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WhiteSage

147 karma · joined October 3, 2017

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WhiteSage··on Vitamin D Supplementation Improves Cognitive Function: 12-month RCT
In Spain you go to your healthcare doctor and ask, and they will usually grant you the blood test, but it depends on them. I never had any issues though.
WhiteSage··on The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
From the article comment section:

> this is not a mistake.

> Assume that the coder meant == 0 what is he trying to enforce. If these 2 bits (_WCLONE and _WALL) are set and your are root then the call is invalid. The bit combination is harmless (setting WALL implies WCLONE [...]), and why would you forbid it for root only.

WhiteSage··on So You Want to Learn Physics (2016)
Beware the first link inside the article redirects you to a phising site (someone's server got compromised)
WhiteSage··on Have we let the LED indicator light go too far?
Dark red nail polisher works like a charm to (semi)permanently turn bright blue LEDs into dim red ones.
WhiteSage··on Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA
Plenty of mutations are already produced by faulty copying. This is how viruses mutate. An early organism would have very error-prone RNA copying. How would the cosmic rays, producing a tiny effect on top of this, be relevant at all? The author fails to explain this. The secret to chirality might simply be chance: once the machinery is running it can only understand its own chirality.
WhiteSage··on Sensors detect rise in nuclear particles on Baltic Sea
Or this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerinox_accident

In May 1998, a caesium-137 source managed to pass through the monitoring equipment in an Acerinox scrap metal reprocessing plant in Los Barrios, Spain. When melted, the caesium-137 caused the release of a radioactive cloud. The Acerinox chimney detectors failed to detect it, but it was eventually detected in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The radioactive levels measured were up to 1000 times higher than normal.

WhiteSage··on The Chiral Puzzle of Life
That does not seem a good paper. The only references on biology are quite generic books. Also the stated hypotheses are quite unfounded. As far as I know, there is barely any evidence of biology using quantum phenomena directly, except perhaps regarding photosynthesis and enzymatic activity:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology

WhiteSage··on The Chiral Puzzle of Life
Also not all DNA mutations produced by DNA damage are equally common, and some of the redundancy lessens their deleterious effect.
WhiteSage··on Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
I'm no expert in the matter, but I guess the problem is somewhat solved as the magnet then interacts with the field lines and these with the other magnet. It depends on how real you believe these invisible magnetic lines are. The magnetic field turned out to be a very real entity, as when it is perturbed these perturbations travel at the speed of light, and the second magnet feels them with a slight delay. The perturbations also manifest themselves as EM radiation/light.
WhiteSage··on If you imagine a business making surgical facemasks is working 24/7, guess again
There is no denying that wearing masks slows the spread. But how much do fabric masks with no filter, which allow most droplets through, slow the spread? I would appreciate any in reference to studies/indications on which fabrics might be appropriate.
WhiteSage··on Clues to Covid-19 coronavirus’s vulnerability emerge from antibody against SARS
It sticks to a virus protein, so you can use that virus protein to find it!
WhiteSage··on H5N1 (2013)
What about HIV? 10 years "incubation" period and 100% mortality. If it was as contagious as the flu it would have killed almost 100% of the human population. Isn't it a scary thought?.

It is not the only virus. Rabies, also has 100% mortality.

WhiteSage··on Chloroquine has shown apparent efficacy in treatment of Covid-19
In the east coast of Spain we have had great weathee (25+ degrees celsius) and it didn't seem to greatly influence transmission speed :(
WhiteSage··on Feathered dinosaur tail found in amber (2016)
Yes, but DNA is very fragmented and degraded. All you can hope to do with it is some DNA phylogeny.
WhiteSage··on The Uncertain Future of the World’s Largest Secondhand Book Market
Physical books have their advantages. Specially when reading technical books you find yourself going back and forth way too often to read a digital copy. Also no need to worry about batteries, less eye strain, etc.

In this case it is the online second hand stores (abebooks, amazon, etc) the ones that are killinh the physical stores.

WhiteSage··on Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace
Choose some hobbies and find some local community supporting them. Engage in lessons around them, or offer lessons yourself. It doesn't matter where, but do not wait for things to happen, make them happen.
WhiteSage··on “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”
The author of the article himself embarked in a crussade to ban limit EM emissions after publishing a meta-analysis which shown there is correlation between 10 year phone use and brain tumors. Yes. Without accounting for any other risk factor. Because the lifestyle of people who use phones and people who don't are certainly similar.

