iguy

I don't know about respect. The data is on persistence of status. They can do this in many countries, those are just two I remember (besides England).

Direct records of ancestry are too scattered to piece together long timescales. What he (and collaborators) do is to find very rare surnames, in records at some distant time (e.g. Oxford graduation in 1600, high-status, or common criminals executed then, low-status) and then trace look for the same name in later data (e.g. Victorian wills, or today's tax data). Rare names give you a fairly targeted marker. One which the carriers are often unaware of.

Yes. The political point being made with this history is different too, it's one of pride, not shame. It's "Our great ancestors were nice social democrats, too! Unlike your cold-war army, grandpa, they let woman have front-line jobs!"

Compare: "Those evil germanics who sailed up the Volga and subjugated our ancestors, you know how much silver they took home? And you've seen how wealthy Copenhagen is now? My buddy Igor ran the numbers, and compound interest explains it all!". That's not a speech which will improve your political career in Russia.

Yes to slavery being widespread in Europe of the dark ages. The church had something to do with its demise but I'm not sure it's one papal edict. Economics too.

But if "late Middle Ages" means say the time of the black death, and after, then at least in Western Europe that's much too late. By then slavery in England is long gone (or so rare as not to matter) and serfdom is in steep decline, and we are still several centuries away from European overseas slavery (no sugar islands before Columbus!)

Slavery in the islamic world was (I think) pretty continuous from the beginning until the 20th C. (Perhaps with ups and downs? There were many violent changes of leadership, over the centuries.) In the middle ages this would have been the primary meaning of slavery to Europeans -- the risk of being caught in some coastal raid and sold for labor (or for ransom, if noble). This no doubt horrified the pope but he had little power to stop this.

Clark finds this pattern in most societies, IIRC Sweden and China have (in his data) almost identical rates of status persistence. It's not a quirk of English manners.

What varies more is the degree to which ordinary people today descend from the nobility in (say) 1100. In some societies they had many more surviving children than average, e.g. it's easy for them to double every generation, within a basically static total population, implying that their offspring make up a high proportion of people after a few centuries. But in other societies, they did not.

His books are pretty readable, BTW, interesting data.

They also aren't a useful rhetorical foil for any present-day arguments. In none of their former territory can you make political hay by deflecting present-day problems onto those particular earlier rulers. That's related to time, of course, but also very much related to what else has happened since, or has failed to happen.

I'm not sure that the value of the art was the supposed justification. Not an expert, but I thought they were just arguing for freedom, that children ought to be free to consent to things, not just that great artists deserved a break.

The ongoing Duhamel scandal makes it sound like there was quite a lot going on, in certain elite circles, everyone knew and nobody talked:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/10/france-begins-...

And, does the severity of your case depend strongly on your dose?

This could have been extremely interesting early on. If it turned out that (say) severe cases in young people required a huge does, then it might have been possible to "vaccinate" everyone under 40 by only-just infecting them.

Yes I mostly agree, it does set a good precedent, even if all it now gives us is "normal science" data.

Would like to understand better how much of the time was needed to ramp up production. My assumption was that Moderna & co. were working on that full speed, and once they'd made enough for the trials, stockpiled every dose they could make until approval.

If they'd had today's production rate in (say) April, I think we'd still have got all the deaths of the first wave. Unless, perhaps, knowing that vaccination was only a few months out would have allowed a much stronger lockdown, but I doubt it.

Title should (IMO) contain "human challenge". Most vaccine trials have involved humans, but none have involved deliberate exposure, i.e. "challenge".

Seems crazy this took so long. Why didn't this happen last summer?

"begs the question" is another phrase whose meaning is now in the uncertain zone, by the same process.

It is exciting. But what's a bit unclear (to me) is how re-usable safety testing is. Are we going to arrive at stage where we can "push to production" after this 48 hour design phase, or are we going to need months-to-years of trials for each new code?

It's clearly no a silver bullet.

There may be opportunities for more blue-collar variants. I'm trying to think where but there was some program to hire former soldiers as teachers, which is a bit like that.

Failure is a pretty strong word, they all went on to do other things, better paid, they had options. They tried to teach, for a while, because they wanted to.

My point is just that they all underestimated how difficult controlling a pack of teenagers was going to be, even those who were at nice schools "with a PTA". That's what I think was meant by "babysitting" above (not my choice of word), it's a real hurdle. As you seem to agree.

I'm dubious that the world is short of video courses. But many people do miss out on human interactions which could show them other paths.

Anecdotally, all my over-educated friends who tried to take up teaching (after something else) gave up. Citing this reason, and sometimes the level of bureaucracy.

