robbmorganf

Would you recommend any particular brand of said injection molding machines?

Does anyone know the etymology of "black box"?

Does anyone understand why a third dose of the same vaccine improves immunity to Omicron?

I'm willing to believe the empirical evidence that boosters make a meaningful difference, but I can't figure out intuitively why the same mRNA a third time helps to address this new spike.

This article briefly mentions SARS-CoV-2, but at length it discusses Ebola and others quite a bit more. This article isn't about what happened with COVID-19, but about whether we should have BL4 labs at all.

In my opinion, we absolutely should. Awful diseases like Ebola are effective at what they do, so they're great places to learn about molecular biology and genetics. It seems feasible that we can manage the risk well enough to get a net expected benefit.

I didn't realize how much metal was in these converters. I always thought it would be milligrams at most.

I think it currently stores energy in a spring, hence helping the user go up and recovering energy on the way down.

I was just suggesting that if the energy can be stored in a battery or hydraulic accumulator, it's easier to change the "counterweight" force. In both cases, I think it can be done without any net assistance from the electrical grid.

I do understand having skin in the game, but at the same time it pushes away candidates, particularly during this labor shortage[1]. And it has disparate racial impact, because oppressed minorities are less likely to have the finances to invest in their own tools.

My thought is that any good company should be able to create emotional skin in the game (i.e. caring) without needing financial skin in the game. If a company isn't there, it needs to sell its mission better and link the availability of tools to that mission.

[1] if you subscribe to the view that there is no shortage but only an unwillingness to pay fair wages (which is totally valid if there are no upfront costs to getting a job), consider that after months of losing savings to a pandemic, candidates may literally not have the cash to buy tools needed for a new job, so in this case it is truly a shortage of candidates with the ability to get the tools

1. I think you call an able bodied relative?

2. Looks like it. I think it's just a racheting system, so I think there are infinite "lock points"

I love this idea, particularly empowering people to move without feeling like they need electrical assistance.

If this is to become a widespread product, I think it needs to address two linked issues: (a) the product appears to be tuned to the specific weight of an individual, so that the counterweights/springs are neutral in use. Changing between individuals (or changing weight should the individual gain/lose weight) should be easy to do and hopefully transparent. (b) the product can't be accessed if it is on a different floor. Without the weight of a user, if unlocked, it would skyrocket upwards. I don't want to lock into the paradigms of an elevator, but the user needs to be able to access the product even if another user moved it.

Unfortunately, the only thought I have to solve these issues is to electrify it, or perhaps a clever hydraulic system. In any case, I think with batteries, it need not consume power from the grid.

Legally, I think there's not a problem with even the strictest interpretation of "you need this, but we aren't paying for it". In many small business manufacturing settings, the typical arrangement is that operators buy their own toolboxes without reimbursement (i.e. wrenches, screwdrivers, even endmills). Strikes me as a dumb way to scare away potential workers, but alas I don't make the rules.

Why do you feel bad about it? Sounds like you're reducing overall CO2 emissions. I understand that you are the "reader" in this article, but if you did start heating your own apartment then demonstrably everyone would be worse off (except your neighbors, who might need marginally less heating)

I think they often benefit one specific person in the company, who happens to be the decision maker, and don't hurt the overall company obviously enough that anyone stops them.

need[ing] to monitor people’s unrelated web browsing and links they click

Does this require some kind of vulnerability exploit? I would hope that apps can't extract this kind of information from other unrelated apps.

Personally I think we are turning discoveries into products pretty fast, at the least faster than any time in history. My thought was that we need more fundamental discoveries (e.g. like understanding gravity or theories that predict and unlock high temperature superconductors), but the people who discover those things needn't be teaching staff.

overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available

Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries.

That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we need more efficient scientific communication before we can make good use of more researchers.

I think income-diversity is a valid and very appropriate criticism of MIT and other schools. I agree that not enough able but poor students are admitted.

Without diminishing MIT's responsibility, I also think the rest of the education system needs to take responsibility for the same problem. In many cases, a very smart kid with low income is afforded poor secondary education, so if they were admitted to MIT, they might not have the preparation to thrive. MIT's disparate impact on low income kids is unacceptable, but the solution requires cooperation from high schools.

