derstander

I think we’re splitting hairs here about terminology. You say that long covid is a fabrication but people can have effects lasting months after recovery. And maybe I’m not using long-COVID in a standard way.

But what I’m fundamentally saying is that if one of the potential benefits is me NOT feeling like garbage for a month or more then I think that shoulder enter into the risk-benefit calculus.

> COVID-19 rates in children ages 5 to 11 are so low that there were ZERO cases of severe COVID-19 and ZERO cases of death from COVID in either the treatment (n= 1,518) or control group (n= 750).

The author seemingly uses minimizing deaths as the only measure of benefit; I don’t see a discussion of minimizing or avoiding what have been called long-COVID effects.

Honestly I have no idea if children suffer from long-COVID: either how badly or what percentage of cases but a cursory search suggests that they do. Certainly I would expect that it’s easier to use a binary metric like death in a risk-benefit analysis but I was hoping a professional in the field would have some way to account for these other risks.

Not to be a pill but velocity (in physics and as-used in the preceding posts) is well-defined and includes both time and distance. So if reducing distance results in the same time then, indeed, the velocity must be lower.

If one is talking abstractly about the “velocity” of the game I suppose a point could be made about that.

Alas, an anecdote is not data. But if it were — as a counterbalance — I had exposure to cats, dogs, and other farm animals and am not allergic to anything to my knowledge.

There is a possibility that exposure to cats and dogs as a child or young adult is protective against the development of allergic sensitization [0]. This isn’t my field so I have no idea if or how this relates to something like the hygiene hypothesis. I guess it just suggests that maybe there is something to not being “too” clean. ;)

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2783630/

If you want to avoid Facebook the product, this will work. If you want to avoid Facebook the company (now Meta), this will not work because Facebook acquired them in 2012.

One can also make syrup from various birch, alder, and juglans species — and more!

PAX Online this past July had a panel called “ A Case for Cozy: Why We Need Wholesome Games” which may interest you if you haven’t seen it yet. They did give a list of some upcoming games in the genre.

I linked the PAX page below. I watched the stream after the fact in the PAX archive on twitch but I needed to scrub through the recording for the whole day and sub-channel to find it so I unfortunately don’t have a link directly to it.

[1] https://online.paxsite.com/content/sitebuilder/rna/pax/onlin...

From the developer of Stardew Valley.

> Do lidar driving systems have objectively better performance?

In one sense yes: accurate ranging is an inherent capability of a lidar system that a passive optical system needs additional algorithms to achieve (e.g., simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)).

In an active system like lidar you know when you’ve transmitted energy and you can measure the delay until you receive an attenuated version of it scattered from objects in the environment. And you know the velocity of the energy so you can solve for distance.

> "Integrate information across multiple dense texts; construct syntheses, ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence-based arguments."

I’m fluent in English (though as an American so British folk may disagree ;)). I wonder if I would meet the requirements for level 5. And I say that as someone who has published a couple of (very minor) articles in my technical field. Maybe I’m interpreting these requirements too harshly but this effectively sounds like what one does when one writes technical material for publication — and certainly above the level of sophistication of many op/ed pieces by widely syndicated authors.

I think this is pretty difficult and I’m not sure I could demonstrate this on a short-term test!

The report itself is linked as a reference within the article and I’m planning on taking a look when I have some time.

> Hollywood production companies

I don’t disagree that messaging in the US about Covid could have been improved. But I think there’s a reasonable chunk of the population that would assume malicious intent (or at least political intent) in anything coming out of Hollywood. And there might be a fair amount of overlap with folks currently hesitant or outright refusing the vaccine.

I’d be interested in a historian’s take on messaging re: Covid in comparison with messaging re: polio or the like. I think there will be a lot of scholarship in sociology and public health about Covid in the years to come.

> Yes, but at one point, the widely held belief was that the earth was the center of the universe, the earth itself was flat

I think it’s important to distinguish between the widely held beliefs of a populace as a whole and the widely held beliefs of experts in a field. I’ll leave aside the point that fields have often gotten narrower as they have gotten deeper. But I will point out that Aristarchus of Samos posited a heliocentric model since some time between 300 and 200 BC and Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of the earth to within the order of 1% error at roughly similar times.

A tangent: is it important what the widely held beliefs of members of Aristarchus and Eratosthenes society believed? I’m not sure. Many members of their society didn’t have access to information or skills that would let them come to these more accurate conclusions. And if they did, there’s nothing particularly actionable for them; imagine a farmer: is knowing the earth isn’t the center of the solar system something that could help them more efficiently grow crops? In this sense, the truth doesn’t have any direct value for them whereas there are potential negative social implications for minority beliefs.

But bottom line: it’s not about consensus itself; it’s about consensus evolving as the most likely scenario given the data available. People in a field will generally have access to more information and the tools to integrate that information into hypotheses than the population as a whole. But certainly experts can still get things wrong. I would just tend to expect better from them than the populace as a whole.

