Hacker News Reader

vo2maxeron Paul Erdős (2000)

You’re right. I thought that little tidbit of a fact would place Paul Erdős among the mathematical giants where he belongs. It was my error driven by my extreme admiration for this nomadic genius.

vo2maxeron Show HN: A free educational live stream platform for kids

The ultimate critic, my 11 year old daughter, just listened to the whole Shakespeare stream. That she peeled away from defeating Protea in Warframe speaks loudly of how much she enjoyed it. Great job!

vo2maxeron Potent human neutralizing antibodies elicited by SARS-CoV-2 infection

It supports effort towards this:

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/138003

vo2maxeron Lost Sense of Smell May Be Peculiar Clue to Coronavirus Infection

From the American Academy of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery:

https://www.entnet.org/content/coronavirus-disease-2019-reso...

vo2maxeron The MAA Math Meme and Cartoon Contest in Lieu of Southeastern Section Meeting

Video by Ben Orlin of Math with Bad Drawings fame:

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/author/mathwithbaddrawings/

vo2maxeron What does the coronavirus mean for the U.S. health care system?

At a 10% hospitalization rate, all hospital beds in the U.S. will be filled by about May 10. And with many patients requiring weeks of care, turnover will slow to a crawl as beds fill with Covid-19 patients.

If I’m wrong by a factor of two regarding the fraction of severe cases, that only changes the timeline of bed saturation by six days (one doubling time) in either direction. If 20% of cases require hospitalization, we run out of beds by about May 4. If only 5% of cases require it, we can make it until about May 16, and a 2.5% rate gets us to May 22.

vo2maxeron The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is 42

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g55m/episodes/guide

vo2maxeron Why researchers are creating “human yarn” and turning it into textile

A team of researchers led by Nicolas L’Heureux at the University of Bordeaux/INSERM is working on a new kind of medical textile that they hope will fly below the immune system’s radar. In tissue engineering research published earlier this month in the journal Acta Biomaterialia, the team introduced a completely biological human yarn that can be twisted, woven, braided, or knotted to produce textiles with different properties.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17427...

vo2maxeron A Text Renaissance

Twitter can communicate novel ideas in the space of threads. I have seen it cleverly crafted by scientists, entrepreneurs, and those in various areas of technology. As much as it frequently descends into the inane quip, Twitter can illuminate areas of inquiry and serve as a gateway to further immersion in the topic.

vo2maxeron An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra (2012)

Douglas Crockford on Monads:

In addition to its being good and useful, it’s also cursed and the curse of the monad is that once you get the epiphany, once you understand - "oh that's what it is" - you lose the ability to explain it to anybody else.

https://youtu.be/dkZFtimgAcM

vo2maxeron Piled Bodies, Overflowing Morgues: Inside America’s Autopsy Crisis

I was fortunate to have Michael Baden as one of our professors at Columbia. His lectures were extremely entertaining and packed to the rafters. Even with his showmanship, I don’t believe anyone in my class went on to forensic pathology.

vo2maxeron Visual Chronology of Science and Discovery (According to Asimov’s Book)

Interactive version: https://borismus.github.io/asimov/web/cross-shape/#geometry

vo2maxeron Who Needs High-Tech Film Editing When There's the Thrill of the Single Shot?

The most spectacular single shot film I’ve ever watched is Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov. I have the dvd but it’s worth seeking in any available format.

vo2maxeron Climate Change: It’s a Buzzkill for Bumblebees, Study Finds

Researchers found that bumblebee populations had recently declined by 46 percent in North America and by 17 percent across Europe when compared to a base period of 1901 to 1974. The biggest declines were in areas where temperatures spiked well beyond the historical range, which raises concerns that climate change could increase the risk of extinction for bees, which are already threatened by pesticide use and habitat loss.

vo2maxeron Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance on a $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop

It was $199 a month ago:

https://www.dealnews.com/Motile-AMD-Ryzen-3-14-Laptop-for-19...

