scythe

I realize this isn't the end of mathematics or whatever, but it's still making me feel better about not having become a theoretical physicist like I wanted to (and seemed to be able to) when I was twenty. I'm now rationalizing a couple of unfortunate accidents and stupid mistakes as divine providence. Strange world we live in.

>I've seen people insist they can't write creatively, then make something beautiful

Yeah, now you have a worse problem. A few people like the first chapter you posted, now "oh shit I'd better come up with something good".

A curse on the OP. I was trying so hard to stop thinking about this today.

They're pretty open about it in practice. They don't want people hosting blogs, basically. Original fiction is almost always allowed.

You can't just "disengage" a car that's six feet off the ground. You have to land it gently with the nozzle engaged or you don't have a car anymore, and maybe you don't have a driver either.

One enduring insight from Brian Potter (Construction Physics) is that the cost of manufacturing tends to go down with scale, while the cost of construction doesn't drop nearly as much. Batteries are made in a factory and then pretty much just hooked up, while gas turbines have to be built. So, the difference in forecasts makes sense if you apply that rule.

There have been some experiments with prefabricated construction, but you still run into the issue that shipping really big things is hard, as we've seen with wind turbine blades. Robotic construction might make a dent at some point, but it still seems to be basically embryonic.

It's hard to say because the helix existed as a theory before it could be verified. From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_molecular_biology#D...

>In 1948, [Linus] Pauling discovered that many proteins included helical (see alpha helix) shapes. Pauling had deduced this structure from X-ray patterns and from attempts to physically model the structures. (Pauling was also later to suggest an incorrect three chain helical DNA structure based on Astbury's data.) Even in the initial diffraction data from DNA by Maurice Wilkins, it was evident that the structure involved helices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History

>Franklin told Crick and Watson that the [phosphate] backbones had to be on the outside. Before then, Linus Pauling, and Watson and Crick, had erroneous models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards.

The mere idea of a helix is not especially complex and could have existed in the minds of many theorists at the time. Franklin's discovery provided the final piece of the puzzle, but the desire to attribute major scientific discoveries to a single author or team is based on an incorrect interpretation of the scientific process. The real reason that Franklin didn't win the Nobel Prize is because she died:

>In 1962, after Franklin's death, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.[210] Nobel Prizes are awarded only to living recipients. A debate continues about who should receive credit for the discovery.

A student of Franklin, Raymond Gosling, actually took Photo 51. He was not awarded the Prize.

Wikipedia is fair to cite Odgers's review. But the nature of the available evidence means that Odgers would be overstating her case to say that Haidt's theory is conclusively wrong, and Haidt would be overstating his case if he claimed to be conclusively right.

You see, the effect on social media on socialization has two parts. The first is the direct effect on an individual caused by their own use of social media. The second is the effect on an individual's social environment when everyone around them is on social media. The first effect is difficult but basically feasible to study. The second effect is downright wicked. So dismissing evidence that hints at the second effect as being "mere correlation that disappears under scrutiny" is not valid reasoning when your process of scrutiny focuses on the first effect.

In social science you have to accept reasoning from incomplete data. You won't always have the answers. I don't think Haidt really stands above or below his peers in any category except notoriety. Of course anyone who has worked with scientists knows to be a little suspicious of a researcher who seems to enjoy being in the public eye. But as the public eye, we're still stuck with them.

It is an ancient practice, that when a human creates something, other humans will observe it and learn from it. Every group of humans living together has practiced this in some form for tens of thousands of years if not longer. Even animals do it. It's a natural assumption when making any form of art.

It is not a natural assumption that someone will digitize the artwork and use it to adjust a couple thousand matrix coefficients in a complex computer program. To most people that seems like copying with extra steps. The brain may in some ways resemble a computer, but what sets it apart is that we have always lived with brains. Everything a human does has already anticipated the presence of other brains, while etched circuits on ultrapure silicon crystals are something new.

My favorite example is "The Beatles" of chemotherapy, viz. platinum, paclitaxel and doxorubicin, at least one of which appears in nearly all first-line cancer drug regimens.

I think that there are plenty of blue areas on that map

We know how to make MRI cheaper. Put it in a can. MRI suites are built with copper shielding in the walls, and the machines are really heavy, which creates huge capital costs. (Capex is a big problem for medicine.) There's an easy solution: you can just put an MRI machine in a standard tractor-trailer container and bring the patients in. Nothing has to be constructed or installed.

