thisiscorrect

Is it possible that it gets fewer dice rolls but the "dice are loaded" by the fact that a vaccinated but contagious case is likelier to spread only selected mutations? Isn't that the concept of immune escape[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigenic_escape

What fraction of people take the annual flu vaccine?

It's not just Massachusetts finding that the vaccine doesn't prevent infection. Iceland[2], France, Britain, Germany[2], Australia[3], and Israel[4] are seeing diminished effectiveness of vaccination. The Israeli study in particular is interesting because it divided the vaccinees into two groups of equal size, partitioning by median time since vaccination (146 days), and found that the cohort vaccinated earlier see less protection than those vaccinated more recently. That seems to suggest it's not necessarily the delta variant that's making the difference but time since vaccination.

[1] https://www.icelandreview.com/society/covid-19-in-iceland-va... [2] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/germany-france-and... [3] https://youtu.be/46vq4Mn2DUQ?t=270 [4] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.03.21261496v...

"do"

[1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210803/Unvaccinated-and-... [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v...

I think you mean "smallpox and other viruses should already have evolved."

The difference is that the smallpox vaccine prevented infection of the vaccinated. That's not the case for existing SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. https://www.verywellhealth.com/covid-19-vaccines-and-sterili... gives an approachable overview of the difference.

Smallpox was eradicated. The likelihood of the same happening to SARS-CoV-2 is lower. At least, it would be the first example of a respiratory infection being eliminated. Influenza hasn't been eradicated and it does continue to evolve.

More broadly, the idea of "immune escape" is hardly something I can lay claim to. You can read about it in existing literature.

"The variants all come from unvaccinated people." This is not necessarily correct. It's clear by now that none of the widely available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines (or maybe none at all) prevent infection by the virus. [1] discusses the role of vaccination in immune escape.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00573-0

That may not be how things play out. Vaccination may facilitate immune escape[1]

"Given that therapeutics (vaccines and antibody-based therapies) target mainly the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the selection pressures that favour the emergence of new variants carrying immune escape mutations generated in chronic infections24,25,26 will be similar to those selecting for mutations that allow reinfections within the wider population27,28,29. Therefore, sequencing of viruses associated with prolonged infections will provide useful information on mutations that could contribute to increased transmissibility or escape from vaccine-mediated immunity."

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00573-0

But isn't it true that most cases don't result in serious infections, regardless of vaccination status? I recall reading at one point that 80% of infections are asymptomatic or very mild.

Apparently 67.6% of India has SARS-CoV-2 antibodies [1]. This can't be attributed to vaccination since nowhere near that percentage of India has had a vaccine for it.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/india/india-covid-antibodies-...

But there's also evidence it presents a significant risk for people who were vaccinated against the earlier variants too.

Not yet. I believe Novavax's protein subunit vaccine would use the same mechanism as the MMR vaccine. Well outside my domain but my understanding is that you're given a premade dose of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins and an adjuvant to boost an immune rsponse to them, instead of producing the spike proteins yourself (as is the case for both mRNA and viral vector vaccines). [1] gives results of their phase 3 trials. The Atlantic [2] gives an overview aimed at a popular audience.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2107659 [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/06/novavax-n...

Murdering infants is barbaric. It's impossible to corroborate now, but many reports at the time suggested they used impaled French infants for a battle standard. I don't have a word strong enough to condemn that depravity. "That's what you get from revolutions by slaves, bro." comes across as extremely flippant. Slavery is wrong. Murdering innocent people is also wrong, bro.

"Everyone knew George W. Bush was going to invade Iraq because Saddam had threatened to kill his father. He was going to finish the job daddy had failed to complete."

I suspect it was lobbying from AIPAC and from defense contractors that led the US into Iraq. Probably not personal vendettas by one man, even George Bush.

What would that do to all the Stripes holding illiquid shares in a private company?

Does this assume that the likelihood of each alien to be an "einstein" remains constant with size? It seems like a larger being which can support a larger brain might stand a better chance to develop higher thoughts.

Mine is Sakurai's "Modern Quantum Mechanics." But it sounds like you're really asking which book would be good for you to learn about quantum mechanics and also the Standard Model of particle physics.

