patpending

Not at all dumb. Source: I worked summers making toothpicks in one of the Forster mills (the name is in the patent). Toothpick making was big business in Maine until the late 1970's. It's mostly done overseas now.

The idiom "ferret away" means to store something in a secret place, and the idiom "ferret out" means to find something by careful searching. Seems like a pretty good name for a database.

I don't know which interview you're talking about, but in any event you don't know what his motivation was for saying what he said when he said it. Perhaps he was wrong, perhaps he changed his mind, perhaps he was rationalizing on the fly, or perhaps he lied.

It's clear that what he and other scientists said about masks early in the pandemic certainly changed over time. I think science is like that. People who like simple, certain, unchanging answers can get them from religion or ideology. People who don't mind complexity, nuance, and change are more comfortable with science.

Assuming Fauci was lying because what he said then isn't what he is saying now just isn't logical.

He said that masks wouldn't be helpful march 08 2020. A month layer New York had a thousand detected covid deaths a day, so people really should have started to wear masks march 08 2020 since deaths lags infections by about a month.

I don't see how that is necessarily a lie. It could have been the best public health recommendation he could make at the time based on the available information. Research into how best to use masks is ongoing, so I would not expect today's masking recommendations to be the same as tomorrow's.

I know his recommendations have changed over time, but can you cite well documented instances where he lied?

What in the world is going on with that URL?

I have a similar problem with my 2017 Pacifica that replaced my 2005 Voyager. Using the touch screen to control the heat and air-conditioning is extremely slow in the Pacifica, and you can't do it without looking at the screen which can't be used with gloves.

There are physical buttons and knobs for a few of the controls, but it seems that they're just talking to the same software as the touch-screen, so they're just as slow to respond. Adjusting the heat without looking at the touch-screen is pretty much impossible.

IMO the touch screen should not be used to control any aspect of the car's operation. It should only be for phone, navigation, backup camera, and entertainment.

My brain kept spoonerizing the alias to "Bill Benemy". Google searches show that "Benemy" is a real surname, but it's not very common.

Google also informed me that "Benemy" (or "Benami") means "no name" in Urdu, so if one was into word games then "Bill Benemy" could be "Bill No-Name".

Could also be "Business Logic Layer"

If I understand you correctly, then it does seem true to me that nature has no agency. However, when the choice a consumer has is to either pay the asking price for a <em>needed</em> drug or to die then I think the consumer has no meaningful choice at all. Given how unequal the bargaining power is between the buyer and seller in this situation, it's hard to see a free market solutions applies: it might be efficient, but it's also brutaly inhumane.

I know I've set up kind of a straw-man. It might be that the consumer could choose to forgo an expensive drug or medical procedure without fatal consequences, but that's not the interesting case.

Is the market for drugs really free though? I believe that in a free market there is supposed to be no coercion between the parties to a transaction. In the case of drug purchases there may be a kind of coercion involved -- a health issue (diabetes, cancer, etc.) that makes one party to the transaction unable to negotiate effectively.

It's pretty quick to plant bare-root seedlings using a spade or "dibble". About 45 years ago another Boy Scout and I planted approximately 1,000 pine seedlings on a tree farm in a single day using a variant of the method shown in [1]. Once we got a rhythm going we planted around 3 trees per minute.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhqa3yeLxhk

This looks relevant: https://numenta.com/blog/2019/01/16/the-thousand-brains-theo...

Could you be thinking of Mark Russell?

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

I'm in total agreement. I'd add that for me the worst kind of distraction is having a co-worker talking about something interesting on the phone. As focused as I try to be, I find my brain defies me and tries to fill in the half of the conversation that I can't hear.

Also, I'm a native English speaker. I speak very little Spanish, but when my co-workers converse in Spanish my brain gets completely sidetracked trying to understand what they're saying. It's even worse with they're speaking Spanish on the phone.

It's as if when I can only hear or understand part of the conversation my undisciplined brain sucks up loads of CPU cycles trying to fill in the gaps. So I picked up a pair of sound cancelling headphones and block everything out with white-noise or music. But now my ears sweat...

The US Navy built 78 escort carriers in less than four years during WWII.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/nav_legacy.asp?id=3

If mining is profitable at all, why wouldn't a manufacturer of ASICs or GPUs run its own mining operation?

Well, the author was talking about organs, not genes. Generally speaking the organ arrangement described in the article (external testes, internal ovaries) is pretty well conserved among placental land mammals even if genes related to other aspects of reproduction are not.

I think I understand. To be fair, I haven't heard United claim that $1350 was the limit, but I've heard people on CNN and elswhere claim that (in effect) the airline's hands were tied and they could not offer more than $1350.

I suppose an excellent reason for an airline to offer more than $1350 would be to avoid losing $1.6 billion off its stock price.

Are there any lawyers around who can explain the $1350 limit? Some sites like DailyKOS[1] have claimed that the $1350 "limit" has been misinterpreted. What it really means is that $1350 (or four times the fare, whichever is less) is the maximum amount the airlines are required to pay. It does not mean that they cannot pay more, nor that it is illegal for them to do so.

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/11/1652290/-The-Widely-...