cossatot

From what you've written, I think you are misinterpreting the standard theory, which is much more like 'your idea' (the second paragraph) than your conceptualization of it in the first paragraph, i.e. there was no moon-sized solid chunk removed. I don't think any scientists working on this think that.

Although there is some argument on the size of the impacting body (Theia), most/all the impact-origin theories hold that much of the planet was reduced to tiny liquid fragments and/or vaporized, including the material that became the Moon.

Here is a video of a simulation of the the 'standard' theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfImQOZp3hE

Something that is important to keep in mind, but is non-intuitive, is that all of the Earth with the exception of the upper crust (say, the upper 10-30 km of the Earth, radius 6378 km) is hot enough to melt if it was not under the confining pressure of the weight above it. Remove material from above the lower crust or mantle, and it undergoes decompression melting. So even if the material that coalesced to become the moon was removed through gentle caresses, without producing heat due to friction, that material would melt, and so would the rock surrounding the area that it was removed from. So you don't need to place the collision happening in a context where the Earth was much hotter (which it probably was to some degree regardless). Add in the enormous friction caused by collision, and you are in a situation where much of the Earth and possibly Theia are reduced to tiny particles of liquid (lava) or gas (vaporized basically), though these would cool to basically volcanic glass very rapidly in space. Then the Moon and the Earth's mantle were reassembled from these tiny particles.

Caveat: I have a PhD in geology but my research is not in this area and I don't follow it closely.

Please, someone, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is essentially how the European Commission allocates scientific funding--professors basically get big block grants to fund their labs to do whatever. Then there are some big grants that go to institutions, with those like ETH Zurich soaking up a lot of the funds, and then those institutions can distribute to the smaller ones as they see fit. Rubbing up to high-profile professors at ETH or GeoForschungsZentrum feels a lot like petitioning King Frederic of Prussia, rather than anything merit-based.

It's really not clear to me that this is a better system; at least in my field (geosciences) I don't think that the European labs are more innovative or productive than their American counterparts, which is what the 'fund people, not projects' idea is supposed to enable. Furthermore, it completely blocks nonacademic research funding, or much project-specific funding. For example, I work for an applied science nonprofit based in Italy, and we have a lot of ideas that would (in principle) be big hits at NSF, but there is no real avenue to fund ~€100-300k projects on an ad-hoc/project-specific basis.

I started out with Wordpress circa 2011 but I switched to Pelican/AWS once the plugins became available to use Jupyter notebooks in the blogs (I'm a geoscientist so I like to show numerical/computational stuff in the posts, although it's been a few years).

More recently I've implemented some cool plate tectonics visualizations in D3.js:

https://rocksandwater.net/blog/2020/11/tibet-blocks-js/ (tectonics of India-Asia collision)

https://rocksandwater.net/global-block-model/ (work-in-progress global tectonic plates/blocks)

For those who are primarily interested in blogging for writing purposes (i.e. primarily text based) then going with a wordpress/medium type centralized solution sounds great. For me, SSGs can better deal with the content that I make, and pushing to AWS is really not that hard.

Of course I'm not really interested in wide visibility either (pretty niche stuff here...).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07vdtBMG4Kg

This is in contrast to biking or rowing at a moderate pace (pusing myself and getting pretty sweaty but not collapsing or wanting to barf) for an hour once or twice a week. If I do this, I am still less fidgety but I feel more mentally fatigued later on the day, and sometimes the morning after, I exercise. I attribute this to nutrition/glucose levels and hydration, but even drinking a ton of water and snacking won't fully ameliorate the issues. The same thing happens after a weekend of playing hard, like kayaking one day and hiking with my daughter in my backpack the next day. I'm often pretty unproductive on Monday (oh well... ;)

What works best for me is moderate weight lifting followed by like 30 min of moderate rowing or biking, twice during the work week. Although I might feel a bit more depleted after rowing than not, my overall energy level is higher than if I skip the cardio, and I recover more quickly from my weekend activities.

If those problems are important, is there a way to work on them for pay? Like through a nonprofit, for example?

You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress blog and format it into Markdown but that shouldn't take a huge amount of time unless there is a lot of weird formatting or different media types.

1. Tightening feedback loops as much as possible. This means both recursively breaking down the problem into subproblems (as discussed by the author), and having very fast ways of doing formal testing, sensitivity testing, etc. Sometimes I'm working on a problem where I have to solve a system of equations that takes a few hours. This means that progress is really slow and I just won't be able to turn all the knobs that I want to or try alternative approaches. If I can subsample the data or the model domain down to 20 minutes, then that gets better but I still need to do something else during the downtime. If I can get it down to 2 minutes, then I can really make progress and if it's a few seconds then I can fly.

To do this I might have to invest a few hours or a day into making a testing dataset and environment that allows for very rapid iterations (but may not be useful once the particular issue is addressed), but I am often averse to doing because it feels like a waste of time, even though my velocity averaged over the month is usually higher if I do it.

2. Work on the hard problems first. This is in contrast to what the author suggests but I would rather take the bull by the horns knowing that once I address the hard parts it's going to be a lot easier. If the hard parts loom in the distance I worry that I will run out of time, because even on the easy parts it's possible to spend all of the time making small tweaks. Do the hard parts, or at least a draft implementation, first so you can allocate your time over the project more efficiently and ensure that you're not going to blow up when you're 80% done but just hit a massive roadblock.

I'm quite interested in the history of the era and might give it another go; I think I've got it on a bookshelf somewhere.

Or maybe your newborn is more capable than mine!

My experience was that the editor and reviewers were more focused on the impact of the work rather than the technical quality. It was all about whether the work was Nature-level status; there were no changes to any of the analysis or the body of the paper, just the intro and conclusions. It felt slimy so I decided to only publish in non-profit society journals from then on.

However, if they're Chinese, the authors may get paid quite a bit (~$50-100,000) as a reward for publishing in a top journal: https://www.enago.com/academy/paid-to-publish-the-chinese-ca...

The expected lifetime value of any article in Nature Neuroscience for the authors is well above $11,390, as that is probably 1% of the typical grant that will produce the article, and getting published in this venue makes it much easier to continue to get grants funded, to get top PhD students and postdocs, and to get promoted.

To be clear, though, the authors are not paying for this out of pocket. The funding agencies (i.e. the national government that supports the authors' research) is paying for it. Because many funding agencies now require authors to publish open-acess, Nature can more or less ask whatever price they want.

Until about a decade ago, it could be really hard to get papers accepted in my scientific field (geosciences, particularly geology) that used Bayesian methods because senior faculty and journal editors deemed them subjective and less rigorous than frequentist ‘letter tests’. This didn’t really change until more powerful computers and mathy scripting languages allowed the younger scientists to generate undeniable better results, particularly for very poorly conditioned inverse and parameter estimation problems. The wave of pro-Bayesian propaganda has been promulgated in no small part by the younger scientists who have been fighting for acceptance for a long time, but the resistance fought through editorial and grant proposal rejection letters, not blog posts, more powerful but less noisy. It’s also still unlikely to find Bayes stats classes in most geoscience departments, so practitioners are largely self-taught outside of Michigan, Caltech etc.

I imagine it’s been similar in many branches of science.

Then once you have all that out of the way, you can take the upper level classes in CS at the university instead of the community college.

My own daughter was born in late Jan 2020 so I think we dodged the fetal exposure issue but perhaps socialization impacts may be substantial (although at her age, her peers do not wear masks and some daycare providers have worn clear spit shields rather than masks; nonetheless I think she has socialized less than she would have a few years previously, but more than kids who don't go to daycare).

[1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/th...

[2]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10....