Correlation != causation. And the author does not ask for caution and research, he asks directly for limits on the technology.

WhiteSage··on Depressed People See the World More Realistically (2017)
I'm sorry for your loss.

When something bad happens I often find myself going back to Carl Sagan's words on the Pale Blue Dot [0]. Puts everything in perspective, and makes everything feel insignificant, when compared with the vastness of what lies out there.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

WhiteSage··on The Twin Primes Conjecture Gets Solved for Finite Fields
There is a bigger problem. If you keep adding 1 you only get all the elements for the integers.
WhiteSage··on Physicists score double hit in LED research
My tv remote works with lights on, why wouldn't LiFi?
WhiteSage··on Exotic Physics Phenomenon Involving Time Reversal Observed for First Time
If it is a name it gets capitalized. If it is an adjective derived from the name (abelian, cartesian, euclidean, ...), it depends on the language, the author and the literature around the word.
WhiteSage··on Show HN: A dbg(...) macro for C++
Thanks for the reply. Amazing work :)
WhiteSage··on Show HN: A dbg(...) macro for C++
Nice idea! I would appreciate a warning from the author specifying whether dbg evaluates its argument twice, as if so one must be careful with side effects when using it.
WhiteSage··on Spam in Your Calendar? Here’s What to Do
I recently had this problem in an old Samsung phone. The spam was not directly coming from email, but from some other installed app which was somehow tricking S planner (Samsung's calendar app) into adding the events to google's calendar, even though the original spammer app had no calendar permissions.
WhiteSage··on Perl 6's given: switch on steroids
C++17 includes the [[fallthrough]] attribute built into the language to disable the warning [1].

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/fallth...

WhiteSage··on Too Many Medicines Simply Don’t Work
You have to fix the hypotheses to test before you begin the experiment, as otherwise you will stumble upon a lot of spurious correlations. That your birthday is the same day than someone's in your class/work group is a rare event, that two people have the same birthday in your class/work group, not at all uncommon. This is the birthday paradox. In the same spirit, with a drug you'll always find groups where it works because of spurious correlations, specially if you don't fix beforehand the group where you want to test it.
WhiteSage··on Huge study finds drugs stop HIV transmission
Vaccines do well for diseases for which your natural immunity can protect you from them after you've created antibodies. HIV works the other way: the virus lets you create antibodies and then it wins the fight by hiding in your immune system and slowing turning the tables.

The virus also stay dormant within your cells, and it is not absolutely clear where, yet. Other viruses which do this (chickenpox, herpes, papillomavirus, ...) are not cleared from the body by the immune system either, but at least the immune system can control them as long as it is healthy enough.

This facts, of course, are no reason to be pessimistic about a cure/vaccine, just explains why it is taking that long. A cure might also pad the way to cure other diseases such as chickenpox and herpes, which may lead to complications later in life.

WhiteSage··on Ask HN: Mathematicians, what textbooks are best for learning these math topics?
For complex analysis the book by Churchill -written for engineers- is a very down to earth introduction with lots of examples and applications to resolution of integrals and PDEs.

In the case of set theory I cannot recommend enough Halmos' "Naive set theory". It's completely rigorous yet easy to read, and lays out all the basics of ZF, constructing both ordinals and cardinals.

For probability Khinchin has some very thin fun books, written for some classes he gave in a military school. The books do not get into deep topics but are a good introduction.

For group theory I would try Isaacs' Algebra book. Although the book is one of those books which contain too many topics, he was really enthusiastic of group theory and I have been told the corresponding chapters are very good.

WhiteSage··on The Adult Brain Does Grow New Neurons After All, Study Says
I'm no expert, but there are many papers from 10 years ago where they identified a signaling gene whose concentration was not being raised enough for the neighboring cell to divide and replace the hair cell, and it was claimed that in 10 years hearing loss would have a cure. We seem to be more or less at the same point though, because it is not clear what goes wrong in the signaling pathway, or whether if that is the only issue. IMO too little is known to answer your questions.
WhiteSage··on The Adult Brain Does Grow New Neurons After All, Study Says
Auditory hair cells in the inner ear -the ones that allow us to hear sound- do regenerate in many animals but this mechanism fails in mammals. The surrounding cells try to replace them but something goes wrong and they die. This is why hearing loss is permanent, and exemplifies how stupid evolution can be at times.
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