I live in Germany and my general practitioner actually prescribed a homeopathic remedy once without informing me that it was. I could have filled the prescription at my regular pharmacy and taken the damn thing without even knowing. Often, a doctor's office will cover both scientific medicine and pseudoscientific approaches under the same roof, by the same doctor(s).

Really, the line between scientific medicine and magical treatments is often quite blurry over here. It's scary. And the government allowing it to be covered by insurance lends it a stupid amount of undeserved legitimacy. And this is not necessarily because homeopathy was invented in Germany, as other hokum is also covered by insurance, like reflexology and acupuncture.

What most of these studies are saying is that these barriers do nothing to stop aerosol. But they do stop the direct spray, as the scientists she quotes do say. If transmission was unique to aerosol, barriers would do nothing, but transmission is also possible through the drops.

That these barriers limit ventilation (and thus cause aerosol to linger longer) is pure speculation. The article discusses an article from 2013 which concludes that plastic divisions (in hospital rooms) could protect some people while funneling aerosol to others (though the article does not speak of aerosol). Scientists are then quoted as saying that these screens would probably not protect students at all, which stands to reason given that they're all locked up together in a classroom. But what about dividing customers from employees at stores? That's what the screens are for and none of the research in the article even suggests that it doesn't work.

None of this is my conclusion, but rather what the article itself says. While the article does a good job at presenting evidence somewhat impartially, the slashdot title and summary imply that screens are counterproductive. They're not, they're just not the end all of protection.

Yet another article saying "X doesn't protect us 100% from COVID, so why bother? It gives people a false sense of security". Where X has been masks, travel restrictions, plastic dividers, closing shops and who knows what else.

I can't really speak for the history of the stupid X thing, but I can tell you that I've been hearing this from South Americans (and Mexicans) for at least 15 years, so it's definitely not a US exclusive.

This is not a term used exclusively by the American left. Many Spanish-speaking people are trying to push this in an effort to make Spanish a less male-centered language because they feel that the using the male adjectives to mean both men and women is sexist. It's a stupid idea, and not only because I think the base reasoning of Spanish=sexist is stupid, but also because using X instead of a vowel (like in latinx) breaks a bunch of things in Spanish. If they're going to do this, they should instead use the now-more-popular E (latine), which breaks nothing and comfortably sits between A and O.

That anyone would export this shit to English is beyond stupid, as English is already gender-less.

Just because the console is capable of 4k resolution and 120hz refresh rate, it doesn't mean that games will actually run at 4k@120hz.

Unless Dirt 5's engine is ridiculously lightweight (we're talking CSGO levels of lightweight), I don't see 4k@120hz happening on a console. Even high-end computers can't reliably push that for any recent AAA tittle.

You'd lose that bet. It was glob.glob(...) returning files in a non-reproducible way.

The summary and the article are ridiculous. The real scoop is simple: some scientific programmer assumed that some file-listing/loading function (os.listdir, maybe?) returned always the same order of files, which it does not. It is not a bug in Python at all, as it is well described in the documentation. It was a stupid assumption made by some PhD student, which in science almost always have terrible programming habits and very superficial knowledge of the language they're programming in.

Truth is, when a group publishes their code with a paper, it is rarely used by anyone else, unless it's published and maintained as a toolbox. Taking the code off a scientific paper, which was used for exactly that one paper and nothing else, and using it with blind faith is never a good idea. This code is not audited or tested in any meaningful way. So why publish it? As the authors of the original paper and the paper that published the correction very directly stated, that's how science is supposed to work. Publishing your code is now done for the same reason that one publishes all the details of the experiment and all the math behind the models: so that the scientific community can evaluate the work and see it if holds up.

- Ok Google, stop spying on me
- Sure thing!

Actually, they say that they corrected for age and BMI, though they don't specify how.

What worries me the most (from a scientific point of view) is that they say that they only found a statistically significant effect between the 0-10 and the 21-30 pushups groups. I assume that means they used pairwise tests. They report the 95% confidence intervals, which then means that they didn't correct for multiple comparisons. This is an instance of p-hacking, if I ever saw one.

A better route (and quite obvious, given their data) would have been to do linear regression and report its significance level. Given what they reported, though, my guess is the linear regression just wasn't significant and they wanted to publish something. Anything.

This is why medicine, among other fields, is suffering from a reproducibility crisis.

Oh no, it's Y2K all over again!

I once booked a return flight from Bergen (Norway) to somewhere in Mexico. Once there, I had to change my plans and wouldn't be going back to Bergen, but staying in Munich, where I had a layover.

When I first got to the airport in Mexico, I told the people at the counter about it, just so they would know and not wait for me at the Munich airport, and the employee at the counter told me that making any changes to my reservation would cost $300 USD. He wouldn't budge, so I just walked away in Munich (I had no checked luggage). What the hell do they expect?

And just as I clicked on submit and went back to the full article, it dawned on me that the names are in alphabetical order, so ignore me; I'm just a bit more ignorant than I thought.

Wouldn't it be much more intuitive to name the different versions of Android by number instead of sweet-du-jour in the summary? How many people not in the business know by heart the order in which these randomly-assigned names came out?

I understand that the writing makes it obvious in which order they were rolled out, but were they all major versions? Subversions? Are subversions even named?

(Mind you, the full article does have version numbers next to the names)

Except AMD cards are also very low on supply and high on prices because they are quite efficient at mining (bang for buck).

In fact, their Vega 56 and 64 have been impossible to find pretty much since launch, and when you do find them, their prices are ridiculously high because miners are willing to pay them. Their RX 580 and 570 are doing no better either.