Half of the conferences I'm aware of have cancelled this year. We are talking not-jokingly about cancelling the Summer Olympics.
Having a conference at all is newsworthy at this point. And they've had a few weeks or a month to come up with a completely new strategy for something they usually have a year to figure out?
Have you ever been involved in planning or running an annual event? It doesn't sound like you have. That people make it look easy is a testament to their skills, not the magnitude of the logistical problem.
You used a lot of words to say, "I hate Apple and this schadenfreude is not living up to my expectations."
I'm just a layperson, but this looks like a run-of-the-mill prescription drug. Hope this helps to allay some concerns and keep the signal-to-noise ratio higher.
Well, testing is still needed to determine the appropriate dosage. If the dosage is lower or identical to the prescription drug, it's all good. If it ends up being much higher, this may be a big problem.
So to clarify: it can be tested directly on patients now, in the dosage it’s already approved for in previous trials, without the need for (or at the same time as) formal trials?
And this should be the case for most such existing drugs?
Or are drugs only approved for specific uses so doctors can’t do this?
One thing that's slightly interesting about Dyson Sphere's is that spherical shells of matter exert exactly no gravitational pull at any point in their interiors. That is, the integral of gravitational pull over the whole shell is identically 0 for every point inside the shell.* This goes for any force that falls off by the inverse square rule, e.g. the electrostatic force.
In short, there's no practical way to stick an atmosphere, much less a civilization composed of life forms that depend on gravity, to the inside of the sphere, even if the other engineering challenges could be overcome.
* One thing that's suddenly more interesting to me now is if the space at any point is being "pulled" equally in all directions, resulting in zero force, or if the bends in space-time cancel out. In the limit, for example, could you "tear" space-time inside a dense enough and/or heavy enough shell of matter?
think about the 2d equivalent - a ball rolls down a hill because the potential gradient directs it that way. a ball sitting on a flat pedestal isn't being pulled in every horizontal direction at once by some forces that are proportional to the height of the pedestal. it's not being pulled horizontally at all
there is zero space-time curvature within the sphere, it's "flat", so there's no force. nothing is "cancelled out", force is the derivative of energy with respect to space. it's like a 3d pedestal (or rather, a cylinder excavated from the earth with a flat bottom)
> there's no practical way to stick an atmosphere, much less a civilization composed of life forms that depend on gravity, to the inside of the sphere
Why not spin the sphere? Given the immense surface area, it wouldn't even matter that the centripetal force would only be strongest around the 'equator'.
So, the plan would be:
1. Create a giant rotating sphere around our Sun.
2. Create a ring world around the 'equator' of the inside of the sphere (i.e. a ring of walls high enough to hold in the resident's preferred atmosphere).
It's clearly a submarine (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) article. The article is so light, and so full of hot air, that it practically advocates for balloon travel, not supersonic flight.
Pithy, perhaps, but not entirely justified. For example, the implied causation might actually be reversed, that people who naturally trust institutions consume more news. The causal relationship could also be external to both: some other factor, like financial stability, causes people to believe in institutions and to consume more news. Or, the cause could even be direct, but much less cynical: The news may accurately inspire justified confidence in institutions. (Conversely, people who prefer to make up justifications or excuses might blame institutions and prefer to not expose themselves to news that discomforts that worldview.)
James Duane recently updated his advice, incorrectly restated in the article and in many places in this thread, in a book entitled You Have the Right to Remain Innocent. There is a long and short of it, but I'd rather see you buy the book, so I'll just mention a few things. First, "I'd like to see a lawyer," is not nearly succinct nor strong enough, as per recent case law and Supreme Court rulings. Second, the Supreme Court has ruled that invoking the 5th Amendment can be admitted as evidence of guilt, especially if you say it wrong, as is simply remaining silent. Finally, the people in here saying to, for example, just assent to a search in order to be on their ways are hopelessly naive about the frequency of evidence planting, the potential to be misheard, misremembered, or deliberately misquoted by cops looking to get a tidy resolution to whatever messy situation confronts them. Not all of them, but enough of them and often enough that I cringe at most of the advice in this thread, much of which you (Yes, you!) personally think is great.
Buy the book. It's cheap, and an engaging quick read. Good luck to you all!
> "Once fusion is cracked" is almost on par with "once perpetual motion machines are cracked." It presupposes that fusion being "cracked" is a reasonable thing to expect.
