Assuming your phantom pain is from a lost limb, check out the use of mirror boxes. They're cheap to build, non-invasive, and apparently cure this particular affliction.

Another important detail: this is a treatment for a disease that's relatively rare(*).

I've spoken to doctors that have cures for diseases, but can't get the funding needed to get FDA approval. One doctor I spoke to had a genetic cure for a disease that has 240 patients in the US. Granted the cure hasn't been tested, but if we can't test *any* potential cure then we'll never be able to cure this particular disease.

So yes. In addition to restoring hearing in a young girl, testing the safety of a genetic cure, it's also a cure aimed at a relatively uncommon disease.

(*) I couldn't find a quick estimate of its prevalence, but ChatGPT puts auditory neuropathy at 0.1% to 0.2% of the population. If not all AN cases are caused by this specific genetic mutation, that makes it fairly uncommon.

It's Day of the Triffids.

Good time to download the 3d printable plans for a triffid gun.

Be sure to save to a local file before the internet goes out.

So... Thanos was right?

As immoral as it sounds, this has been addressed by various regulations. The term to search for is "value of statistical life".

FEMA, NIH, and others put this value at $10 million per life saved. I've seen older estimates from corporations of $1 million and more recent estimations of $2 million.

This comes up in the context of safety certified software (which I did for a living): you can calculate the probability of some sort of failure in your device, multiply out by the times it will be used, calculate the cost of mitigating the failure, and make the decision.

Additionally, having government certification, such as FAA , on things can mitigate responsibility and reduce liability to manufacturers. If you do the above calculation and decide that the lives saved isn't worth the extra costs, and the FAA agrees, then your product is considered "safe enough" and you can sell the product without fear of liability.

From the NIH number cited above and the back-of-the-envelope calculation in the parent post, it would seem that this regulation is not cost effective. Effectively, the loss of value to the consumer for paying for the package is more than the value of the safety the consumer gets, it would be better to *not* have the regulation and let the consumer have the money available for food, medicine, and so on that would be more effective.

Or, you could lower the cost of the installation by about 1/5. Economies of scale might result in a commodity product that's cheap enough.

The data processing techniques used to decipher the text on the scrolls is downright awesome. You can check out the Vesuvius project for more detail.

There's a hefty prize award for anyone who wants to take a crack at it. Really fascinating stuff if you happen to be interested in that sort of thing.

Also, it uses AI.

And your genes would not be propagated to future generations.

Look, I get it, virtue signaling is a thing and gets you in good with your friends, but down in the real world you do what you have to to survive. Specifically in this case, if you *don't* punch the guy in the face and instead take a different path, you can live longer and maybe get out of slavery another way.

The Romans had ways for slaves to get out of slavery. A couple of the emperors (or kings) were sons of freed slaves. The phrase "you have to play the game by the rules you are given" comes to mind.

Also if you live and make it out of slavery you can turn your efforts towards ending slavery, which is probably a more effective strategy if, for example, ending slavery is your intent.

Isn't the ocean, like... big?

I thought the pacific ocean was like, half the planet? And a couple of miles deep?

How far down are these cities sinking?

It's an interesting situation in Ukraine.

Ukraine has essentially run out of artillery shells and anti-missiles. That's not an absolute measure, but effectively Russia is missile striking all the infrastructure in Ukraine, notably power generation facilities, with impunity.

The Russians are also slowly taking territory. You might have heard about the recent fall of Avdiivka, which is officially a win for Russia except that Ukraine made it a very expensive piece of real estate. I've heard one estimate that Russian casualties are 10:1 against Ukrainian, so it's really a win for Ukraine. Except that Russia has so many people it can throw into the war effort it might not make a difference.

On the flip side, Ukraine has damaged several oil processing facilities inside Russia 200 miles East of Moscow. Two soldiers carrying small drones in a backpack can hike across the border, deliver a small munition (probably more than a hand grenade but not much more) right to the vertical distillation column using video feedback for targeting, and the distillation column is an integral part of the process and the most difficult piece to repair.

Ukraine has taken some 14% of Russian oil processing offline using this method, which is a huge bite out of Russia's federal budget. Also, Russia now has to allocate resources to protecting vital infrastructure all over Russia.