vo2maxeron Sleep, health, and human capital: Evidence from daylight saving time

Also related to the dangers to health of Daylight Saving Time: A Chronobiological Evaluation of the Acute Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...

vo2maxeron Commotio Cordis or “Agitation of the Heart”

Of related interest: Her campaign to make lacrosse safer goes on, 20 years after her son’s death

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/01/31/lacrosse-he...

vo2maxeron Artificial intelligence will do what we ask, and that's a problem

I’m sorry. You’re correct. I got carried away by the Asimov connection.

vo2maxeron Books on Silicon Valley

Can you expand on how a link to a bookseller adds or subtracts from the article’s content?

vo2maxeron Death on Mars

This is a powerful argument from Katie Mack, true for the next few billion years:

There is virtually nothing we — or the Universe — could do to Earth that would make it less habitable than Mars. Global warming, nuclear winter, extinction-level asteroid... still easier to live in caves here than there.

vo2maxeron Wisdom of the crowd? Building better forecasts from suboptimal predictors

Original article:

Forecasting high-dimensional dynamics exploiting suboptimal embeddings

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-57255-4

vo2maxeron Internet use reduces study skills in university students

Some definitions and facts on addiction and substance dependence, terms frequently used incorrectly:

Addiction Medicine (ADM) is a recognized physician subspecialty of the American Board of Medical Specialties. [1]

Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences. [2]

Dependence or physical dependence is used in the psychopharmacological context in a narrower sense, referring solely to the development of withdrawal symptoms on cessation of drug use. [3]

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/nidamed-medical-health-professiona...

[2] https://www.asam.org/resources/definition-of-addiction

[3] https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/terminology/definition1/...

vo2maxeron Toshiba Touts Algorithm That’s Faster Than a Supercomputer

For a gentler title and more information: Combinatorial optimization by simulating adiabatic bifurcations in nonlinear Hamiltonian systems

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/4/eaav2372.full

vo2maxeron The student loan problem that no one talks about: Graduate school debt

Graduate School Debt: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecond...

vo2maxeron Harvard Just Discovered That PowerPoint Is Worse Than Useless

You might be interested in Gene Weingarten’s Pickin’ up where the Apostrophe Protection Society left off,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/gene-weing...

vo2maxeron League of Legends gamers could become California’s newest workforce

Now I understand what you meant. Thank you.

vo2maxeron League of Legends gamers could become California’s newest workforce

The issue seems to be whether gamers should be considered employees or independent contractors. I’m not sure how your statement follows.

vo2maxeron Can You Locate Iran? Few Voters Can

The poll is telling given survey findings of only 36% correct answers on geographical knowledge among high school students:

https://calgeography.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/GeoEduRepor...

vo2maxeron We lost tremendous amount of short term memory thus chimps can do this, we can’t

I took your statement, “it looks like nobody on the thread is an expert scientist,” literally. It could be that I’m confused by what you mean with “expert scientist.” You qualified two from the list but questioned Sharon Redobre’s (I misspelled her name in my comment) inclusion as merely being a veterinarian. When I read her curriculum vitae [1], I can’t help but conclude that she is both, an expert in her field, primates and exotic animals, and a scientist based on the definitions I consulted [2, 3, 4].

I will not discuss the others you excluded; it would be tedious and belaboring the point.

Finally, I agree with those who refuted the original poster despite his answers to their counterpoint. Someone posted a claim that was argued with civility over the chain of comments, not unlike what happens in HN. How such a discussion is tiresome, I leave to individual preference. :-)

[1] https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sharon-redrobe-obe-11139912

[2] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/scie...

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scientist

[4] https://sciencecouncil.org/about-science/10-types-of-scienti...

vo2maxeron We lost tremendous amount of short term memory thus chimps can do this, we can’t

Some of those involved in the discussion:

Brad Wyble [1, 2]

[1] https://psych.la.psu.edu/directory/bpw10

[2] http://wyblelab.com/

Sharon Rodobre OBE [3, 4]

[3] https://lafeber.com/vet/redrobe/

[4] https://blooloop.com/features/twycross-zoo-sharon-redrobe-on...