waterhouse

Kids' Shenanigans by Klutz?

> Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. [...] The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine (nuclear reactor) development, uranium and heavy water production, and uranium isotope separation. Eventually, the German military determined that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to the war, and in January 1942 the Heereswaffenamt turned the program over to the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat) while continuing to fund the activity.

> The program was split up among nine major institutes where the directors dominated research and set their own objectives. Subsequently, the number of scientists working on applied nuclear fission began to diminish as many researchers applied their talents to more pressing wartime demands.

> [...] Heisenberg said that in 1939, the physicists at this second meeting concluded that "in principle atomic bombs could be made, but they also emphasized that it would take a number of years",[24] certainly not less than five. He also said that he "didn't report it to the Führer until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the Führer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped and the Führer also reacted that way."

> [...] Speer states that the project to develop the atom bomb was scuttled in the autumn of 1942. Though the scientific solution was there, it would have taken all of Germany's production resources to produce a bomb, and then no sooner than 1947.[39] Development did continue with a "uranium motor" for the navy and development of a German cyclotron. However, by the summer of 1943, Speer released the remaining 1200 metric tons of uranium stock for the production of solid-core ammunition.

There are ways of calling this "weren't working on a nuclear bomb", but it seems to me like "they wanted to, were moving in that direction, and would have done it if they had the resources and weren't distracted by shorter-term considerations".

"The child reported minor injuries and did not require transportation to a hospital. ... Waymo said at the time that the child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV and that the vehicle braked hard before contact, reducing speed significantly before impact."

Edit: Waymo's blog[2] says it "reduc[ed] speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made", and that "our peer-reviewed model[3] shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph".

[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/new-details-released-in-way...

[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...

[3] https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/

Even worse, because you don't get better odds or payouts by persuading others to bet on 13 black, but you do when they invest in the company you've backed.

https://help.uber.com/en/riders/article/women-preferences-fa...

https://help.lyft.com/hc/en-us/all/articles/9030680293-Women...

Though a compensation that high sounds like it would invite fraud, where the customer would be glad to have something go "wrong" and get a fat check. Not sure if that's a solvable problem.

  seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null

So there is a low ceiling, and if they instead used MCAT or something with a higher ceiling (where, apparently, the number of perfect scores is about 50 per year—in America, presumably lower in Canada due to population size), then studying harder would benefit them. That seems like a much better outlet for competitive urges.

But also, how small is the pool of qualified applicants? If there were something like "they're going to take n people from your school, at which there are 30 plausible candidates", then sabotaging one might conceivably be worthwhile. But if the pool is—well, Google says 3,000 medical students get accepted each year in Canada (and the qualified applicant pool is presumably at least somewhat larger), and sabotaging one person is extremely unlikely to help you personally. (This is one case where it's good that the expected-value "benefits", of sabotaging person X, are widely distributed among thousands of medical candidates, and thus it's a "free-rider problem" where no individual candidate has a strong motivation to do the work.)

Is there some multi-stage thing where they pick 10 people from each high school, or 30 from a town, or something? Or is there major grading on a curve, or a big benefit for being the top person in your classroom of 15? That seems like how you would get real incentives for this backstabbing behavior. Otherwise, I can't see how it's rational (even to a complete sociopath), and would have to chalk it up to individual miscreants and possibly some kind of culture that encourages it in other ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association#R...

Wow. 1997: https://www.baltimoresun.com/1997/03/01/ama-seeks-limit-on-r...

> “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. “The current rate of physician supply — the number of physicians entering the work force each year — is clearly excessive.”

> The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who become residents each year.

> The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate.

MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam annually." So it should work fairly well for them to sort by MCAT and take however many they have (or expect to have) room for.

“Women tend to have thinner skulls than men, along with smaller neck muscles, which can predispose female athletes to getting a concussion,” says Sarah Menacho, MD, a neurosurgeon and neurocritical care specialist at University of Utah Health. “Data shows that women are also more likely than men to report concussion-related symptoms, and these symptoms can persist for a longer time period prior to recovery than in male athletes.”

That said, it's portrayed as a retirement, and doesn't seem to give any hints that it's connected.

To simply "not bother" with lower-quality teachers sounds like you find it easy, as an institution, to determine teachers' quality. That seems far from a solved problem, for teachers and indeed most employees in general. You can pick a particular metric, of course, but then people will try to game it, and in teaching, there seems to be a lot of room for gaming metrics...

Ooh, that sounds like p-hacking. How many other protocols, and other potential outcomes in general, did they look at before picking the one to publish? If it's on the order of 20, then we can expect they'd encounter such a result by pure chance.

"Mithridatism is not effective against all types of poison. Immunity is generally only possible with biologically complex types which the immune system can respond to. Depending on the toxin, the practice can lead to the lethal accumulation of a poison in the body. Results depend on how each poison is processed by the body."

"A minor exception is cyanide, which can be metabolized by the liver. The enzyme rhodanese converts the cyanide into the much less toxic thiocyanate.[12] This process allows humans to ingest small amounts of cyanide in food like apple seeds and survive small amounts of cyanide gas from fires and cigarettes. However, one cannot effectively condition the liver against cyanide, unlike alcohol. Relatively larger amounts of cyanide are still highly lethal because, while the body can produce more rhodanese, the process also requires large amounts of sulfur-containing substrates."

Our immune, metabolic, and other systems are built to be adaptable, and some things are easy to adapt to, but other things are difficult or impossible for them to adapt to.

Not explicitly, but do you think the salary wouldn't change in the medium to long term if the hours changed significantly? Of course, in the short term you can burn out your doctors by making them work longer.

But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to call it a "spectrum" and insist on using the "vector" definition?

(I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")

Or autism among Somalis causes them, or their parents, to want to immigrate to Minnesota and Sweden?