stopping

There are many studies which show that surgical masks are quite good at stopping a majority of expelled particles, even those well within the aerosolized size regime:

Surgical masks reduce outward aerosol-sized particles by at least 74%: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7

Surgical masks reduce outward COVID viral transmission by 73%, and viral RNA by 58%: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msphere.00637-20

Outward filtering efficiency above 50% is certainly worth it compared to the cost of a surgeon wearing a mask. It's arguably worth it even at much lower efficiencies.

If you read my comment, you'll notice I'm not disagreeing on the aerosol/droplet size boundary. I'm arguing against the apparent subtext of your comment, which seems to indicate that surgical masks aren't effective at protecting patients.

Your assessment is a non-sequitur to the article.

Surgeons wear masks to protect the patient, because masks are very effective at trapping both droplets and aerosols that are emitted from the wearer. They are not designed to protect the user from lingering aerosols as masks are too loose to form a good seal, so most air breathed in simply enters from around the sides of the mask.

No, individual particles can indeed be redshifted. The particle's wavelength is a fundamental property.

Citation?

It seems telling that as camera and detection equipment has gotten better, presumed "alien" UFO elusiveness has advanced precisely in lockstep: not too much to stop being detected altogether, but not so little as to be definitively identifiable.

I'm going to challenge those numbers: Using a posterior probability density function for a binomial distribution, the lower bound in Falcon 9 reliability is .9934 with 95% confidence (assuming 450/450 successful trials). The reliability of F9 could be much lower than five 9s and still reasonably give you 450/450 successful trials. There's only a 0.44% chance that F9 reliability is at least five 9's given the data.

Indeed. It's not clear to me how closing off visa programs while simultaneously divesting in education will do anything strengthen a country's economic position.

It depends on what market you're deciding to operate in, right? Global market vs domestic market. In an era of globalization, it's a huge loss for an economically well-off country to close itself off from the rest of the world. Remember that businesses don't have any obligation to operate in your country if the local labor market simply becomes too expensive. It also means that a business is far more likely to leave critical positions unfilled because an available person with the required skill set literally doesn't exist (or is extremely difficult to find). The only way to find talent is to poach from other companies, but this is a zero-sum game and offers no overall economic benefit to your country.

In principle a well-implemented visa program picks up people with required skills rather than just simply increasing the size of the available labor pool to suppress costs of labor. If the current program doesn't achieve this, then it certainly requires an overhaul. But abolishment (i.e. closing the labor market to domestic candidates only) doesn't do anything to further the economic health of your country.

The whole point of work visas is to address situations when there aren't enough qualified domestic workers for the open positions that are available. It's economically favorable to fill a position with a qualified foreign national than it is to just leave it open.

It's actually the side mirrors which are the problem. I tend to glance at them frequently to maintain situational awareness, but that good habit is punished when a vehicle with elevated lights simply hovers in the lane next to you. Many times I have to actively adjust the mirror to a useless position just to keep from accidentally blinding myself.

Over the years my opinion on light trucks has shifted from ambivalence to seething resentment. The main reason is that I now live in an area where large vehicles have become increasingly disruptive to normal living:

1) Side streets that prioritize street parking (e.g. streets with multi-family housing) mean that a poorly-parked truck is literally impossible to see around when you're driving a smaller vehicle. Exiting an apartment driveway is frequently a precarious maneuver when you can't clearly see traffic coming in one or both directions. Heaven forbid there's a bicyclist obstructed from view.

2) Headlight elevation blinds other drivers, especially those in shorter vehicles. If you're being blinded from behind at night, you have to slow down to let them pass, or else your mirrors become useless or even actively dangerous to look at.

3) Blind spots in newer light trucks are horrendously large, as indicated in the video. Many drivers are not aware of the blind spot to the front-right side of the cab and are at risk of being PITed by an inattentive driver changing lanes into them.

4) Echoing the point about parking infrastructure. Being unable to park these sorts of vehicles in standard spaces and garages means that many of these end up parked on the street where inconvenience to other drivers is maximized.

The only way a driver can completely mitigate these problems is to simply join in the Bigger Vehicle arms race, to the detriment of all other drivers and pedestrians.

It is needed if you want to control for taste. Paper filter vs metal filter makes a massive taste difference in lighter roasted coffees, along with other parameters like extraction time and water temperature.

For folks that only drink darkly-roasted coffees, there is a lot less variance in taste across brew methods.

V60 isn't a version number, it designates the angle of the V-shaped brewing cone.

Or a single tracer bullet, if it's filled with hydrogen.

It's also tiny, less than 10m across. Barely enough to reach the ground before disintegrating due to atmospheric heating.

Nuclear is going to have to play a significant role if we want to get off fossil fuels. By all accounts nuclear is far safer and cleaner than fossil fuels (even amortizing the disasters), and so it is a suitable replacement if we can make it economically viable and publicly acceptable like it used to be. Solar and wind are already economically viable (even compared to fossil fuels), but still leave some key problems unsolved (e.g. baseline power at night). We might be able to solve this with batteries and other grid storage solutions, but these aren't yet scalable in the way that nuclear energy can be.

