, and estrogen and is needed in the blood to help transport fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K).

It doesn't seem at all strange that there should be an optimum level that is non-zero.

Sad to see the Soviet complaints about the allies not opening a second front in Europe until 1944 uncritically reported. The allies invaded Italy in 1943.

In the US, the cable tv market is subject to the exact same local monopolies as the isp market; in fact, they are often the same company.

This is a strange way compare NASA's budget size over time. It mostly reflects the out of control growth of entitlement spending, which was only 20% of the budget in the 1960s and is half of the budget now (https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/entitlement_spending).

According to your source, at it's peak during Apollo, NASA's budget was only twice what it is now in constant dollars. In constant dollars NASA's budget is basically the same as it was when it was operating a fleet of space shuttles in the 80's and 90's, but NASA isn't operating any now. Where does the money really go?

No. Even if it were pure platinum that required no refinement it would still be more expensive to return it to earth than to mine and refine earth platinum.

I'll admit to being wildly inconsistent on this, since I do care about what I perceive as the suffering of some of my favorite individual plants and animals, but not enough about the suffering of plants or animals in general to stop eating them or building things out of wood and leather, or what have you.

I could imagine other alternatives. I knew a fruitarian once (before Notting Hill came out). I suppose you could try and engineer auxotrophy into human cells. I went to a conference once where some people earnestly (but naively) proposed it.

A question isn't an argument. I'm genuinely curious about how people have decided what suffers and what does not.

>there's little suggesting plants are capable of experiencing suffering (or experiencing anything at all).

So walk me through this, I'm curious how you know whether or not plants have experiences? How would you know whether any arbitrary life form (or object, since you brought up fighter planes) has experiences? What method allows you to make this determination?

Would you consider these more or less processed than butter, yoghurt, cheese, peanut butter, pickles, or chocolate? Why?

How do you know plants don't suffer as they die? That seems like a pretty bold assertion.

Sure they don't really have muscles, so they don't thrash around like animals, and they don't make noise or cry out when they are killed.

On the other hand, when they are wounded they do make chemical compounds to resist predation and to signal to nearby plants that predators are present (e.g. salicylate). This seems vaguely parallel.

Is the moral worth of plant suffering lower because it isn't close enough in form to human suffering?

If we were to encounter a truly alien species, how would you know whether or not it experienced suffering?

If you're talking about first world street dirt I agree. If you're talking about ancient Mesopotamian city street dirt, I think you're asking for norovirus, dysentery, cholera, etc. Yes they had sewers and even pipes, but stormwater and sanitary sewers weren't separate and often relied on open ditches.