gns24

Although it now seems as if that was massively inaccurate, things were very near to turning out completely differently in the first days of the war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlttS0N7uVA

"A study using a complex mathematical technique claiming to cleanly isolate the effect of X and Y. I can't really follow what it's doing..."

This is a frustrating type of issue. Dismissing something with "I don't understand this, but I don't believe it" isn't the sort of thing I want to be doing. However, I don't have any desire to waste time trying to understand what someone has done (and did they really understand what they were doing themselves?) when it's clear that the effect isn't cleanly isolated in the data and no amount of mathematics is going to change that.

Yeah, I'm always a bit suspicious of apparently effective dietary changes which result in a calorie reduction - often different people report completely different dietary changes helped them, but one thing they all have in common is being in calorie deficit.

There are plenty of studies showing that caloric restriction calms inflammatory responses which are responsible for the majority of common diseases. Without balancing the energy intake, I'm always slightly suspicious that any improvements with changing what I eat are actually caused by the change in how much I eat.

I don't see why that means there's anything off. Just because most of us can't produce enough energy per unit time to maintain this pace doesn't mean that it's not the most efficient pace per unit distance.

Anecdotally, when I start (or re-start) running I find the pace I can run at increases quite rapidly. That makes sense with this data - although my fitness is only increasing slowly, being able to produce slightly more power actually gives a disproportionate increase in pace because the higher speed is more efficient per km.

Contrary to what the article says about habitats, some crocodiles live in fresh water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_crocodile

Yeah, the potential loading is annoying. I remember wondering why predestrian/cycle bridges were always so annoyingly narrow despite having low loads. The issue is of course that they have to be strong enough to support being crammed with hundreds of people when everyone is there to watch the local fireworks/rowing race/anything else that's happening, even if that happens almost never.

I can recommend this film from one of the last commercial sail ships rounding Cape Horn in 1928 during some big storms, narrated by an experienced captain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLzBDhilDL0

That sounds massively expensive. Being very generous and assuming that the piston is the length of the hole and can rise out completely, then the energy storage is still only a few times that required to pump all the water out of the hole. It doesn't start to compare to the volume behind a hydro dam (which may then have a large vertical drop to the generator further down-river), but is still much more complex.

Another proposed idea for places that have deep seas or lakes is pumping air down into a storage at the bottom of the water. This storage can even being a flexible plastic - there isn't any high loading on it because the pressure balances out. The issue with that tech is that it's not that efficient, as compressing the air going down generates a lot of heat - some of that could potentially be recovered, but there's a trade-off with simplicity. Also if the containment fails then a lot of air bubbles to the surface, potentially sinking any ship on the surface at the time.

It's surprising how well these ships sail; although square sails are often thought of as only being effective going down wind, they sail somewhat into the wind fine. And of course, you don't have to worry about a bad gybe removing your rigging. I was in Norway a few years back and took a tourist trip in a 2/3 replica of a Viking boat found in a burial mound - the crew took us up the lake, turned round and came straight back - it was remarkably nippy and seemed to handle very well. I'd be interested to read how the much larger ship here performed under sail.

The criteria by which they consider things endangered are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_species_(IUCN_statu...

I'm more of an in-office person. The office is definitely more distracting, and I used to like working late occasionally because I had some solid focus time, but to a degree that's still true: whilst other people are online there is necessary interaction to transfer information in both directions.

One potential WFH efficiency loss for me is that due to casual conversations or things I overheard in the office, there were many occasions when I knew that someone had already investigated something or that some issue had come up that explained symptoms I came across, saving unnecessary duplication of effort or implementing something which wasn't quite what was required. You might argue that this level of communication could be achieved remotely, but maybe you'd end up with nearly the same level of distractions.

I will add that my commute was a 15-minute cycle, and my employer provided me with lunch, so probably going to work was actually a net time saving for me (certainly if you consider the commute exercise time), which may explain why I'm less keen on WFH than most.

From the employee's point of view, yes. From the company's side, not really. Which may explain to some degree why workers are more likely to feel that they're more efficient working from home - they consider the commute part of the workday, and the employer doesn't.

Tidal energy doesn't compete with wind, it competes with energy storage. Having virtually no wind production over the whole UK for a week happens regularly; in fact this last week is a good example - production has averaged well under 2GW according to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ On a windy week production can average over 10GW, but as yet grid scale storage is about as immature a technology as tidal generation (with the exception of pumped hydro, and there is a limited number of suitable sites for that).

My hair recently went significantly less white - a significant fraction of the hairs that I vainly plucked because they were white at the tips were dark at the roots. It correlated with a significant change in diet to eat more healthily, but I've noticed it happen before so it may also be seasonal or related to some other factor such as how stressed I am or how well I am sleeping.

