The beginning areas of the video game The Secret World are in New England, and it unironically nails this vibe really well.

• rowhammer
• rainbow table
• global interpreter lock
• race condition (atrocity?)
• core dump

The thing that gets me is that these people are all really smart. If someone is willing to lie and do math, why not work at an unscrupulous pharma/finance company? They’d make way more money and do way less work. I’d even argue that fraud in the private sector is less unethical - if investors give money to a fraud they deserve to lose it, and regulators take an adversarial stance and have whole orgs (in theory) policing fraud like the SEC and FDA.

It takes a really particular kind of scumbag to seek a position of public trust, make a bunch of trainees financially and professionally dependent on them, accept taxpayer money intended to help cancer patients, then commit fraud.

Wife and I did Dorf Romantik on a recent long train ride and we had a great time. It’s very cozy/calm which helps when you want to stay low energy and not bother your neighbors. And I fully agree with the battery pack idea - it gives me a ton of peace of mind when I’m traveling.

What in the world is the original context here? Have these people never encountered a puddle before? Her foot is completely immersed in gutter water and his white pants are about to be soaked and gross.

According to the article they’re spending $17 billion to increase production.

I like how the first message is in both languages, but the second is only in English.

You would really like the Three Body Problem.

A very cool idea, however the headline is misleading - NASA has not even remotely committed to running this mission. They’ve selected the swarm project as one of 13 projects in their innovation program and given it up to $175k to study feasibility. That’s roughly a postdoc for two years. This is far, far from committing the hundreds of millions or billions needed for the execution of this mission.

Great shot! LA Union Station?

On Mander, fighting the clickbait pop science menace is every citizen’s duty. Are you doing your part?

You and I already agree with the sentiment of this message and interpret this claim charitably, which the intended recipients of this message (US Republicans) will mostly not do. This message needs to convince them, not us, and it would be a far stronger argument if it cited a source.

The Surviving Mars OST is spectacular, though the gameplay is just good.

New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.

The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.

Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.

Largely agree with all your other points though.

Three of the six currently operating maglevs are in communist china

This is a really cool read with lots of very strong results, but “show” doesn’t seem like the right word for the specific claim the article makes from the paper. In grad school we had a professor who led the first year seminar who drilled into us the importance of using the right word to communicate inferential strength. “Is consistent with” is weaker than “suggests” is weaker than “shows” is weaker than “proves” (really only mathematicians should use “prove”). Section E3 on this website has a similar hierarchy.

My “speak up in seminar” reflex was going off here because this article jumps one - possibly two - whole levels of inferential strength from what’s actually written in the paper.

In the paper, the inferential claims in the "communal effort’ part are:

These differences clearly suggest a lack of evident social stratification…

further revealed no clear signs of social stratification

It’s possible I missed a stronger inferential claim about the communal aspect - Please correct me if so!

I think “are consistent with” or “suggest” would more accurately communicate the strength of the results. The evidence presented that the drainage system was a communal effort is that the houses were the same size and the graves didn’t seem to be differentiated. This seems like absence of evidence for a state authority/hierarchy, not evidence of absence.

I love that more and more open source science projects are streamlining deployment and encouraging folks to just try it. This one has a binder link in the README (though it seems to be failing… may need some TLC). I really think this is a positive template for what academia could eventually become!

Not a huge fan of the Israel situation but it does seem like they often stay out at the US’s request:

During the 1990–1991 Gulf War, Iraq carried out a missile campaign against Israel, in which it launched 42 modified Scud missiles (designated Al-Hussein) at Israeli cities with the strategic objective of provoking Israel into launching retaliatory attacks and potentially jeopardizing the multinational coalition formed by the United States against Iraq, which had full backing and extensive contributions from other Muslim-majority states; Israel did not respond to the Iraqi missile attacks due to American pressure, and Iraq failed to gather support for its occupation of Kuwait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq–Israel_relations

They successfully converted β-pinene into two everyday painkillers, paracetamol and ibuprofen, which are produced on ~100,000 ton scales annually.

At first I couldn’t believe that we make 100,000 TONS of paracetamol (acetaminophen) a year.

1E5 tons per year / 6E9 people on earth = 17 grams per person per year

My tylenol pills are 500mg, and ~34 pills per year seems about right.

Wow. At a density of 1.3 g/cm^3 that’s about half an olympic swimming pool of acetaminophen a year.

but like everyone else who leaves academia I lost access to journals after finishing my grad program.

I still have my academic account but the sci-hub experience is so much easier that I just use that anyway.