That's like saying driving from NYC to Sacramento is just a "Stepping Stone" to driving to SF. You've done most of the drive.
To get 1kg of U-235 requires 1.11kg at 90% purity, 1.67kg at 60% purity, and 140.6kg at natural 0.711% purity.
12,383 karma · joined April 4, 2013
To get 1kg of U-235 requires 1.11kg at 90% purity, 1.67kg at 60% purity, and 140.6kg at natural 0.711% purity.
I regularly drive on a two lane 55mph highway that school buses stop on and let kids out.
It runs through a reservation and has no sidewalks at all.
> modern brakes are incredibly good.
They're probably not worth that much of a superlative, and they're fundamentally limited by the tires.
This is just a pet peeve of mine, since it is used by people to argue that modern vehicles are so much vastly better than cars in the 1980s that we should be able to drive at 90mph like it is nothing.
But reaction times and kinetic energy are a bitch, and once traction control / stability assist hits its limits and can't bail you out, you might find out the hard way that you're not as good of a driver as you think you are, and your brakes won't stop you in time.
> Speed is the factor in collisions
This I will definitely agree with. Say it louder for everyone in the back.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/07/coronavirus-vaccine-dr-fauci...
> White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci that the chances of scientists creating a highly effective vaccine — one that provides 98% or more guaranteed protection — for the virus are slim.
> Scientists are hoping for a coronavirus vaccine that is at least 75% effective, but 50% or 60% effective would be acceptable, too, he said.
> The FDA has said it would authorize a coronavirus vaccine so long as it is safe and at least 50% effective.
From August 2020 before the phase III trials were complete.
The Phase III trials dropped in November and showed something like 98% efficacy, but they only followed people for ~3 months, over which time the vaccine actually is that effective. But waning of antibodies and immune escape by the virus severely drags that number down, although prevention of severe disease remains high due to T-cell immunity. People thinking that Fauci said the vaccines would be something like 98% effective against infection and transmission are committing a Mandela effect fallacy.
I vividly remember that time period because I was in the camp which expected this coronavirus to behave like other common cold coronaviruses and to periodically reinfect people. I was following that reinfection tracker on BNO news pretty religiously. And I recall vividly that the whole idea that the vaccine would be a magic shot that would instantly shut down the pandemic was something that _people_ wanted desperately to believe, but responsible authorities like Fauci weren't ever actually saying that. The initial Phase III results, combined with the lack of data on reinfections at the time, led to a lot of wildly optimistic beliefs which were not scientifically grounded at all.
Then Omicron happened, and it did actually surprise scientists with how much the virus drifted and how much it escaped from existing antibodies. Which was something that nobody really quite predicted, but was in line with general predictions that the coronavirus was never getting eradicated and would eventually become a new seasonal coronavirus. Fauci may have said some things in 2021 that were technically contradicted by Omicron, but there were a lot of wildly optimistic claims after the initial good results of the Phase III trials, and I suspect that any incorrect statements by Fauci were couched in uncertain terms. And nobody during this pandemic was batting for a thousand.
That is false equivalence. Obama's EOs would wind up going through the court system and getting overturned and ruled unconstitutional. The courts would tell him that he had committed executive overreach, and that what he wanted was the provenance of Congress, and that he needed to go do the hard work to get a law passed through that body.
Trump has already had EOs rules unconstitutional, and he's announced his intentions of ignoring the courts entirely. That violates our system of checks and balances, and is the comic-villian interpretation of what Obama was doing (he wasn't ever doing that).
What we have now is a CEO-President. And Companies don't have a representative Congress or Courts. The top-down hierarchical structure of the typical corporation would be called a dictatorship in the political sphere (particularly if the CEO owns >%50 of the voting shares). That isn't what our system of government is supposed to be. Arguably we shouldn't accept that in corporations, either, but at least we have some kind of freedom of association to quit and find another job.
Half the country has forgotten basic High School Civics 101 and "Separate but Equal" along with "Checks and Balances" and think this is entirely normal. But we aren't supposed to have one person who makes up the laws and enforces them, with no checks on their power. That would _accurately_ be described as a Dictator/King/Fascism or some other term in that general universe. The Constitution was written to prevent _exactly_ that.
And to reiterate, Obama was regularly checked by the Court system. Trump has indicated that he will ignore the Courts. That really is "crossing the Rubicon".
The only thing providing a check on Trump right now seems to be the stock market.
2. They don't care if the systems collapse, as long as they wind up with more than everyone else.
For configuration files, the write-fsync-move strategy works fine. Generally you don't need fsync, since most people don't use the file system settings that allow data writes to be reordered with the metadata rename.
I don't give that a lot of credit.
The SARS-CoV-1 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Guangzhou.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Wuhan.
This is the same fucking problem. One way or another we know it has a solution that doesn't involve WIV due to the SARS-CoV-1 spillover.
If we can explain SARS-CoV-1 without WIV then we can explain SARS-CoV-2 without WIV.
> I don't think spillover of SARS-1 from bats in Guangzhou is commonly proposed.
I never suggested that was definitely what happened, and I kind of doubt it, I think the wildlife trade is more likely. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if the range of the viruses in bats is larger than we know right now.
