conistonwater

Pointless pedantry, just because I've been watching TWiV: the PCR test is detecting virus RNA because coronaviruses have RNA, and there's no DNA there. The rest I absolutely agree with.

True, in fact I think a lot of those ideas are not even remotely new. For example, in shogi (Japanese chess), stalemate is a loss for the stalemated side (because that side can't make progress), and three-fold repetition is a loss for the side giving checks (because that side chose not to make progress).

I remember the Kramnik-DeepMind collaboration studied the stalemate=win variant, I don't remember what the results were.

What would be the wisdom of Black winning stalemates, though?

Wikipedia isn't very good at explaining go, Sensei's Library is much better and has the advantage of being written by go players for other go players: https://senseis.xmp.net/?Kikashi https://senseis.xmp.net/?Sente

> 1. e4: "This game is a game that I lost because of a tactical oversight on my part. I had a tactical idea in mind, but in this game, black resigned. I would have played on for a while, but I was able to find a way to convert my material advantage into a win."

I think so too: the mice went from 27g to 38g (32g for control mice), so they gained a lot of weight on this diet. For a human that would be like going from normal weight to borderline obese in six months. But I wonder if the mice were still growing up during the study (they were 6 months old at the start), maybe they got merely overweight.

> Stimuli previously tested were other Mozart compositions16, Beethoven’s Fur Elise19, and a string version of K44810.

Why would you not test other things too? Are there not enough of these IED episodes, or you have to wait around for too long for them to happen? Beethoven had piano sonatas, a lot of them, and Rachmaninov had some compositions for two pianos. There were composers around Mozart's time that wrote music in a similar style. Can people with these IED episodes test this theory for themselves using some music on their phones?

This might be Regulation DD, set by the Federal Reserve if you're in the US, or something similar if you're elsewhere: https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/caletters/2009/0914...

> It must round the annual percentage yield, the annual percentage yield earned, and the interest rate to the nearest one-hundredth of one percentage point (.01%) and express them to two decimal places. (p.17)

Personally, I don't see what the problem would be with 0.10%, doesn't seem misleading in the slightest. I also love how the regulation is called "Truth in Savings", like how could anybody be against it?

There was an episode the TWiV podcast a few months ago where they discussed the biology-based evidence for why SARS-COV-2 wasn't made in a lab. I think it was this one: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-762/ One nice thing about the podcast is that because they're scientists by personality they tend to focus far more on the biology of it, which I really appreciate. I listened to it at the time, but I don't remember what they said, to be perfectly honest.

It's worth noting that the consensus in the MathOverflow thread seems to have been that it was a complete waste of time to spend any further time on that paper and the proof. That's the opinion that they reached based on the general issues with the proof itself, and not any promotion committee decisions: specifically the fact that multiple mathematicians tried to read the paper in detail, in seminars, to understand it, and reported that they failed. That would certainly do it!

I don't have an opinion myself on whether it was a mistake to spend more time on it, but you can clearly see professional mathematicians deciding not to work on something "important" for the legitimate reason that they thought it was unsalvageable. If that's correct, then a promotion committee should penalize people for doing it anyway.

You're right, but I'm not sure how to refer to something that doesn't seem to have been ready after this much time.

If you're going to use the scientific notation for billions, you should just use it for everything. I don't think it's so obtuse anyway, it's exactly how I'd spell that number in code.

Is that actually true? According to [1], McDonalds (in 2020) was buying EUR160e6 worth of Irish beef accounting for 20% of its beef sales across Europe. It would make quite a loss for them if they shipped beef into Ireland while buying that much locally and exporting it. I can't find anything that mentions this "100% Irish beef" theory.

[1] https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0323/1124769-corona...

The "Russian counterparts", if I understand correctly, are something like two different entities. One is the Russian government itself, which is mostly interested in PR. E.g., I read a rumour somewhere that part of the reason that Nauka module was so out of control was that they rushed it so that some tourists get to film something in it when they go up this autumn. I'm not sure how true it is that it was rushed.

But the other entity is Roscosmos, which is partially subservient to the government (like any government agency), but partially consists of scientist types that would care more about space than PR. Quite similar to Nasa, really. So Nasa would have to deal with the State Department, the Russian government, and the Russian scientists all at once, it's not like they literally have a single counterpart to deal with. What I read about the Nauka failures was mostly sourced to Roscosmos and people working there, while Nasa was relatively quiet.

But Earth-based stuff isn't designed to last too long precisely because it can be maintained. Why wouldn't the ISS be somewhat different in this regard? I don't really see how this analogy is supposed to work.

When there was a fire on Mir, Nasa said "Small Fire Extinguished on Mir" [1], and the actual thing was pretty severe: "The flames were large enough to span the breadth of Kvant-1, cutting off access to one of two Soyuz escape capsules", "Thick smoke rapidly enveloped the entire station, forcing all crewmembers to don oxygen masks." [2]

Given all the recent trouble Roscosmos had with the new module in addition to the engine malfunction, I wonder how bad the situation really is. What's the worst that can happen here?

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/news/releases/1996_1998...

[2] https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/saf...

There are already some countries that made a business of looking the other way when somebody wants to launder some money, that's been going on forever and isn't related to Bitcoin. The benefit to the population is that because the government gets to tax some part of the activity, the people's taxes are lower and the government can provide better services than it would otherwise. If this makes a country a kind of a tax haven, but for Bitcoin, then that's probably just business as usual, in a way (still wrong, though).