Ukraine has also had good luck with water-based drones: put a bunch of munitions on a motorboat with a GPS and video feedback for targeting, paint it black and send it at night, several hundred miles with pinpoint precision to sink a warship. Russia discovered experimentally that all of their anti-whatever guns are intended for incoming missiles and other ships, and so they can't point down low enough to hit a small motorboat within striking range. You have to get the crew to shoot at the drone from the deck with rifles and hope you hit something important.

Ukraine has basically kicked the black sea fleet out of the western half of the black sea using this method.

Of note, these drones are being built in Ukraine by Ukrainians. They're not donations from other governments.

Ukraine now has lots and lots of military observers from various countries across the world looking in on the military aspects of drone warfare, which is a completely new tactic for war. If it takes an anti-missile costing $100,000 to take out a drone costing $1,000, that's an obvious advantage to the side using drones.

And no one has tried drone swarms yet either, and I think that would be the next logical step. Exhaust your opponent's anti-missile shield over the city with one wave of cheap drones, then send in the second wave with incendiary munitions to set everything on fire all at once.

And all for the price of 1 anti-missile missile.

Thought problem for the physics mavens here.

The event horizon is usually described as requiring an escape velocity faster than the speed of light, and anything that falls in can't get out.

Suppose an object came in on a parabolic or hyperbolic course, in the manner of a meteor or comet going around the sun. Ignore tidal and time dilation effects for the moment because that's something the object will experience and I want to view this from a reference frame outside the black hole.

Suppose the orbit of the object goes inside the event horizon at an angle, so that the object wouldn't intersect the singularity at the middle.

Would it come out again?

In Newtonian terms the object would speed up as it approached the black hole and crossed the horizon, and it could never exceed or attain the speed of light, but would get kinetic energy in excess of it's actual speed. Things appear heavier as they are accelerated, and more and more of the energy is put into mass while the velocity only approaches the speed of light.

Coming around the object the same process happens in reverse, so the object isn't travelling at escape velocity but the pull from the singularity takes mass energy instead of slowing the object down. Without slowing down appreciably, the object should pop back out of the black hole and continue on it's original course.

Is there a good reference that points out the fallacy in this argument? I'm just a little surprised that there's this area in space that will grab anything that flies by and suck it in permanently. Especially since the black hole has roughly the same mass as a regular star, so flying around in the vicinity should be no more difficult than flying around in the vicinity of a typical star.

(I've been looking into whether the universe is computable, and the existence of boundary discontinuities 'kinda throws a wrench into those theories.)

Is there a good reference online that explains this?

I wish you wouldn't dox people like that.

He writes a comic, it's funny, and he pokes fun at your team. Lighten up, allow other people to say things, and respond.

The only purpose for doing it is to cause him suffering.

For any people here with a background in philosophy, this meets the definition of evil: doing something to someone else that, if it were done to you, would cause you suffering.

Just stop. Instead of suffering, try causing more good in the world.

Faxing is better. Powders and simple devices can be sent by letter, and politicians have to watch out for that.

Faxing means you're likely to be in a place that has a fax, ie a business, and if you put your thoughts on a letter with corporate logo then that's even better.

And yeah, faxing is very old school, but it's still used in a lot of down-to-earth places, the kind of grass-roots companies that politicians like to cultivate.

Do that and you'll get slammed. Suppose you call someone out who *didn't* use AI to write their paper, or suppose you call out someone who used the AI as a crutch, rewriting the AI sentences in their own words.

That's a recipe for controversy, and your reputation will/might/could take a big hit.

You mean like racist?

NATO membership requires each country to spend 2% of its GDP on defense. There are currently 32 NATO member countries, and of these only 11 are meeting this goal.

In particular Germany and France, which are #1 and #3 in Europe by GDP (UK being #2) spend less than the requires 2%.

Right now the European countries are scrambling to give weapons and armor to Ukraine. Germany is ramping up production of armaments, but will be missing it's target production by about half this year.

If Europe had kept to its NATO obligations, it would have far more weapons and armaments to spare for Ukraine, about twice as much as they've given to date.

It's looking now like Ukraine will not be able to win the war. They are out of artillery shells, and can do just about nothing except try to withstand the Russian onslaught. All because Europe got caught flat-footed after decades of poor future planning and cheating on their neighbors.

The situation is complex and nuanced, but suggesting that European policy has been sane these last few decades does not track with reality.

(And this completely ignores Europe dismantling their nuclear reactors in favor of complete reliance on Russian natural gas.)