If this is true, the incidence of brain tumors would dramatically increase with the proliferation of cell phones, but it's been pretty much flat over the last 30 years: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html

Nothing of what you said is an argument against the points I made. Where is the error in my reasoning? I literally gave an example of my argument applying to a real life, well studied scenario.

Not at all. The issue of rampant consumerism is mostly orthogonal to issues of overall economic stability. Deflation will certainly reduce consumption, but at the cost of massive societal upheaval by way of extreme unemployment and all of its ill effects.

So why is it that essentially every developed country in the world today has a central bank? How can they all be wrong? If a 100% "free market" solution was more effective than central banking, I would expect at least one of them to have given it a shot and succeeded in doing so.

Also, "A Monetary History of the United States" argues that the Federal Reserve should have done more to combat the Great Depression, not less. How can you think that the book advocates against central economic policy?

Dismissing a contrary position as "propaganda" only stifles debate, and you haven't presented an argument against "sweet spots". It's a good mental model for many situations. What makes you think there doesn't exist an optimal inflation rate?

0% inflation is generally not a safe target. In an economy you want to avoid deflation at all costs. If consumers expect future price drops, demand can dip significantly and induce further drops in price (deflationary spiral). Businesses need consistent, predictable demand, else they enact shortsighted, over-reactive responses (e.g. layoffs) which can further exacerbate an economic downturn. See the Japanese financial crisis. Even a small fluctuation into deflationary territory can have long-lasting effects on consumer perception. It's safer (read: insurance policy) to maintain a slightly positive inflation rate so that consumers are encouraged to make purchase decisions promptly when needs arise versus indefinite speculative postponement.

Of course, the "optimal" inflation rate is context-dependent. Your unique economic situation will dictate which inflation trade-offs you end up selecting.

Direct image links:

https://archive.stsci.edu/missions/hlsp/relics/smacs0723-73/...

https://archive.stsci.edu/missions/hlsp/relics/smacs0723-73/...

https://archive.stsci.edu/missions/hlsp/relics/smacs0723-73/...

You can compare with the pre-JWST images here: https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs07...

You can compare with the pre-JWST images here: https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs07...

Noticeably better detail, for sure.

I still can't figure out why this "economies of scale" misconception is so popular on HN with respect to JWST. The major costs of building JWST are in the testing + validation + refinement phases, which must be done meticulously for every unit that is built. A JWST "out of the box" is guaranteed to fail: literally, you could launch a million "unrefined" JWSTs and every single one of them will experience a critical mission failure.

Most components of the JWST are not within spec as they leave the factory floor; for many components, the precision required cannot be achieved with machining metrology alone. Remember that system error compounds with every new component that is incorporated. Components have to be constructed, integrated, and then measured/validated with sophisticated metrology equipment after full assembly. If you're lucky, you can modify the components you have to achieve the desired overall tolerances. But a lot of the time, you have to bin the same component a dozen times until you get a batch which happens to be correct (much like in microchip manufacturing).

And this is just for physical manufacturing -- there are multiple other dimensions which are impossible to get right the first time, requiring multiple iterations until your integration tests pass. Many of these test scenarios are extremely expensive to simulate (e.g. full-size vacuum chambers, launch and zero-g simulators), and must be done to validate every single phase of a 5-year mission to an extremely high chance of success (from transport to launch site -> launch -> full deployment -> science operations). Something as simple as a wrongly-tensioned cable is enough to scrap an entire mission -- the validation is absolutely essential to ensure that anything from a manufacturing defect to a simple human error doesn't make it through to launch.

Even in spite of all the lessons learned from JWST 1, I would be surprised if JWST 2's cost was less than 50% of JWST 1 (realistically, I'd peg it at ~80%). The testing costs are a very high fixed cost that must be paid for every unit you make. There's no other way around it.

This comment can be interpreted in two different ways:

Are you suggesting that the parents should have filed suit to counter wrongdoing by the teachers, and that you're surprised they let it slide? "The teacher hit their child, and I'm surprised the parents aren't suing them."

Or are you surprised that the parents exercised restraint, defying an expectation bred from our overly-litiguous culture? "The teacher told their child to be quiet. I'm surprised the parents aren't suing!"

I can't imagine not being able to take a single extra day off for two years straight.

I think the only realistic options for most people are to (1) quit and take extended time off between jobs, or (2) get approval for unpaid leave. Unfortunately most jobs don't have an option for the latter. And even if your job does offer unpaid leave, I don't think I could truly "disconnect" knowing that work is potentially piling up in the background and waiting for me when I get back.

Update: It's now working properly for me.

All of reddit.com is failing to load for me (mobile + desktop). However, it loads fine in an incognito window. Perhaps it's only broken for people who are signed into their accounts?

This post isn't about voter fraud.