Doesn't that undermine the argument the Bitcoin is a good store of value, if that's the trouble you have to go to with an "unspendable fortune"?

I agree with the other comment about there being a lot of predecessors to IEEE floating point numbers. What happened was that when people designed other, non-IEEE floating point arithmetic, they sometimes got things wrong. Not wrong in that the hardware produced incorrect results, but that it was hard for people to write code that did what they wanted. The dominance of IEEE floating-point numbers (in part due to the fairly logical way it's designed, and at the time they took into account what they knew, about 40 years ago now) means that we have all forgotten how annoying things can be if you don't have IEEE numbers.

One of the well-known people in this research area is Bill Kahan, and on his webpage (http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/) he has a bunch of, uhm, rants about floating-point arithmetic. If you read some of them, you can find clear explicit examples of arithmetic that's not IEEE-compliant, and does weird hard-to-understand confusing things that don't really happen any more. (For example, p.4 of http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mind1ess.pdf, and you can dig around his page for more examples; none of these were done out of malice by programmers, they just didn't think things through, which is what Kahan is writing about)

The first one reads like somebody just found out about functional programming and functors and tried to "improve" a straightforward bunch of if statements. I can read the second program without having read the plain English description, but I definitely would prefer to have the comment for the first one. I think even in languages like Haskell I would prefer (just sometimes) to read just a straight if-elseif-elseif-else.

The whole thing about the way it's written with throwing/catching is a red herring anyway, you should just replace those with a different choice of if's. If you're feeling super adventurous, you can instead replace them with goto's, which is kinda funny; it would actually simplify the code, how often do you see that?

> Except the boringness of it. There is no solution to it, except running in a large park or nature.

I like podcasts and audio books. Since I started running I got through a lot of books, way more than I could possibly read physically. But yeah, if you have things under control, then sometimes it's like doing nothing for an hour straight: pretty dull, so you have to have something else going on.

If you find that your slowest running pace is still not conversational (which happens a lot), try the run-walk method, and accumulate as much total running time as you can with enough walking breaks that keep you listening to podcasts. That's pretty much where I started myself.

Painful, exhausting, and boring is a combination that usually means you are running too fast for your fitness level. It's usually recommended people run at a pace that allows them to have a conversation relatively easily, and it's rare for people to find that pace painful and exhausting. Especially (!) if you can't focus enough to watch something on TV. When I run hard I can't listen to podcasts either, that's pretty normal and just part of how things work, but it's nothing to do with running per se. Obviously I don't know what your fitness level is, but running can be a humbling experience sometimes, so one shouldn't give up just like that.

I know people like to play up individual preferences and personalities, genetic variability and all that, but the basic physiology of running is (scientifically) basically the same for all people barring some health conditions. So if you hate it there's still a good chance that some experimenting will get you running quite fine even if you hate it now. We're all just humans anyway, you know, you're not that special.

There was a very good book, Being Mortal, where one of the points is that from the point of view of a doctor working with old people our bodies slowly but surely degrade until we are no longer to get on with our lives. So one aspect of life expectancy that gets missed very often is that my life expectancy is not the only thing that's important. During those extra years of life I also want to not be stuck in my bed, I would like to be able to go do stuff that I consider to make up my life. Exercise especially, among the other good things, doesn't just raise the life expectancy, it also makes sure you can do things yourself independently during those extra years. You don't even need to be forty for being sedentary to affect your life, it just comes to the fore as you age. It was a very motivating, slightly scary, interesting book, by Atul Gawande.

The total amount of time recommended as the minimum is something like 90min cardio + 90min strength training per week, that's like 30min/day. I spend more time watching Youtube than that.

The startup performance issue is just a regular difficult issue, as far as I'm aware. I don't think it has much to do with the goal of "being readable pseudocode" or something. It's getting better with time too.

The "readable pseudocode" kind of code is exactly the sort of code in Julia that you almost always expect to be compiled down to native code quite efficiently. The kind of pseudocode I usually see is either straightforward loops iterating over something where the compiler can infer all the necessary information, or calls to library functions where somebody else has already made sure it's good. I use this a lot in my own code, and, like I said, I don't think there is a tradeoff.

> Those goals are always going to run counter to performance

These days Julia is a very clear counterexample to this sort of claim, I don't think this is true at all.

That's not true at all. Also, historically, there's been a trend of attributing negative things to depression. I've read John Cacioppo's work (here's an interview: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/how-lonel...), and as far as I know it's both scientifically well-founded and at least somewhat actionable.

Just to be clear: if running is "intense exercise" that means you're doing it wrong, and you will have a much better time of it if you slow down to easy conversational pace. (People usually use the run-walk method to develop such a pace in the beginning.) The thing about exercise and human biology is that there is some room for subjective statements, but not that much room. I, for one, find it quite pleasant about exercise that it doesn't matter how it makes me feel temporarily, that it works so long as I do the right thing.

I wonder if there is maybe some other, easier, way of checking if someone's an idiot.

No, vaccines effectiveness can be substantially lower than 100%, so if you're vaccinated, depending on the vaccine type, you still might not be protected. It's much like the normal vaccines for the normal diseases, you don't always know if you're fully protected yourself so you end up relying on other people being vaccinated too.

> Imagine what it took to develop the photos in space and beam them back to earth.

For one type of satellite that I heard about, the US were dropping the film canisters and catching them in flight, to develop later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)