rflrob

Yes, to two 737s, and the cause was a software bug. https://mentourpilot.com/how-alaska-airlines-reacted-to-two-...

And minor nit: the airline is Alaska Airlines (no final n).

Seeing other comments fault the Southwest pilot for not starting faster, but it’s not obvious to me that there was any significant delay—a few seconds at most between lining up and starting the roll down the runway. The diagram isn’t to scale, so it’s hard to tell. I wonder how much faster an expedited departure could have been.

Assuming the sibling to your comment linking to Terrence Tao is the correct one, the resolution is to harshly penalize being confidently wrong. The points are proportional to log(2p) (where p is your subjective probability of being correct, so you can theoretically lose all the points ever by saying your confidence is 100% and choosing the wrong answer.

One of the questions my friends and I have made mostly standard for tangible things is “can you buy it at Target”. Not all tangible things can be bought, and not all things that can ge bought are for sale at Target, but it’s a broad enough set that it’s proven to be reasonably effective. Plus, none of us own breadboxes.

The conclusion that “prices rose” is the correct one. What you should not conclude, even though the inflation has been at 20% all year is that “prices are (still) rising”.

I’m contributing to my niece’s 529—worst case scenario being she doesn’t need as much as her family has saved, and any excess can be transferred to another family member or taken out for a relatively modest penalty. And, I assume if there’s a major restructuring of college costs over the next 20 years, more flexibility will be introduced for getting money out as well.

The routes they mentioned in the press release (NYC-LHR, LAX-Hawaii) are almost entirely over water.

From TFA:

> The hardest 1% of the technical problem, automating the surface streets and interchanges, would end up being worth only about $600/truck/yr. Level 4 truck autonomy has less value than a daily coffee.

Note that savings is $600, not $600,000. For a $100K truck, that’s 0.6% per year. Not nothing, but they’re happy to let someone else do the Herculean effort to get to L4.

For each programmer on a team that could do it in a year for, say, $240K in comp, you’d need 400 truck-years ($40M worth of trucks for 1 year) to make it a break even proposition. How many programmer-years do you think it would take to build L4 autonomous trucks? How many programmer-years have FAANG alone (leave out auto manufacturers or taxi apps) spent over the last decade on autonomous driving?

My naive assumption is that there’s a combination of two factors going on: 1) the blast force will be proportional to the area through which it’s transmitted, and a narrow hose will have a lot less area than the lid of a can, and 2) if the hose is fairly flexible rubber, there will be significant reduction of the force over the length of the tube.

As a student who went through gifted programs in public elementary and in private middle and high school, but otherwise not plugged into the literature on it, what does the evidence look like that gifted/magnet programs actually provide significant tangible benefit to the students? One way to break it down would be to look at the relative number of students in these categories:

1. Students identified as gifted who do well because of their gifted program/who would have done well if they were in a gifted program. 2. Students identified as gifted who would do well regardless of whether they had a gifted program, even if they might do marginally better in a gifted program. 3. Students not identified as gifted who would benefit from additional resources/gifted peers in their non-gifted program 4. Students not identified as gifted who would not particularly benefit from gifted peers/already have adequately resourced classrooms.

I would have a hard time believing that the number of students in any of those categories is negligibly small. So then the question becomes how do we, as a society, best balance the tradeoffs between them. For any given student, we don't generally have the ability to try it both ways and see what would have been better, and of course any given parent will tend to prefer to take any tiny marginal improvement in opportunity for their children, regardless of whether it's net beneficial for society. But some of the role of society is to not allow people to take actions with mismatched externalities.

If there are more #3 students than #1 students (and/or the benefits to society are larger), and if we cannot distinguish between #2 students and #1 students, then yeah, let's get rid of gifted programs.

For myself, I think I was probably a #2—I had affluent, educated parents, benefited from significant extra-curricular enrichment, and could probably have had more enrichment with several tens of thousands of extra dollars per year of saved tuition. At what point could my parents have known that I was a #2?

