wh313

Perhaps review "Dialectics of the Concrete," which if read carefully, might ameliorate your smug demeanor.

By the way, you failed to address his main point that the US is taking a turn towards authoritarianism, and instead chose to critique a secondary part of his claim. Why is that?

Unlocked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/science/mushroom-hunters-...

I'm confused about how the article minimizes the suicide rate in boys. It even has multiple paragraphs analyzing why this gap exists.

It seems like you're framing gender dynamics as a zero-sum game, where improving the situation of one results in stepbacks the other. I agree that men do face significant struggles in today's society [1], but there are ways to move forward in ways that benefit everyone [2].

[1] Perry, Grayson. The Descent of Man. United Kingdom: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017.

[2] hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2000.

I was answering a question asking for a link between xenophobia and democracy. This article establishes the link through an analysis of right-wing supremacy in the United States. Could you explain how your reply applies that that context?

However, you do touch on an interesting point regarding the link between Nationalism and democracy. This review paper [1] might be of interest to you. The underpinning question seems to be the moral implications of this relationship in regards to climate change, and I'd love to hear you thoughts on it.

[1] https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/c...

This brings up the question, why should that be the metric to measure the effects of climate change with, as compared to the other metrics we go by?

How much does this greening offset the other effects of climate change, such as increased severe weather, ecosystem loss, and water scarcity, among other things [1] ?

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

I find your point extremely interesting, though I think I'm missing one of your core assumptions. When you highlight the term "democratic," it seems to me as though you implicitly switched away from the ethical perspective of nequo's comment based on the assumption that universal human rights should be respected no matter what. Instead, you seem to be working from a legal perspective based on American law and ethical theory surrounding it. Do you mind expanding on this?

From the paper "Right-wing extremism/radicalism: reconstructing the concept" [1]:

> Although nationalism, racism and xenophobia are all discrete concepts, policies of exclusionary nationalism and cultural homogeneity often go hand-in-hand with racism and/or xenophobia. Homogeneity is usually advocated on the grounds that there are irreconcilable natural differences between groups of people and that these groups should not mix – i.e. according to a racist doctrine.

> It is the values inherent in liberal and pluralist democracy and the procedures and institutions that sustain these values that particularly stick in the craw of right-wing extremists/radicals. Indeed, Carter defines right-wing extremism by reference to two elements: ‘a rejection of the fundamental values, procedures and institutions of the democratic constitutional state’, and ‘a rejection of the principle of fundamental human equality’.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2018.1...

The highest stipend I've been offered by a CS PhD program has been 50k. In NYC. Most other offers I had were around the 30k-40k region.

The median household income in 2020 was $67,521 [1]

[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...

Thanks for the link, I actually haven't seen that. Here's an interesting preprint tackling this issue as well: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/rw4es

I'm also curious as to why you thought that this was "very well known," however. Could you elaborate on how you determine which set of facts can be selected to be well known, and which set cannot?

Maybe it's just that my search skills are subpar, but I can't seem to find any relevant works on Google Scholar. Would you mind taking the time to share some of these sources?

Could you share some sources for that assertion?

Could you elaborate on these points you made?

> The solution is to defund universities and stop this elitist nonsense. We are a better society without their control and political agendas.

As someone currently doing a PhD, I definitely agree that there is some elitism in academia, and that school administration usually sucks. However, I also love the work I do, which I couldn't really do anywhere else, and the community of students and faculty, which is pretty unique.

What makes you condemn the institution as a whole?

> There is little of value that isn't better done by a YouTube video today.

As someone who enjoyed the liberal arts education portion of their education, it seems like we don't have the same way of defining "value." Could you describe how you measure if something has value?

You can always send a rebuttal to a relevant journal

Those complexities seem to be central to how you view graduate degree holders as less trustworthy. From what I understand, you're stating that these institutions are not trustworthy for some reason, which seems to be that they are trying to hide something that is true. Could you elaborate on that?

I can't tell if you simply skipped over words while reading her response or if you simply brought personal bias into your reading.

First, you quote her as stating: "the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter." But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses.

Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one, and the second point is clear. There is no evidence that they had the virus, so any argument that there was a lab leak requires them to have the virus in the first place, going back to her first axiom at the beginning of the tweet.

But the bigger issue here seems to be one of framing. Yglesias frames the preprint in the context of the press response to it, and not so much the actual contents. The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Note the lack of any mention of a lab leak here, or anywhere else in the preprint. Rasmussen's rebuttal is done in the frame of the conclusions of her research, which Yglesias misinterprets as a paper trying to disprove the lab leak theory.

Considering that he cites those figures as from the New York Times instead of from the appendix of the preprint, it seems pretty clear that Yglesias is responding to the New York Times article and probably didn't even read the actual preprint.

You seem to be making a really broad claim with a hidden assumption. When you claim that "Trust should be the most important priority for any scientist," whose trust should be prioritized?

I find it suspicious that very few of these "researchers" seem to even have any expertise in virology. Furthermore, very few of them seem to even have a PhD in their respective fields, nor any significant institutional affiliations.

Two of them at least have research profiles, but their fields of expertise are in microbiology and nitrogen fixation, which have very little to do with virology or pathology. Their primary mode of publication also seems to be ArXiV and ResearchGate, which doesn't go through peer review, so there is no good way to verify their findings.

Calling these people researchers would be equivalent to calling your average software developer a physicist.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LLlFfdUAAAAJ...

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YWuJkRsAAAAJ...

I believe you misunderstood his analysis.

At timestamp 6:36 of his video [1], laowhy86 analyzes a copy of the draft "The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" to conclude that the virus must have come from the lab. This preprint has been shown to be false by future scholarship (see the citations of the draft at [2] for some examples).