She could be facing much more serious charges for that too. It sounds like these girls are minors.

To your latter point, the Jeffrey Epstein case was the first time I'd really considered kompromat on American politicians and other elite as a prime motivation for many of the decisions we see out of DC. Was that also an eye opener for others? Maybe it just reflects naivety or lack of imagination on my part.

A strictly internal decision like this wouldn't explain, e.g. Ebay also delisting all of these books.

All other possible ur-sciences you list are purely deductive. But the natural sciences have an element of inference, or inductive reasoning, to them as well. To the extent that scientists aim to capture all observed phenomena into a theory which is capable of making predictions and otherwise performing deduction, they need to bridge that gap. Category theory, e.g., does not do this.

I've never heard of Prof. Mary Wootters before. I wonder if there's any relation to Prof. William Wootters. Neither mentions that in their biography but it's not a terribly common name, and both seem to work at the intersection of physics and information theory.

Information Theory is the ur-science. It's the theory of mapping observed data onto models. In other words, it's how to fuse inductive logic into deductive logic. In physics, this is especially salient, since many of the models are of low-information systems. See, e.g. Wootter's paper "Statistical Distance and Hilbert Space" [1], which gets pretty close to deriving the Dirac formulation fo quantum mechanics as the physics of low information systems in those explicit terms. (It doesn't seem to explain why it's a complex Hilbert space.)

[1] https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.23.35...

I agree wholly here. Google needs to be much more upfront when floating experiments. It's good that they do, but the signaling needs to be better. Or even different branding altogether. It would go a long way to help their image.

I don't think Google mines data from their office suite to fuel ads. Do you have evidence of this?

"I love the Swiss, I really do, but their reputation has been in tatters since the Crypto AG fiasco."

Crypto AG is certainly an awful event but this seems like an impossible standard to hold a nation of millions to. Which country doesn't have some equivalent scandal?

"The same applies to atoms, we all agree on what they are, and we can show pictures of them etc."

This is where you bury the lede. It's clear if you read many of the comments here that there is no such agreement. Some people _think_ of an atom as something you can reach out and touch, or grok in some deep sense distinct from performing specific experiments. Others take an approach that's more in line with theory in the sense I use it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory). Your definition of theory is too loose: it's not just a body of work. That sounds like a pile of experimental evidence to me. A theory is a robust model or family of related models that match the experimental evidence. Atoms exist in that sense: they're a well tested model of experimental phenomena.

I'm certainly not claiming that atomic theory is a wild speculative guess which you seem to imply I've done.

You sense spacetime directly too. It's what holds you do this planet we inhabit.

I think atomic phenomena may feel somehow more familiar because it takes far less energy to make them dynamic than it does for gravitational phenomena. If we were somehow huge beings made of binary stars or something, gravity would probably be the very familiar force and atomic phenomena almost inconceivably small to you.

"But Atoms are conceivable - they work as a model, but we can also imagine how to fit into the reality that we experience."

"Quantum Mechanics is a model that fits experiment results very well, but is very hard to conceive of."

These two statements stand in contradiction. Atoms only work as a model if quantum mechanics holds. In a non-quantum world, electrons collapse into a nucleus, shedding electromagnetic radiation and lowering their energy as they do so. That's also necessary to understand why neon signs have their colors.

More broadly, if you want to compare one scientific theory to another and contrast their "realness" you have to take quantum mechanics along with your atomic theory.

We do. Thinking a bit about what that means, we have photographs showing how the physical entity we model as atoms interact with light, and can confirm that the theory lines up with experiment.

If we adopt that same definition for spacetime, we also have photographs of it, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_May_29,_1919#... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens#Gallery.

“What exactly is spacetime? Is it a real thing like an atom, or just a mathematical construct that is used to describe how mass 'generates' gravity?”

This is a false dichotomy. Atoms too are "just" a mathematical construct used to describe how certain observable, physical systems behave. It's even called the atomic _theory_, and like all other good theories it knows its limits. At low enough energies, it's too fine and at high enough energies it's too coarse a model. Spacetime is exactly as real as any other current model of observable physical phenomena that physics can offer.