I also genuinely do not understand the appeal. But I also don’t understand the appeal of reaction videos on YouTube or network cop dramas, and they are also profoundly popular with stupid people.

got lucky

That is not how I’d characterize 2016 at all. Also, I would like to refer you to argument number two.

1. 2016
2. He currently works for a crypto betting market
3. 2016

Why on earth are we still listening to Nate Silver?

1. Hack together a proof of concept
2. Works well enough that management slaps a “done” sticker on it
3. Pile of hacks becomes load bearing
4. One or two dependencies change, the whole thing falls over
5. Set evenings and weekends on fire to fix it
6. Management brags about moving fast and breaking things, engineers quit and become cabbage farmers and woodworkers
7. New graduates are hired, GOTO 1

I work a 9ish-to-5ish in a science field, salaried. Nobody really cares when I arrive or when I leave, as long as the work gets done. Sometimes science stuff goes off the rails and I have to arrive early or stay late, but I keep track of my hours and arrive a little early or leave a little early on other days to compensate.

I mean, it took four years of college and more than six of a PhD to get to this point, which stunk. But now I can monitor my chemicals stirring in a flask for a few minutes while hanging out on my phone, which is nice.

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Realistically, how much worse could they get? The disasters so far have only been limited by the number of people they can kill due to the plane’s capacity.

Probably would have been different if they failed after taking off from New York or Chicago instead of Indonesia or Ethiopia, because, of course.

Beats me. I’m just a chemist who managed my facility’s NMR magnets (built like MRIs but with different electronics for chemical analysis) for a few years. We had to pull some stunts to keep those magnets alive sometimes, but it was always a matter of how soon, not if, a shipment of cryogens would arrive. Can’t imagine trying to keep MRIs from quenching in a war zone.

No idea, but if it were up to me I’d spend that rationed power on ventilators and such keeping patients alive. Losing cryogens stinks, but you can top them off without any power as long as you have stock or deliveries. And I’d rather a magnet quench than have to explain to a dead person’s family that their loved one’s life was less valuable than some helium and a chunk of ceramic.

The cryogens boil off at a pretty consistent rate no matter what, but the recovery/recompression systems do require power. So once power is cut, any boil off isn’t recovered.

Superconducting magnets (like in MRIs) can run effectively forever when at the right temperature. Turning them off requires a complex process of draining off that current slowly and carefully so that the magnet isn’t damaged. Hard to do on a normal day, and profoundly harder if there’s no power.

I think the point is that even by the standards of his time, he was horrible. And that was an era where a common legal execution method was strapping you to a wagon wheel and beating you to death over the course of an hour. He was horrible compared even to that.

Let’s just ignore the partially burned polymers and aluminum and stuff billowing out of the boosters, huh?

Elon is a shithead, but that does not make SLS a good rocket.

They are cooled by liquid helium, but also have a liquid nitrogen outer dewar as well with a vacuum insulator in between. The N2 takes the brunt of the ambient heat so you don’t have to top off the (much more expensive) helium as often.

I don’t agree that this is the real deal. The effects were barely visible, and only in a subset of the patient group. Lilly will certainly make a ton of money pushing this on desperate family members of regressing loved ones, though. And there’s no way every single older person is going to get tested for amyloid buildup and take this for years before symptoms start.

And that’s not even considering the issue of whether amyloid buildup is a cause or effect of the disease. Given how poorly anti-amyloid therapies have been actually working in the clinic, I think it’s an effect. But a lot of powerful people have bet their careers on the amyloid hypothesis and it’s hard to turn that big of a ship around.