Potholer then analyzes the veracity of the claims within that preprint in his video [3], starting with an excerpt of [1] starting at 2:02.

So the timeline should be:

Feb. 2020 - Preprint published

->

Apr. 2020 - laowhy's video

->

May 2020 - potholer's rebuttal

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1699435143784344899...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk

Here's a two of his videos where he claims that COVID-19 emerged from a lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-GVcfP1zrg

And here's a pretty thorough analysis of the flaws with this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk

> In all this excitement hopefully we don’t forget the horde of luddites that’s the modern physics community that couldn’t imagine the possibility of faster than light travel.

https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10701-011-9539-2 - cited 57 times

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/aafcea - cited 47 times

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.56.2100 - cited 123 times

Each of these papers propose a separate method of faster-than-light travel. Where's the lack of imagination?

> Like I get it, it’s absurd to consider FTL in regular space time, but when a normal person asks this question all they care about is whether they can realistically imagine going from one star to another in meaningful timespans. Pretty much every physicist I talked to online and offline would scoff and call the concept “absurd” (which is technically true in regular space time). I even believed them for a while. They’d shut down any discussion or imagination before it was even possible. Even now you see the same backwards thinking instead of being excited at least by the theoretical possibility. Even last year when I brought up the Alcubierre drive to a physics PhD he wasn’t aware of it, and couldn’t imagine this being anything other than a joke (even after showing him the Wikipedia page).

What's the difference between "regular" and "non-regular" spacetime? Also, maybe the physicists you talked to worked in other subfields of physics and didn't have expertise in this topic? Imagine going up to a professor in computer networking and asking what they think about the P=NP problem.

> Like a bunch of science fiction writers could think of something called “warp drive” and it took decades for some dude in Mexico to imagine a theoretical potential method to do this?

A bunch of science fiction writers also thought up of something called "transporters" and we have no way of making it real. Another group came up with PADDs and we have them now. You're cherrypicking one data point and generalizing it.

> The last great physicist in my opinion is Carl Sagan, the entire field just like most sciences have rotten to the core into completely unimaginative folks who cannot fathom a world that’s only marginally different from what’s currently around them.

Roger Penrose is still alive, and has a Nobel Prize in physics. We also took a picture of a black hole two years ago. Isn't that a great scientific achievement as well? It seems as though you're mistaking Sagan's scientific outreach efforts for actual scholarship on the subject.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I see the opposite of what you do in academia. For me, it seems to be still working well. Sure, there's still weird politics and worrying about being scooped, but ideas that are credible won't be shot down, but anything that doesn't make sense would be ripped to shreds.

My Aeropress coffee maker. It feels more convenient than a french press, and much cheaper than an espresso machine.

https://aeropress.com/

Also a bidet. Americans really need to start using it more.

There's also a pretty active academic scene for reverse engineering. The big thing right now (at least in the subfield I'm familiar with) is symbolic execution, where you generate a expression that shows the value of a variable at some point in time.

Does FreeBSD `sendfile` avoid a context switch from userspace to kernelspace as well, or is it only zero-copy? I've worked with 100Gbps NICs and had to end up using both a userspace network stack and a userspace storage driver on Linux to avoid the context switch and ensure zero-copy.

Also, have you looked into offloading more of the processing to an FPGA card instead?

There's Barycentric Dynamical Time, which takes time dilation into account: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time

NASA has actually thought through this problem and created SPICE, which lets you convert between different time systems, some relativistic and some not, as well as doing conversions between various reference frames: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/index.html

Oops, thanks for pointing it out! I've fixed it now.

Being able to go to the moon also provides the ability to go to deep space (just point the rocket away from the moon). Escape velocity is 11,186 m/s, so (assuming a rocket with specific impulse similar to the one in the post):

11,186 m/s = 263.1 s * 9.81 m/s^2 * ln( x kg / 20,800 kg )

That's roughly 1.58591*10^6 kg of propellant, which is actually less that what's in the first stage of a Saturn V. Of course, this doesn't include air resistance or anything beyond just hitting escape velocity and leaving Earth's orbit.

An average Danish adult is 1.80 m, so I would be off by 0.05 m. That gives me an additional 9,000 litres of volume in the main stage, which can hold 3,240 kg of extra fuel. It also gives each SRB an extra 1.47 cubic meter of volume, or an extra 2,980 kg of fuel. This gives me an extra delta-v of 144.8 m/s, which is still a far cry from the 11,186 m/s you need for escape velocity.

[0] http://www.dst.dk/pukora/epub/upload/17958/headword/dk/29.pd...

This brings up an interesting point in LEGO canon. If we assume that all LEGO franchises take place in the same universe, we'd have to assume that LEGO Angry Birds[0] took place somewhere in the canon timeline of the LEGO universe. Even more problematic would be trying to put BIONICLE[1] somewhere in the timeline, while somehow also being able to fit in LEGO Star Wars[2]. Perhaps the toughest one to piece together would be LEGO Mars Mission[3] and LEGO Life on Mars[4]. While Life on Mars depicts a peaceful relationship between humans and martians, Mars Mission centers on a conflict around powerful energy crystals, which just doesn't match up (especially considering the Martians look completely different in these series).

[0] https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Angry_Birds_Movie

[1] https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/BIONICLE

[2] https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars

[3] https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Mars_Mission

[4] https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Life_on_Mars

I saw that! I thought that his idea to compare heights was interesting, but he failed to account for volume, since LEGO City rockets are wider than normal rockets (an Ariane V, for example, has diameter 3.06m vs 3.51m for the LEGO one) and so could potentially hold the same amount of propellant as our real-life counterparts.