Oof. One need only to peruse your comment history to see where this sentiment is coming from, but even that is no excuse for that obtuse argument.
"Perpetual motion," on the one hand, is quackery outlawed by straightforward thermodynamics, breaking the rules of which allows assertions like "chair seats and door handles should be spontaneously heating up to incandescence essentially at random." Fusion, on the other hand, is a technical problem.
Fusion researchers at MIT, ITER, and other institutions at the top tiers of academia across the globe are not a cabal of greedy grant-dependent charlatans bamboozling their way through careers in bad faith, deliberately ignoring the lone rational voice of Lidsky and his Johnny-Come-Lately-The-Baptist on HN, u/pfdietz. It's perfectly rational (Sane, even!) to cast aside internet naysayers (no matter how zealous) in favor of deferring to, you know, actual experts.
Fusion researchers are people who have irreversibly (or nearly so) committed their careers to something. They have a very strong incentive to not admit they have wasted their lives. It's touching you think that asking such a person if fusion deserves more funding that you'd get anything but a "yes" answer.
In general, you don't want to ask a person in field X if X needs funding. You might ask them what's the best way of spending money in X, but even then you better phrase the question carefully to avoid conflict of interest.
> That story about Carmack applying cutting-edge academic research to video games has always impressed me.... He deserves to be known as the archetypal genius video game programmer for all sorts of reasons, but this episode with the academic papers and the binary space partitioning is the justification I think of first.
I'm not throwing shade on Carmack when I say that the reason the author states seems to me to be evidence, taken alone, of the exact opposite of the case that Carmack is "the archetypal genius video game programmer." Or, if it is, then it impugns the profession of video game programming, because, in most real engineering fields, a literature review is the first step, not the desperate measure taken after "creativity" has been exhausted. It seems to me that a better case can immediately be made that the originators of the technique are the real geniuses, having come up with the idea, and Carmack just adopted it. Geniuses create; the rest of us adopt, right?
Again, don't get me wrong: Carmack could program circles around me. (Or ellipses, or pentagons, or particle clouds, or fractals, or...) But affirming the consequent doesn't make him "a genius." He may or may not be, for other reasons, but 'applying a known technique' just can't be one of them.
You are forgetting a important detail here. If BSP was already succesfully used in games by a pioneer, you would be right.
The question is, to recognize an algorithm and apply it, with the proper changes to a novel field, being the first to recognize this, in my experience at least, is not for the average intelligence.
We all have trouble with tagging someone a "genius", because its not clear what this is, or if we are using this too much and in a wrong way (and i think we do)
But i also need to remind you about the early nineties, and how hard was to get into information, papers and research, compared to now. Also the limitation of the computers back then forcing people like Carmack to use very clever algorithms to thrive. We always need to take the context people were in to properly estimate this kind of things.
By the way, he did not just solved that, but a lot of other hard problems with different, successful outcomes.. So its not just because of the BSP he have this level of recognition.
I may be wrong, but IIRC, Carmack used a property of the BSP which is that each each leaf of the tree represents a convex volume. A nice property of the BSP makes it easy to locate in which of these convex volume you're inside. A second step is to compute which surfaces are visible from that volume (you compute that off line). So, each convex volume is associated with a list of visible surfaces. So when you're inside a convex volume, you know which part of the world you're in. The fortunate thing is that these lists are rather short, so the whole structure fits in memory.
And that was very clever (dunno if that was invented by Carmack though)
A thought on the political, rather than technical, side of the story:
I went through a regrettable phase of reading about military strategy and the like, and one of the things that stuck was how good strategies need to have a component of randomness to them, to make them unpredictable by the enemy. Trump is chaos and randomness, and him having landed on this issue, and in such a random (?) and (apparently?) sexist way is both testament to that, and an indicator of the danger he poses to Democrats and what passes for the left in the US: They've left themselves exposed on many fronts because they've faced a very ordered and predictable foe until Trump. Nobody, but nobody, on the right would have launched an attack on the left with "women have told me dishwashers suck, now," before Trump, so they were free to pass stricter and stricter regulations, unpunished by the cost to consumer satisfaction.
I am loath to admit it, but there is something to be admired, here, some kind of low genius that demands respect, under threat of great peril if respect is not afforded.