Clarification: when you say "reader", do you mean the reader of this linked article, or the reader of the chaplain's statement?

Third, intellectual ability and achievement are the principal requirements for admission as a student or faculty member to any university.

This is the crux of the issue as I see it. The author sees achievement as a proxy for ability, and therefore achievement-meritocracy is the only acceptable system.

By contrast, MIT sees ability as only one factor among many that create achievement. If one takes the further axiom that ability is independent of protected categories like race and gender, then achievement-meritocracy does not recruit the most able students. Hence, affirmative action and reducing oppression.

Mathematically, author believes achievement=f(ability) so ability=f^{-1}(achievement) while MIT believes achievement=f(ability,identity, background) so ability=f^{-1}(achievement,identity,background)

This is a much better idea than the one I had.

For the Fed, this doesn't seem enough. Their policy has a predictable effect on the whole market, so I think they should not be trading in the couple of weeks leading up to a Fed announcement.

Sometimes I wonder why we pay for insurance (to cover unpredictable accidents) when insurance policies specifically don't cover many unpredictable accidents...

"Ultimately, Instagram is just a vicious messenger. But the cesspool of content fueling it? That comes from us."

I don't particularly like that this article tries to absolve Facebook. OK, maybe Facebook doesn't have any particular line of code "for (user in users) if user.girl: user.show(eating_disorder)" BUT they are getting paid to promote accounts with beauty advertisements, and they know those accounts promote eating disorders. That is clearly not in the public interest.

Yikes, I didn't know that. Seems like I need to make my fidelity password 6 times longer.

Does this also mean they probably store passwords in clear text? Because there's no way to normalize the numeric passwords back to letters and symbols.

What does the median even mean in this context? The whole point of a median is taking the element that is greater than 50% of other elements in a strictly-ordered set, but since when have people or voters been strictly-ordered?

Some people care about climate change (or lack thereof) and others about women's rights (or lack thereof), so even if voters could be quantified, it would at least be a multi dimensional problem.

I'll give it to them that the solution is an elegant reduction in parts count. It's just a shame that they compare it to a straw man and exaggerate the benefits. "It solves this problem, and this one, and this one" but modern compressors don't suffer most of those. Other sibling comments have good specific qualms, so I won't duplicate them.

That said, I'm glad people play around with new designs. That's how innovation works. I just wish investors would be satisfied with "we're trying a reasonable alternative design to look at benefits" rather than requiring "the old design is a dinosaur, and our design solves every problem under the sun"

If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading some of the history of how traditional utilities (electricity, water) came to be regulated: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9986/c9986.pdf

Perhaps like cities traded franchises in exchange for access to digging up roads, we can trade franchises in exchange for access to privileged information. If you don't want to play by the rules, then please enjoy a total ban on storing PII or confidential data.

I love CSV. Only change I want is some way to indicate a comment. Then I can write a human readable description of what the data means (more than just column names, but how it is calculated). It would be cool if the comment mechanism also could have a machine readable metadata system.

Alternatively, maybe the navy minister could beat the army minister if there are more sailors than soldiers. It would be interesting to simulate/play the dysfunction of bureaucratic militaries...

Just an observation: IF we take it as GIVEN that policymakers are going to find a way to earn some fixed amount X which is greater than their salary (this is a big assumption and probably not true, but just for a thought experiment)

THEN maybe making money from stock options is actually better than taking money from lobbyists? Lawmakers can make money from both hurting and helping companies, so it doesn't create a particular incentive to go out and help PARTICULAR companies (that said, there is an incentive to create volatility, which isn't great). Meanwhile, lobbying tends to advantage some of the least ethical companies (e.g. Opiods, fossil fuels) because the only incentive is to HELP the company at the expense of customers.

To be clear, I don't think it's right for lawmakers to make any more by virtue of their position than the salaries set forth by the law. I'm just saying that of the several unethical ways they can make money, stock options have incentives least misaligned with the public good.

I never used this software, sadly. What made it different from Mathematica or from Maple?