Do you have some data showing that the amount of carbon stored in Siberian forests has a more significant warming effect than the methane escaping from the warming ground?

Marketing/propaganda is an important part of defence. Having to actually fight will have costs. The real goal is to convince the enemy that there's no point in fighting.

I assume you are referring to the approval process. I've been thinking that too.

I don't want to be that person who thinks a really complicated thing should be trivial, so: Can anyone suggest why it would take weeks to approve these vaccines? What might the regulator actually be doing in this time?

They're clearly going to know that the request is urgent, and know when it's going to be arriving in their inbox; they could ask for anything apart from final data ahead of time to check everything is as they want it. I don't see why they can't have made sure they were happy with everything else ahead of receiving the final data.

The actual load on ISPs has changed very little due to home working. Compared to the evening Netflix peak, the daytime usage increase is pretty small.

Founder effects don't explain why this new strain took over as the dominant strain in London.

Even if we suppose the chance of it being as bad as suggested is only 50%, we should panic now, rather than waiting until we have solid proof and risk having a public health disaster.

Personally I suspect the UK didn't panic in its announcement and that this situation had been under surveillance for some weeks.

1. No, I don't have any relevant qualifications. But it's not the epidemiologists who I think are underestimating the seriousness - what's surprising me is that everyone else is largely ignoring this. I think people think 70% is not a big amount, rather than the difference between slight decrease and rapid exponential growth. Clearly a lot of foreign governments do think it's serious given the travel plans they have put in place.

2. I spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at data. Before this incident there were always random peaks which got explained by outbreaks at abattoirs or freshers' week, and national movements, but this change stood out. Week after week it kept behaving differently. My partner and I had already speculated about the change possibly being down to a mutation, since although that seemed incredibly unlikely nothing else explained what we were seeing, but dismissed that idea since obviously the authorities would have noticed. It turned out they had noticed, they just hadn't announced it.

3. A quick calculation: recent infection surveys suggest about 1% of people in the UK have the virus. The new strain makes up about 10%, so 1 in 1000 people have the new strain. In November 2020 from Heathrow alone, 240k people travelled to the EU, 68k to other European countries, 63k to Africa and 82k to North America.

If I remember correctly cases have already been found in Denmark and Australia. Denmark does more sequencing than most countries (I don't have a good source for that, but there by-country filters here imply it: https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/united-kingdom?c... )

Based on this I'd argue that it's more likely than not to already be in tens of other countries. I'd certainly be interested to hear arguments to the contrary. But I don't believe it's sensationalist to suggest this - at this point I'd consider it a miracle if it hasn't spread too far. I hope I'm wrong.

I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different.

Now high case counts are spreading from the South East into the rest of the country. We don't know whether we can even stop the growth. During the last lockdown schools remained open; I suspect that it may be necessary to close them in order to just stop the growth. A significant reduction in cases looks impossible.

This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus.

No. Imagine that your heat exchanger is simply two touching pipes running parallel to each other, with flows in opposite directions. Incoming air will gradually warm up as it comes inwards, eventually being warmed by the air which has just left the room. You can get a much better result than just averaging the temperatures.

There are already plans for massive investment in a hydrogen production plant - though obviously there are still lots of issues to be solved with that energy pipeline.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201112-the-green-hydrog...

No, the results are not valid, or at least not in a useful way. The group who have received the wrong dose isn't a random sample from the treatment group, so we don't know whether it's more effective or not. It could even be less so.

I don't know what the regulator will do about this situation; it's clear that the vaccine is effective in at least one of the dosing regimes administered, but being entirely certain as to which is better is probably impossible to determine from the data available.

The article states that the sound from Krakatoa was well over the 194dB limit.

Well with case counts in the US doubling roughly every two weeks, you would expect to see the number of cases among trial participants there doubling over that period.

One of the problems with UBI is that a lot of people who need support can't live off what the average person needs to live off. People with disabilities etc. may well need more, so UBI doesn't replace as much as its proponents sometimes suggest.

Once you had a basic income like this it would have the nice effect of then being able to talk about (and implement) other policies in a revenue-neutral way.

For example a government interested in reducing CO2 emissions could introduce a tax on motor fuel of say £1/litre and balance that with an increase of the basic income of £75/month.

In the medium-term the most promising thing out there is better, faster, easier testing. There are a number of organisations developing saliva-based tests that can return results in around an hour for a few dollars a test. Being able to test everyone on a regular basis may well be enough to keep the disease under control without major impact on our lives.

There are significant resources going into scaling up new testing technologies, but it's definitely not getting the support that vaccine development is, and maybe it should.

So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on?

If people can, good for them. If not, I don't feel in any position to tell people that obsessing over injustices that I'm not experiencing makes zero sense.