cbkeller

Eh, there's also usually a lot less money on the line in academia. I would bet that this particular type of problem is positively correlated with potential commercializability.

I don't know anything about the folks behind that website, but a quick survey of the literature would lead me to expect a scientific consensus that the placebo effect is absolutely physiologically real.

Just to pick one particularly interesting study from way back in 1978, Levine, Gordon, and Fields [1] reported in the Lancet that naxolone (better known now as Narcan) can actually block placebo pain relief (in this case, in the context of dental surgery), implying that the placebo analgesia is mediated by actual physiological release of neurotransmitters (in this case, endorphins).

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(78)92762-9

Yes of course, I just would have assumed the cost of that is pretty minor compared to the cost of the (apparently) 26 megawatt cogeneration plant

Wow, that's annoying, too bad that they wouldn't have a way to disconnect. IIRC, Princeton was able to operate some buildings off of the cogen plant during Hurricane Sandy, so I guess they had things engineered differently.

Many universities have "cogeneration" plants that produce electricity, steam for heating, and also hot water. However, they usually don't generate enough electricity to power the whole campus, so the administration chooses who gets it and who doesn't. If these sorts of outages are going to become more common, then the management is going to have to re-evaluate the cost of providing backup power for all labs vs the cost of lost research.

For academic scientists, it's not always up to us. Just going out and renting a generator and hooking that up to our instrumentation ourselves may be technically possible (plus or minus various building code and safety issues), but by that time the damage is probably already done, so backup power really needs to be formally installed. We can beg the facilities and maintenance dept to install proper backup power, but unless we managed to get that written into our startup budget at the time of hiring, the money is probably not going to appear.

One may or may not like it, but that is literally how language works.

I sympathise, but for better or worse the OED reports that people have been using "literally" to mean "figuratively"* since at least 1769:

  > 1769   F. Brooke *Hist. Emily Montague* IV. ccxvii. 83 "He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies."
  > 1801   *Spirit of Farmers' Museum* 262   "He is, literally, made up of marechal powder, cravat, and bootees."
  > 1825   J. Denniston *Legends Galloway* 99   "Lady Kirkclaugh, who, literally worn to a shadow, died of a broken heart."
  > 1863   F. A. Kemble *Jrnl. Resid. Georgian Plantation* 105   "For the last four years..I literally coined money."
  > 1876   ‘M. Twain’ *Adventures Tom Sawyer* ii. 20   "And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth."

[*] Or as they, put it, "Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense"

> "Stallman.org was defaced by an FSF employee,” I have just been told, “the deface has been reverted, and the domain appears to now be operating on non-FSF infrastructure…”

Huh

Going off of wikipedia, it looks like Julia started in 2012, two years before Crystal.

I think this [1] is the latest on static compilation -- they're working on it

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl

Release notes: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/v1.2.0/NEWS.md

Cerro Rico is a crazy place, geologically speaking. Apparently around 800 million ounces of silver (22,695 metric tons) were produced between 1545 and 1823 [1], and even after about half a millennium of mining it still has another 1.7 billion ounces in estimated silver reserves [2].

It's a swiss cheese of tunnels by now, so much so that the summit is subsiding at a rate of a few cm/yr [2] due to the gradual collapse of the mountain.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Rico

That's an interesting question. Fe and P are probably the most relevant nutrients that are abundant in suspended glacial rock flour. Since Fe3+ is pretty insoluble in seawater, the suspended (vs. dissolved) load might actually matter -- wind-blown dust would be the #1 competitor. The first relevant paper I found suggests the dust still dominates [1], but it was clearly enough of a consideration for them to write a paper about it. And sometimes the wind-blown dust is actually glacial rock flour [2], so the plot thickens!

[1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-015-0091-6

[2] https://doi.org/10.1029/2010GL046573

? Assuming you meant to reply to me, I think this is orthogonal to what I posted

ETA since we seem to have reached maximum comment depth: To clarify, the context suggests you mean to disagree with me, but I don't see any incompatibility between your comment and mine. These examples are not bringing back species that are currently extinct. That is not to say that life is not adaptable or that vacated ecological niches will not eventually be re-filled. Judging from the paleontological record, they definitely will -- sometimes rapidly and sometimes not for many Myr. Sometimes, due to convergent evolution, the replacements for a given niche are shockingly close in appearance to the extinct originals, but it's never quite the same as before.

I think the only thing I actually disagree with here is the apparent (implied?) suggestion that folks concerned about climate change are in a state of "hysteria." The climate scientists I know would be among the first to agree that we don't know everything!

Eh, I mean the silicate weathering feedback will definitely fix the CO2 issue on Myr timescales, but doesn't mean it mightn't be a bumpy ride.

Then there's the issue of above-background extinction rates -- not entirely a CO2 / climate change issue, but arguably already irreversible unless we're about to go all Jurassic-Park-style Pleistocene rewilding over here.