Because it's a mixture. Some rowdy kids are just bored sick, and can't see any point in memorising crap for another stupid exam. These same people might really benefit (let's say, HN) finding out there is more to coding than their teacher knows about, and that you can get paid to do it. Finding out that school-teachers aren't the only adult role models.

But the guy who might show them that might, this semi-retired engineer, may not have the skills or the desire to do crowd control, well enough and long enough to get through.

I don't think the claim is that this is an untapped source of cheap labor. More that it's a (potential) source of inspiration, direction, contacts, knowledge. High school students have spent their entire lives inside the education system, taught by people who have also spent their entire lives inside the education system. They might benefit from perspectives on what's possible outside the wall, besides those they get from their parents.

I presume GP meant that keeping an unruly high-school class on track is... a skill you won't develop in most workplaces. Not literal "babysitting", but a large part of what teachers do, orthogonal to actually conveying content.

Presumably GP's plan would be most useful for high-school students. Exposure to teachers who'd had varied & interesting careers outside the school system could be great for those within sight of leaving it.

Maybe part-time reduces the pay problem too. Think senior engineers with consulting gigs, who'd like to dial it down to 3 days a week, and do something productive with the rest.

I think "selection" is the short answer. If you can, by any means, arrange to have a class of better-behaved more-interested children, then you can save money. First, you can pay the teachers less, because the job is much more pleasant.

Second, you can avoid hiring special-ed non-teachers, who (IIRC) are quite numerous in some public school systems (like 1/3 the staff?) but aren't usually counted in the teacher/pupil ratio (because their jobs are different).

Ideally, we would think of this as getting a second use for your heating fuel. Between being mined and being burned, it's temporarily used to let you cary milk home from the store.

What this means is that the US has replaced its common-law adversarial criminal justice system, with something completely different. Almost completely, and with very little debate. No referendum, no constitutional amendments. The old one sticks around for occasional ceremonial use.

It would be interesting to understand better why. My theory is that part of it is to do with rising standards of criminal trials. IIRC the average murderer went from arrest to dead in something like a month, 1950s. Most had no appeals. Certainly no expert witnesses to explain the DNA evidence to the jury. Today the default seems to be decades of appeals, thousands of hours of lawyer-time. That doesn't scale.

But it did take 400 years more technology than what Cortez had. The Zulu army was not a walk-over in the mid-19th C, although 50 years later (with gatling guns) it would have been.

That sounds in a way the best case scenario, not to need anything from school. (Although not the one which schools should be designed around.) Or do you think that a better-designed school could have pushed you further, perhaps?

I don't know either, but lots of stuff in hospitals is disposable, because this is easier than figuring out a system to disinfect & re-use it.

Although perhaps that makes more sense in an operating theatre than many of the lower-risk places people now wear them, all day.

If you "maxed out the math curriculum", then surely you got some idea that you enjoyed logic, and were better than average at solving puzzles?

Presumably writers seldom end up writing about the texts they studied in high school, but they may pick up similar impressions of what they like, and what they are good at.

There are two meanings to "gene" here. What you describe as lego blocks are segments which code for a protein, which is one meaning.

The other is just any code which affects the phenotype, including promotors etc. The SNPs mentioned in TFA are just known fairly common single-point differences, but aren't necessarily in coding DNA. Of course these are still heritable, just like coding changes.

> Is there any trait that is strongly linked to a single gene?

Sure.

Sickle-cell anaemia is one classic case, one (recessive) gene.

Huntington's disease is another, it's about a specific repeat number.

But, as you say, most complex traits (such as height) aren't like that, and involve hundreds or thousands of different genes. IIRC eye color is actually fairly simple, not one gene but much of the control in just a handful? Maybe hair color too? (But not super-sure.)

For complex traits, I believe people think that linear effects dominate. Which is another way of saying that they see no advantage to adding a hidden layer, which encodes interactions, compared to adding up individual effects.

The caveat here "for complex traits" means things like height, for which we know there are hundreds to thousands of common variants which matter. Some things aren't like that, e.g. simple recessive gene effects are interactions! And, with more data, this may change.

A super-interesting book this is Jonny Steinberg "A Man of Good Hope". The man in question is a Somali who, when he's being interviewed, does various jobs in the poorer parts of South Africa. And has interesting perspectives on things, and how they look "from below" as it were, as opposed to the more common outsider's impressions from people visiting from richer countries.

> our rescuers are exposed to mountain risk when they should be sitting back at base ... inter-hospital transfer ... actually worth risking their lives for.

Do you think people who sign up to work for mountain rescue, in Switzerland, secretly wish for a life of sitting around and occasionally driving an ambulance to the next town? Boring jobs are also available... but some people want to be out there, summer and winter, with teamwork, helicopters & adrenaline.