> Do you seriously propose that 'defund the police' has no effect whatsoever on the murder rate?

This is a straw man of the parent’s position. They say “ blaming it on the "Defund the police" movement is a lazy oversimplification”, not that it had “no effect whatsoever”.

It certainly seems plausible to me that having loads of people — particularly those in lower socio-economic strata - without employment for an extended period of time could certainly contribute to crime rate increases.

There’s no need for straw-manning/hysterics here, we can have a measured conversation or debate.

> the whole point is to maintain an imbalance of power and capability in one’s own favor

That’s one strategy. Another, once the nuclear cat is out of the bag, is mutual assured destruction (MAD). If that’s your strategy then it is hypocritical because then the point is that everyone has enough power to destroy everyone else so no one will make a move.

I personally think that both strategies are stupid. The former will just breed current and future resentment and the latter is vulnerable to one unstable person with authority to use the weapons.

But I don’t have any sort of alternative so it seems like preventing others from getting nukes and then falling back to MAD is just the way the world is working.

Ludum Dare 49 is also coming up from October 1 through October 4; you can use Lisp there as well if you like.

> just brandishing the weapon is enough

The comment is probably not meant this way, but brandishing has connotations of anger, excitement, or intimidation.

I would caution one not to do this as it may be illegal in your jurisdiction. Only draw a firearm with the intent to use it, not with the intent to intimidate. Certainly, the intent to use it may have a side effect of intimidating an aggressor — I don’t dispute that.

Moleskine (and I’m sure others) make pocket-sized notebooks. I find this easier than fiddling with a binder clip every time I want to write something. It’s pricier than the index card solution and the notebooks eventually fall apart but my use case is temporary storage while I’m on-the-go. Important notes are then dealt with or copied to more permanent media during reviews as appropriate.

Moleskine’s version: https://www.moleskine.com/en-us/shop/notebooks/journals/cahi...

> It's kinda sad to see the astronomy community consider a slight inconvenience to their hobby to be more important than worldwide internet access.

Astronomy is more than a hobby for quite a few people: it’s also an actual scientific field.

When I was in school I enjoyed the “games” bundled with the “Language, Proof, and Logic” textbook (like Tarski’s World). But these are definitely more in the edutainment category than the entertainment category.

More on the entertainment side of things, for learning programming through a game I might choose TIS-100 (or Human Resource Machine).

Tangentially related, but here’s the USPS page for the types of live animals that you can send through the mail!

https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm

There are probably similar pages like it but that’s always the one that comes to my mind when people talk about mailing odd things.

Julia 1.0 was released in late 2018. I think it would be irresponsible to design valuable or mission critical systems with a language still undergoing that much change. I expect we’ll start to see the sorts of valuable systems you refer to start to surface in the near future if Julia is getting traction.

Full disclosure: I don’t currently use Julia but I’m interested in spending some time with it this year. I primarily use MATLAB in my day-to-day life. I like Python as a general purpose language but find the syntax of Python+NumPy a little clunky for what I do.

I don’t really feel that Julia falls outside of mainstream programming paradigms anymore than something like MATLAB.

This would benefit from a 2019 tag.

For scale, Wikipedia says the US has 97,275 megawatts of installed photovoltaic and concentrated solar power capacity combined as of the end of 2020. If you add 2% loss onto that, you lose about 1,945 megawatts.

It seems like many of these approaches would negatively impact power production from solar panels. If you assume that people won’t dramatically lower their power usage (which may certainly be a false assumption) then you effectively make people who use solar power more reliant on fossil fuels.

It would also be interesting if the article included a cost comparison for this sort of wide-scale heretofore untested geo-engineering against just building more renewable/low-carbon power generation; the latter is fairly proven tech at this point.

Compromising and consensus-building.

My opinion is that this sort of long-term and/or high-risk research and development is precisely what universities and governments (and government grants) are for.

> Trees and bushes are invisible to X-band (10GHz) SAR. It has to be an optical image underlaying the radar data

Trees and bushes are very much visible to X-band radar systems. See e.g. http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~saraband/KSIEEE/J54IEEETGRSJan00S...

Foliage Penetration (FOPEN) radars, in my experience, do not use X-band.

> If you took a SAR image of my home you would absolutely see how many vehicles are in my garage.

Unless your garage was made of materials that are transparent to the frequency band of the radar or the collection geometry enabled the radar to image through a door or large windows, this is not true.

Radar is good at ranging. So you can locate things precisely in that dimension. It’s not great at cross-range though because a beam is typically wide. SAR gets around this by essentially using the flight path or orbit of a radar sensor to synthesize a longer antenna than you’ve got. You make some assumptions that can be violated to varying degrees that may degrade the image (you need coherence over the synthetic aperture, you assume things you’re imaging don’t move, etc.)