Eh, NASA has been losing interplanetary landers for as long as its been launching them. The original Surveyor program, the pre-Apollo effort to land robotic probes on the moon, lost 2 out of 7.
I don't think there's any evidence here for decreasing ability to engineer space probes.
To some degree it probably doesn't matter. If you send $ on carbon offsets that don't offset carbon, you're still imposing an extra cost on releasing carbon and thus incentivizing yourself to release less. Basically a self-imposed carbon tax.
Obviously it would be even better if the $ went to actual carbon sequestration, but the program would presumably work to some degree if you just gave the $ to some totally unrelated cause (which seems to be the solution UC has settled on).
Partially historical inertia, partially the fact that commercial Fortran compilers have had decades to optimize numerical code to within an inch of its life.
Also, for at least the older versions of it, its a pretty small language. If you have a grad student who's already familiar with programming, they can probably teach themselves Fortran and start being able to make useful changes to your research code in a week or two. Compare, say, C++ where just learning the language enough to be useful could take most of a semester.
The no ID thing is interesting. The article mentions that as a major issue as well. Seems like it'd be a pretty cheap intervention to just issue all out-going prisoners a gov't photo ID on their release.
Seems like a good idea, but from the article it sounds like a lot of the difference between Maine and his earlier prisons was the culture that existed amongst the prisoners themselves. Obviously prison officials can try to influence this (indeed, it sounds like the authors transfer to Maine was an attempt to do that), but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to do with just, like, correspondence college degree programs and the like.
"we shouldn't lock people up for non-violent crimes except for ones similar to the one I was a victim of" seems like kind of a..limited view?
I don't think there's anything particular about SBF that makes him more likely to re-offend (And even if he wanted to, one would hope he'd have a hard time convincing folks to hand over another 8 billion for him to embezzle a second time).
Which isn't to say that I don't think he should go to jail (he definitely should!), just that I don't think he's any more jail worthy then people who engage in other forms of non-violent theft and/or fraud.
Glancing at a few graphs of death rates/year, they show, if anything, the opposite of what he claims. And note the effect he's claiming would be huge, the drug was on a market for a few years, so 500k would be on the order of 100k/year. Total cardiovascular deaths /year in the US run around 500k a year, so you'd be seeing a jump of 20% and then a similar decline a few years later. Its hard to imagine that would go unnoticed.
Why? Chris Collins was convicted of insider trading while in congress just a few years ago. I don't think there's any special protections for Congress-folk from insider trading laws.
I think the problem is that, historically, leagues claim to self-police but then the amounts of $ involved ends up meaning enough individuals can be bribed/threatened/etc. that "fair" matches end up fixed. In the best case, this ends up as fraud and so ends up in the courts anyways, in the worst case, the amounts of $ at play mean people turn to violence and...well that ends up in the courts.
So think the idea is that we're better off just making it a public matter from the start, rather then waiting till things escalate into other forms of crime.
Yea, I've played the location only version of this, and was surprised how good my intuition was at guessing where different photos were taken, even without any explicit clues in the photo.
Though my first try here was a picture of a large group of people waving French Flags, wearing "'98" t shirts and celebrating under the Arc d'Trimph. Some times intuition has to do more heavy lifting then others!
Seems the fastest way to clear this up would just be for the original team to send a sample to some other scientists for testing. That would solve any issues regarding other teams reproducing the material incorrectly, and at a first pass, what everyone cares about is whether its a superconductor at room temp, not how to make it.
Think the x.org foundation has the better claim, since they pronounce the name the same way (think OS X is "OS ten", from what I recall), and their logo is closer.
Eh, I imagine people will just keep using the old nomenclature.
Still, while the social network was presuambly the most valuable part of Twitter, gotta figure the brand was a non-trivial part of the 44 billion Musk paid to buy the company. Seems crazy to toss it after a few months.
Also, the new brand is bad. if someone told me to check out "x.com", I would assume they were directing me to a porn site. And the logo looks too much like the button you click to close your browser.
Yea, kinda feels like X.org would have a decent trademark case if they wanted to pursue it. Both the name and logo are really similar, and it seems like both companies are operating in similar enough categories that its not too hard to imagine there being confusion between the two.
Also people less likely to assume its the brand for a pornography site? Feel like people have developed a habit of avoiding (or seeking out) anything with a prominent "X" in the name on the Internets.
Some of it is just normal "popular thing sucks" backlash. But it had a weird cultural moment in the early 2000s where the press went kinda nuts with some of the psuedo religious themes, and there was a brief cottage industry for talking heads talking up apocryphal biblical books, Knight Templar conspiracy theories, etc which I think rubbed a lot people the wrong way.
This isn't really prohibition though, just restrictions on sales. The point isn't to make it impossible to get a drink, just make it more difficult, so that some margin of drinkers will be incentivized to do something else.
As a result, while Im sure some small blackmarkets for booze will spring up, there isn't really the same incentive for violent, organized criminal gangs to spring up as was/is the case with US alcohol/drug prohibition.
Hence my including "a diet lacking essential vitamins". But nutritional science figured out stuff like "preventing scurvy" pretty well several decades (or in some cases, centuries) ago. It's further attempts to refine diet to promote health that don't seem to have really led to any really actionable results, to the point that it seems worth considering that it might just not be possible.
Alternatively, I think the idea that outside some extremely broad parameters (not eating a diet lacking essential vitamins, under-eating to the point of malnourishment or over-eating to the point of severe obesity, etc) there are no particular nutritional needs is under-examined.
Nutritional Science seems based on the idea that relatively minor tweaks to diet can influence health outcomes. After several decades of failing to find what those tweaks might be, it always seems strange to me that people don't seem to consider that they might just not exist, and that the human body is fine with whatever food it gets, within some broad range.