Hacker News Reader

atomic_rabbiton Doctors Say Shortage of Protective Gear Is Dire

Turns out N95 masks are quite high-tech, and even China is having trouble scaling up its production. They're made of a material, meltblown fabric, which only a limited number of factories are capable of producing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/8149292...

atomic_rabbiton A tale of two covariates: Why OWID and company are wrong about US healthcare

The blog Random Critical Analysis has made a good argument that Americans spend so much on healthcare simply because Americans spend so much on everything. Healthcare isn't exceptional in this regard. If you replace the usual GDP per capita measure of income by a measure of actual individual consumption, the US lies right on the trend line, just with higher healthcare spending and higher overall consumption than everyone else.

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything...

atomic_rabbiton More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

Andre Geim (Nobel and Ig Nobel laureate) named an animal co-author, H.A.M.S. ter Tisha, in a 2001 paper about diamagnetic levitation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092145260...