Lot of silt in that water! There has been some interesting debate recently on the efficacy of glacial erosion under the Greenland ice sheet -- and more broadly whether or not global average erosion rate has increased due to northern hemisphere glaciation over the past few million years. One recent estimate [1] suggests:

> We find that, although runoff from Greenland represents only 1.1% of the Earth’s freshwater flux, the Greenland ice sheet produces approximately 8% of the modern fluvial export of suspended sediment to the global ocean.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo3046

Geologist here -- the delayed-evolution-of-lignase hypothesis has been criticized in the literature recently [1], but I'd say the jury's still out.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517943113

Ah, didn't realize slicing always made copies. A view/alias/whatever would have been fine for the example, but having multiple variable names referring to the same memory has caused me enough problems to try to avoid it by default.

Not my exact area of expertise, but my two cents would be that the model space is sufficiently vast and underconstrained that there are likely an infinitude of equally allowable models that could also explain these features without an LHB. Since the Nice model was specifically developed to explain the LHB [1], using it as evidence for the LHB seems a bit circular.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03676

Yeah, that's it -- since the first solid material also means the first material we can determine an age of!

Yeah, even though the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, among folks I know who work on this there's a pretty good (subjective) correlation between favoring an old age for the moon and being skeptical of the LHB.

Geologist here -- this has been an active topic lately!

Just a few weeks ago there was a paper proposing a 4.336 +/- 0.031 Ga age for the Lunar Magma Ocean [1], which is often equated with (esp. in public press [e.g., 2], though not really the same as) the age of the Moon. For comparison, the "40 to 60 Ma after solar system formation" in the new paper [3] discussed here translates into roughly 4.517 +/- 0.010 Ga.

This new paper agrees almost perfectly with one I was a coauthor on a couple years ago though [4], which also gave an age of 4.51 (+/- 0.01) Ga, so maybe we're starting to get slightly closer to some consensus.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2019.07.008

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128265-100-moon-may...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0398-3

[4] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1602365

The initial precompilation times may give some new users the wrong idea, but those have been for me a total non-issue once I'm using the language regularly.

The comment I was going to reply to disappeared, but for something closer in form to the Matlab example that used to be here:

  using Plots, DelimitedFiles
  d = readdlm("data.tsv",'\t')
  A = [ones(10,1) d[:,1:2]]; B = copy(d[:,3]); X = A\B
  plot(B, seriestype=:scatter, color=:blue); plot!(A*X, seriestype=:scatter, color=:red)

I find Julia syntax feels closer to Matlab than to Python or R, just different enough to be frustrating for the first month or so (followed by a period of "oh, that's why Julia does it this way instead!")

I think you forgot one: "The principle of locality always applies" / "no spooky action at a distance" -- while local hidden variable interpretations have been ruled out, nonlocal ones are still very much on the table.

I don't know your field, but that hasn't really been my experience at all. Just about as much sloppiness all the way across the board.

My only systematic complaint here is that short format means much of the substance has to go in an inconvenient supplement, but that's hardly unique to Nature and Science.

Well yeah, obviously: high risk, high reward. Without the benefit of hindsight (and subsequent tests), a paper that proposes something truly transformative will look a lot like one that is just wrong (albeit, wrong in a creative/novel way). If you want to publish the former, you're going to have to take a lot of risks and publish a lot of duds. Don't we complain all the time that NSF doesn't fund high-risk science?

May have been three times even: in addition to the two Neoproterozoic "snowball earth" episodes they discuss here, there's also pretty decent evidence for an even older (~2.2 Ga) Paleoproterozoic one [1]

I've worked a little bit on things relevant to this, previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798130

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/102/32/11131.short

Hold on one minute! Geologist here -- you're partially right, but "sea glaciers" are absolutely part of the theory! Just to give you a snippet of the sort of things we're considering, here's one relevant quote from the abstract of a 2017 paper on the subject [1]:

> Some previous models have suggested that tropical open ocean or thin‐ice cover is possible; however, its viability in the presence of kilometer‐thick sea glaciers flowing from higher latitudes has not been demonstrated conclusively. Here we describe a new method of asynchronously coupling a zonal sea‐glacier model with a 3‐D global climate model and apply it to Snowball Earth.

As it happens, the key defining characteristic of a glacier is its ability to flow, i.e., "a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight" [2]. While today this mostly only only happens on top of the continents, models suggest that the Neoproterozoic snowballs may have had both normal (thin, brittle, non-flowing) sea ice and flowing sea glaciers! The contrast actually ends up being important in that [3]:

> Even if thin ice was not present in the tropical ocean, it could still have prevailed on large, low‐latitude lakes and confined seas like the modern Mediterranean, protected from planetary‐scale sea‐glacier flow by surrounding continents. This, by itself, may have provided sufficient refugia to explain the survival of photosynthetic algae and other marine organisms.

There's a surprisingly large number of papers on this, actually [4].

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2017...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier

[3] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

[4] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=neo...