> Nobody expected spillover in Wuhan pre-pandemic though
Which doesn't mean it didn't happen.
> and the WIV absolutely wasn't situated based on any such expectation.
The central location made Yunnan a lot more accessible than if WIV was in Beijing, and puts it around about the same distance from Yunnan as Guangzhou is.
And SARS-CoV-1 occurred in Guangzhou. The closest known relative virus (WIV16) is 96% homologous to SARS-CoV-1 and was found in Yunnan as well, which is over 1,000 km away from Guangzhou. Either the range of the bats carrying these coronaviruses is much larger than anyone in the world (including Dr Shi) knows about, or else the "blast radius" of the animal trade in China is considerably larger than anyone knows about.
The outbreak was likely to happen in a large population center near where the bats were. The actual probability that it went north and happened in Wuhan was probably 1-in-12 or so. And the first time there was a coronavirus spillover and pandemic, it happened in Guangzhou. So we rolled 1d12 once and didn't get a 1 and then rolled it again and did. Not that mind-blowingly improbable.
Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study.
> Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November.
This has been asserted by a story in the NYT, but never proven and denied by WIV. There's literally no evidence of this.
> and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away,
Still roughly a thousand base pairs and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2. You can't get from RaTG-13 to SARS-CoV-2 in a lab, and there's no evidence they ever had live virus RaTG-13 in the lab.
> and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site
It had a novel PRRAR furin cleavage site which had never been seen before. Not one that humans would have ever guessed. That is actually strong evidence AGAINST it being lab-made.
And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. All the research they were doing on live virus was based on SARS-CoV-1. You can't get SARS-CoV-2 out of that. And while they sequenced RaTG-13, there is no evidence they ever had live virus, and RaTG-13 is still around a thousand mutations and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19980237254/downloads/19...
Those were still winged boosters, but were not helicopter-caught and did RTLS.
Musk didn't invent the concept.
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2005-6682
Lars and Beschet wrote their groundbreaking paper on lossless convexification of the powered descent problem at JPL before Lars went to SpaceX:
http://www.larsblackmore.com/CarsonAcikmeseBlackmoreACC11.pd...
You literally responded to a guy citing Lars Blackmore, who is the engineer that designed their landing algorithm--which was developed at NASA's JPL lab (before SpaceX existed).
Musk bet on landing rockets _because_ engineers told him that it was possible.
Give me a better term to use.
The problem is that it accurately and concisely describes a pattern of behavior that I see all the time, where people at businesses don't do the hard work to understand what they're doing, and they just copy methods around, unknowingly increasing the amount of technical debt in the company.
Getting a ballistic missile to hit the continental US is the first of many problems they'll need to solve before I start losing any sleep.
They also need to be able to hit a location accurately.
And they need a hypersonic reentry vehicle capable of delivering a nuclear payload without disintegrating the bomb or prematurely burning up the explosives in it.
Those are incredibly difficult problems, and each one keeps getting worse.
Yes, there probably are. If you haven't been working there for long enough to know who they are, then you shouldn't be YOLO'ing it.
The fact that it hasn't all been cleaned up yet is due to that being an order of magnitude harder than greenfielding your own standard. That doesn't mean that nobody is aware of it, or working on it.
I've absolutely worked for a decade on a codebase which had at least 5 different standards, and I was the one responsible for cleaning it all up, and we were understaffed so I could never finish it, but I could absolutely point you at the standard that I wanted you to follow. It also probably was somewhat deficient, but it was better than the other 4. It evolved over time, but we tried to clean it all up as we went along. Trying to ram another standard into the codebase without talking it over with me, was guaranteed to piss me off.
If there are 5 different standards in the codebase, don't just invent your own better way of doing things. That is literally the xkcd/Standards problem. Go find one of the people who have worked there the longest and ask which of the 5 existing standards are most modern and should be copied.
And as you get more experience with the codebase you can suggest updates to the best standard and evolve it. The problem is that you then need to own updating that whole standard across the entire codebase. That's the hard part.
If you aren't experienced enough with the codebase to be aggressive about standardization, you shouldn't be creating some little playground of your own.
The problem is that too many people in our industry are trying to get experience to land a job at Google so they try to turn every job into Google...
Although honestly I suspect that Google could do more to simplify internally, but that is the kind of work that doesn't get you promoted, while layers of additional smart-sounding complexity do.
And it really sounds to me like we've gone wrong as an industry, where you can't bolt together lego blocks and get working larger systems out of them, and have to worry about large scale spooky-action-at-a-distance effects. It is like having to worry about the interaction of your radio with your car's drive train. A simple fuse keeps the radio from killing the engine, and then the designer of the engine never has to think about the radio.
Yeah, so maybe try not to build anything that complex to start with.
definitely this one. there was a lot of projection of competency onto him, wanting him to be some kind of superhero assassin that would disappear. when in reality, he wasn't using that welrod pistol clone, and his gun was jamming with every shot.
but also he was self-destructive and definitely wasn't trying hard enough to not get caught. and that comes with the territory because you're not going to be well-adjusted and decide to assassinate someone in broad daylight. and i would pick self-destructive over arrogant. and he may just have not realized how distinct his facial features were.