It’s one thing to advocate not using Gmail for your own mail, and another entirely to advocate not sending any mail to gmail accounts from your own mail server, which is what TFA is really covering.

In the spirit of TFA, if your hypothesis were true, what evidence could we find that would be consistent with it? What evidence would disprove it?

"Whether the roots were uplifted and the city had been informed" and "was Mr. Peña irresponsibly impaired" are arguments about the merits of the case. The point of the article is that Bird agreed to indemnify the city (compensate the loss incurred to the other party), and Bird claims that by agreeing to the ToS, users agree to indemnify Bird. I am not a lawyer, but it seems untenable that the buck stops with the user in all circumstances.

> This is not just an academic exercise. This type of technological progress has the potential to transform personal genomics—where individual genomes can be used to inform health decisions.

I don’t think genetic interpretation is yet or will soon be at a point where a significant number of people (say, greater than a half of a percent) can benefit structural genome information, much less have the field be transformed. Heck, we have a hard enough time resolving the impact of single nucleotide variants in coding regions. While large copy number variants have the potential for significant impacts, for the most part we can resolve these pretty well to the necessary level of detail with current tech.

I’m having trouble getting the patent to load on my phone, but my interpretation of the “codon optimized” patented sequence is that although the sequence codes for a naturally occurring protein sequence, the RNA triplets that are actually used are not naturally occurring.

MolBio 102 for software engineers: each amino acid is coded for by 3 RNA bases. However, the number of possible RNA triplets (4^3=64) is greater than the number of amino acids (20), so some amino acids have multiple triplets assigned to them. For instance, both UUA and CUG code for the same amino acid (leucine), but one of them is more efficient to express. The implicit argument is that consistent preferential use of these optimal codons is evidence of genetic engineering rather than natural evolution.

The iBooks definitely had them. Back on dialup, you could hook up your airport base station to the modem and initiate a connection as needed, but it was just as easy to plug the phone jack straight into your laptop.

Is this the study? “The mood effects but not the physiological effects of intravenous caffeine were similar to those previously observed with cocaine in studies using similar methods and subjects.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7714788/

While I’m of the opinion that trans-generational epigenetic inheritance is not typically important in human biology, the most convincing argument I’ve heard is that the egg cells that will become a grandchild are present and post-meiotic in the fetus of the mother, so exposures to the grandmother could have effects 2 generations down without requiring some relatively exotic pattern of inheritance.

I believe that the issue is that the harms are broad but relatively small for each person, while the benefits are quite concentrated for those who do profit. Thus, there aren't going to be many people where loosening copyright terms is their primary factor in voting for a legislator or lobbying, while the large rights-holders will put considerable effort into maintaining or extending the status quo.

There's a lot of sibling comments going on about whether the value they're looking at is the right one. What the Times is showing as their headline number is Positive Predictive Value (True positive/(TP+FP)), which depends on the prevalence in the population. The "methods section" here is a little vague, but given the low prevalence I'm willing to accept on face value that it's basically accurate (i.e. that it's not assuming that the families getting these tests are not orders of magnitude more likely to be positive for these diseases). If the test result truly said one patient's 'daughter had a “greater than 99/100” probability of being born with Patau syndrome', then that's concerning, but given the fairly narrow quotes around the number, I'd suspect that what is actually on the test result is not inconsistent with the fairly low PPV on these screens.

The larger issue as I see it is that the medical system around these screenings are not well versed in the statistics and able to communicate that to patients. "Eight [patients] said they never received any information about the possibility of a false positive, and five recalled that their doctor treated the test results as definitive." It's hard to know what happened in the room when the doctor spoke with them or what was on those particular patients tests, and that's (one hopes) the worst medical news those people will receive for a long time so listening comprehension is understandably impaired, but there needs to someone available who can help them interpret, even days or weeks later, and these people were let down by the entire system, not just the test manufacturers.

From your PDF:

> Administrators should examine programs and policies and how white supremacy impacts student outcomes (e.g., tracking, course selection, intervention rosters).