None of the private equity chains with the sans-serif fonts, simplified logos and trisyllabic names are doing this, though. It's bad marketing. Patients don't want to walk outside to an MRI machine in the parking lot. It feels sketchy. Never mind that they score just as well on the ACR image quality tests as the in-room machines. Who the hell knows what that is?

In reality, it's the county hospitals and big universities that use them! Places that have in-house physicists who can argue for what really makes sense in practice. A major problem with healthcare as a business is that the customer does not usually understand the product, but they still need to buy it, and there are time constraints.

If human society collapses, our cities and landfills will become ores. Strange ores filled with unnatural mixtures of metals, but ores nonetheless.

The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.

This is a defense of glass, specifically, and not a class of architecture in general. And "traditional" architecture is not a properly descriptive term; it tells us where the architecture came from, not what it is. Architecture is basically a creative process, and we can't handwave away the complexity by using temporal language like "traditional" and "modern".

The problem with modern architecture, in my opinion, is its preference for "dramatic effect": long contours, flat surfaces, high contrast. This is visually exhausting. It looks nice in a catalog and from a large distance, but it's uncomfortable to be close to. This doesn't follow from the use of more glass. It's a historical coincidence that the float glass process made windows cheaper around the same time that architects started experimenting with smoothness.

>Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle?

You're equating life skills to professional skills. I was not taught to milk a cow, but my milk comes from someone who was. The topic is whether software engineers in a professional context learned certain things about software.

Even women won't consistently sit down on public toilets

The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.

The efficiency of most existing heat-driven refrigerator and heat-pump designs is kind of disappointing. This isn't a fundamental thermodynamic issue; the Carnot efficiency for a gas burner at 2000 C running a refrigerator offering a 40 C temperature drop is close to the electric efficiency. In principle, it could be a more efficient way to use stored hydrogen than a fuel cell. In practice, it isn't. Maybe actually taking advantage of such high temperature differences requires very good refractory alloys. I would be curious to know the absolute efficiency proposed here rather than just a rough estimate of relative efficiency.

I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.

Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.

When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.

Well, for one thing, the only existing Yb-176 production facilities are in Russia. That means demand for a domestic supply is pretty high right now.

The other thing is that for a nuclear reactor, you need many kilograms of uranium. But for a Pluvicto patient, you need less than a gram of ytterbium.

You responded to an abbreviation of the original argument. The original was "people had one year to prepare for or protest this". And the impact of a required equipment replacement is dependent on the expected lifetime of the equipment. Practically all equipment lasts more than a year. Disposable items bought in bulk are basically a form of equipment that lasts until you run out. Five years will see about a third of stuff get turned over. I have seen some fluoroscopy equipment still running since the late 90s.

Ultimately "make better rules" is only half the battle. You still need a process for implementation.

>And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sources.

Including a rather unusual battle between the Tang Dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talas

It's recorded that the Caliph, on hearing of the battle, said "What is this? A crossover episode?"

>Notepad but with Rich Text formatting

TextEdit on Mac uses RTF. Perhaps that's why Windows switched.

>Finally, I can think of one strong argument for TUIs: they’re cross-platform.

>[...]

>But remember: I’m not really building applications for other people to use. I’m building them for me.

Giant caveat to the whole argument and it's buried 80% of the way down. Granted, he alludes to that a little earlier, but if other people using your application are a completely irrelevant outcome, you're an unusual case.

I mean, sure, I make tiny one-offs, but those barely even have something you could call a CLI. I push as much complexity into command-line options and config files as possible.

High-temperature superconductor refers to the critical temperature at zero field. But the crucial field decreases sharply with temperature, so the superconducting phase appears concave on a T–B phase diagram. Therefore, in order to operate superconducting magnets at high field, liquid helium is necessary irrespective of the superconducting transition temperature (critical temperature).

Not only Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a textbook topic in condensed-matter physics, but also Rydberg atoms, which are a very weird phenomenon that has been mostly studied recently as a sort of edge-case where quantum physics starts to look like classical physics.

Apparently people surf at the beach near this reactor. I never went there when I lived in Florida, but my dad told me about it.