See also Dana Lewis and the OpenAPS movement. Dana gave a talk at the NZ LinuxConf a few years back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p76hGxv3-HE

I'm not sure if death cheated Stephen Hawking out of a Nobel prize, but I'm damn sure that sexism and racism have cheated dozens of women and Black people out of a Nobel prize.

Facebook is the problem; they are tapping into inbuilt behavioural hacks to encourage engagement that have a side-effect of spreading misinformation.

Arguing that the people are the problem is like building steps with 1 metre drops, then blaming the people for subsequent injuries.

Shutting down Facebook will stop the monopolisation of these hacks.

Related XKCD

Just in case this hasn't already been posted, here's the list of the top 20 (total 2019 single-use plastic waste in million metric tons):

ExxonMobil (5.9)
Dow (5.6)
Sinopec (5.3)
Indorama Ventures (4.6)
Saudi Aramco (4.3)
PetroChina (4)
LyondellBasell (3.9)
Reliance Industries (3.1)
Braskem (3)
Alpek SA de CV (2.3)
Borealis (2.2)
Lotte Chemical (2.1)
INEOS (2)
Total (1.9)
Jiangsu Hailun Petrochemical (1.6)
Far Eastern New Century (1.6)
Formosa Plastics Corporation (1.6)
China Energy Investment Group (1.5)
PTT (1.5)
China Resources (1.3)

There's also a song about this:

Evo Devo

It's #2 in infectious diseases in terms of average deaths since mid December (just behind TB), to be #1 in a week or so. See the last graph in the COVID-19 infographic datapack.

Or maybe rather than the system, the neural networks inside the brains of the participants were learning and adapting, leading to an increase in accuracy.

What? People can learn and improve over time? Crazy talk! If that were true, then any static electrical signal-to-text algorithm could be used (as long as it can be consciously modified), with the added benefit of it not needing to adapt to anyone.

Assuming India gets a similar expansion in cases to that of Wuhan, it'll be 10 times higher [in terms of positive test results] in two weeks, not four. And the number of actual cases now could be over twenty times what is seen in the diagnoses.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

That $10k is the "raw materials" / research cost - it currently requires single-cell sequencing of a targeted gene set at extremely high depth (e.g. hundreds of thousands to millions of cells). With US insurance markup I wouldn't be surprised if it were in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In any case, this is not a one-time cost. The T-cell population is changing all the time, every time there's a new infection or change in the biological environment: a cold, eating food that's a bit off, or getting a scratch.

I find it bonkers that MAIT cells (which interact with MR1) are such a recent discovery in the field of immunology. I think the discovery was made in the last decade, but they comprise (in some cases) over a quarter of the immune cells in our body!

Possible contributing factors to their lack of discovery are that their mouse equivalent are at quite low levels, and the T-cell repertoire is so variable in humans that it can be a challenge to find a pattern amongst the noise. Expect more discoveries on a similar level once we work out how to type the T-cell repertoire cheaply - it's currently on the order of $10k / person.

Um... law enforcement clauses are part of most website account privacy policies. Here's the one from Facebook's page:

Law enforcement or legal requests.
We share information with law enforcement or in response to legal requests in the circumstances outlined below....

We access, preserve and share your information with regulators, law enforcement or others:

• 1. In response to a legal request (e.g. a search warrant, court order or subpoena) if we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so. This may include responding to legal requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States when we have a good-faith belief that the response is required by law in that jurisdiction, affects users in that jurisdiction and is consistent with internationally recognised standards.
• 2. When we have a good-faith belief that it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud, unauthorised use of the Products, breaches of our Terms or Policies, or other harmful or illegal activity; to protect ourselves (including our rights, property or Products), you or others, including as part of investigations or regulatory enquiries; or to prevent death or imminent bodily harm. For example, if relevant, we provide information to and receive information from third-party partners about the reliability of your account to prevent fraud, abuse and other harmful activity on and off our Products.

Information we receive about you (including financial transaction data related to purchases made with Facebook) can be accessed and preserved for an extended period when it is the subject of a legal request or obligation, governmental investigation or investigations of possible violations of our terms or policies, or otherwise to prevent harm. We also retain information from accounts disabled for term breaches for at least a year to prevent repeat abuse or other term breaches.

The problem with banning the nice-flavoured vape pods is that it reduces the incentive for adults to shift over as well. If a vape pod tastes better than a cigarette, and produces similar pleasant after-effects, then people will tend to chose the vape pod over the cigarette. This is a good thing.

Please stop picking on 6-digit account numbers, it's numerist.

Okay, I won't. I'll just point you at this XKCD comic about survivorship bias:

https://xkcd.com/1827/