> White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when... Students are tracked

I interpreted this to mean that tracking is (like course selection) a student outcome that can be impacted by "white supremacy culture", not that tracking is, inherently and unavoidably, a sign of white supremacy. If there's burglars around, unlocked doors are usually correlated with burglary; that doesn't mean you can't leave your doors unlocked, but you're going to want to be careful about it. Similarly, if you live in a society with pervasive racism (read: most societies), it's possible to track students in a way that doesn't reinforce those racist trends, but probably only if you're careful about it.

I think I probably agree with you that "white supremacy culture" is, as a term, perhaps more aggressive than it needs to be. Not being deeply embedded in this debate, I'd assume it's going to turn off more people who hear it, think "I'm not a klansman, so this isn't something I need to address" than it will engage people who think racism is bad but haven't considered how their own (probably unexamined) practices are leading to outcomes they don't want.

I am skeptical-but-open on the behavior-alteration hypothesis, but I do think it’s worth dropping in this paragraph from the Discussion. Getting around it will take some really clever experimental design.

> Alternate explanations for the effects of T. gondii on humans cannot be ruled out. It is possible, eg, that individuals with certain personality characteristics behave in a manner that makes it more likely that they will become infected.

> We know parachutes work despite never having proven it in an rct trial.

In fact, the one study examining parachute use showed no effect! ;-) https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

My favorite story of algorithmic pricing gone mad was discovered by a postdoc in my grad school lab, leading to an out of print book being listed on Amazon for over $23 million: https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Experiment is surely not the only way to acquire knowledge, but it’s one of the easiest ways to reduce the frequency of tricking yourself into reinforcing what you wanted to believe to begin with. As you say, the system of knowledge production is imperfect, so let’s try to use rigorous tools more often, not less.

I think we all agree that financial literacy is probably, on average, good. But, as the parent post said, the magnitude is unknown. Is it the “passport to financial freedom”, in which case it’s probably reasonable to spend a lot of class time in school on it? Or is it just nice to have, and outcomes are mostly dependent on other factors, in which case we could just as well use those classroom hours for something else. This is a hard thing to disentangle from good survey data, and nearly impossible from the kind of anecdotal reporting in most of the article.

Personally, I think some of the article cuts against its own thesis. “ Leanne Fielden fits the bill for the disadvantaged. She is an unemployed woman living in the deprived Middlesbrough region. […] Her profile belies her own financial expertise. “I’m fortunate that I’ve worked for Barclaycard and Visa. I often help family and friends with money issues,” she says. So she herself has no fear of finance.” If financial literacy were a magic bullet, why is she disadvantaged? Let’s not motte and Bailey this argument from the title (“financial literacy is a passport to financial freedom”) to the more defensible position of “financial literacy is helpful, in most situations”.

Paragraph 4: “Slowly, slowly, slowly, the terminology of ‘junk DNA’ [has] started to die,”

Rest of the article: continues to use the term "Junk DNA".

For the non molecular biologists out there, the 3-base codon AGC gets converted to the amino acid Serine.

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

I think we agree? The Chinese government wasn't open about SARS, and despite their apology in 2003 (by which point SARS was on the path to containment), I don't have reason to believe they've become more open about such things in the last couple decades. I am by no means a China expert, so you may disagree with my priors about their behavior.

My experience in biology labs (though not virology labs) suggests that a leak of benign research is plausible, and that if it did happen odds are good that there wouldn't be a ton of documentation to suppress. Mistakes happen all the time, and if researchers filled out a report every time a tube was dropped or some PPE was ignored in a "pretty safe" scenario, there'd be almost no time for research.

I still think the total number of human-animal contacts outside the lab are at least an order of magnitude greater than inside of it, so I would rank the probabilities as (natural > benign research leak >> gain of function leak).

> I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious.

I don't find it suspicious at all, precisely because I don't trust the Chinese government. In my estimation of the CPC, the following probabilities are all roughly equal (and close to 1):

* P(suppress investigation | natural origin)

* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of benign research)

* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of gain of function)

From a Bayesian point of view, then, P(lab leak | suppress investigation) is going to be almost equal to P(lab leak).