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Comment Re:What part of (Score 1) 129

COVID is equal opportunity.

Trump supporter at a rally.
Anti-Trump christian at church.
Agitator trying to stoke unrest at a protest.
Ordinary citizen at a protest expressing support for racial equality.
College student just trying to attend class in person.
College student at a COVID party.

COVID don't give a shit.

Comment Re:He's right (Score 2) 99

No, there were a bunch of scientists saying this probably would be a problem. There are lots of papers pointing out how dangerous coronaviruses (and others) could be. The point is not that it's an amazing prediction, but that it's not.

This is the best insight in this discussion so far.

The point is not that they miraculously predicted some outlandish thing. That their prediction came true does not make them prophets. They documented a bunch of facts, used knowledge and experience to describe what was almost surely going to happen, and warned that we weren't ready for it.

It's like saying to a friend or relative: "you know that this region is known as tornado alley, this particular trailer park has been hit multiple times over the past 30 years, and you don't have the savings or insurance to recover from an event like that, right?"

User Journal

Journal Journal: In principio erat Verbum.

Here.

In the beginning was the word. Biblical, John 1:1. The full verse is
"In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum. "
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Submission + - DARPA helps train cadets, midshipmen as cyber warriors (scienceblog.com)

An anonymous reader writes: DARPA officials say the Defense Department must train 4,000 cybersecurity experts by 2017. Meeting that goal requires building a pipeline for training and education, especially for future officers who'll oversee protection of the cyber domain. During a winter weekend in Pittsburgh, more than 50 cadets and midshipmen from three service academies sat elbow to elbow at nine round tables in a packed room. They’d been training since November to compete in a pilot program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Service Academy Cyber Stakes.

Submission + - Why Improbable Things Really Aren't (scientificamerican.com)

sixoh1 writes: Scientific American has an excellent summary of a new book "The Improbabilty Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day" by David J. Hand. The summary offers a quick way to relate statistical math (something that's really hard to intuit) to our daily experiences with unlikely events. The simple equations here make it easier to understand that improbable things really are not so improbable, which Hand call the "Improbability Principle":

How can a huge number of opportunities occur without people realizing they are there? The law of combinations, a related strand of the Improbability Principle, points the way. It says: the number of combinations of interacting elements increases exponentially with the number of elements. The “birthday problem” is a well-known example.

Now if only we could harness this to make an infinite improbability drive!

Submission + - UK Surgeon Implants a 3-D Printed Pelvis

An anonymous reader writes: Neat story out of Britain, with a strange delay in its circulation, but good news about long-term success for the patient involved, and for others who might benefit from similar procedures: three years ago, surgeon Craig Gerrand (he's got a cool handle on Twitter, too) successfully printed and implanted an artificial pelvis (actually, about half of one) into a patient suffering from a rare form of cancer. Other techniques were ruled out, because the patient would be losing so much bone. So, after careful scanning, additive printing with titanium was used to create the replacement: 'In order to create the 3-D printed pelvis, the surgeons took scans of the man’s pelvis to take exact measurements of how much 3-D printed bone needed to be produced and passed it along to Stanmore Implants. The company used the scans to create a titanium 3-D replacement, by fusing layers of titanium together and then coating it with a mineral that would allow the remaining bone cells to attach.'

(Tags: medicine, surgery, UK, cancer, threed, materials ... )

Submission + - The Individual Midnight Thread 40

unitron writes: Trying to figure out time zones is starting to make my brain hurt, but apparently in a bit over 6 hours somewhere on the other side of globe from Greenwich the Week of Slashcott will begin, as Midnight arrives for anyone in that zone, and then it travels west, where I will encounter it in about 23 hours.

So if we can get this thread out of the Firehose, I was thinking that, as the 10th arrives for us in our respective locations, we could leave here what may be our final farewells to Slashdot.

Until Midnight, this is our meeting place, our City Hall, our town square.

(and yes, our playground)

After that I'm not sure where we can congregate to discuss how the Slashcott's going and whether it's time to move on.

I'm going to jump the gun and lay claim to "So long and thanks for all the Karma", and perhaps someone could do a Bob Hope and re-write the lyrics to "Thanks for the Memories".

In the meantime, a bit of housekeeping.

An AC beat me to the week-long boycott idea by a couple of hours, and suggested the date range of the 10th through the 17th.

As part of a group of people familiar with the concept of beginning a count with 0 instead of 1, I really should have spotted the mistake of putting 8 days into that particular week.

So, should Slashcott Week end as the 17th begins, or do we give Dice a bonus day?

Comment Re:You know... (Score 1) 30

Oh, sorry... I was basically agreeing with you, and commenting on the inanity of "form over function" at the same time.

I will say this... the WaPo site, as much as I dislike it, and as similar as it is to Beta, is still better than Beta. Not much, but at least the information density is higher. (Still sucks compared to classic, though.)

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