Likely, yes. But it still might be pretty good, and a big step up from the nothing we have now. And just when I start getting really old, this thing will go off patent!

When this vaccine finally gets out to users, it will be exactly the same formulation that already existed in March 2020. Now just imagine if we had wiser leaders and wiser "medical ethicists" who went straight into a manufacturing ramp-up mode at that point. If had moral fortitude to ignore the idiot "ethicists" who refused to allow challenge trials for the vaccine, testing could have been done in three months, and millions of doses could have been available by the end of summer.

We could have saved a million lives, hundreds of businesses, and many months of lockdown. But I guess we chose the more "ethical" path and did everything the slow way, as we would if people weren't dying and our social institutions weren't collapsing under the rules of social distancing. And I don't blame this one on Trump, at least not entirely. There was basically a global consensus of "ethicists" who argued that we must slow-walk the vaccine. It's apparently better to let a million people die than to deliberately expose fifty thousand volunteers to slightly dangerous challenge trials.

I was one of these volunteers. I live next door to the NIH in Bethesda, MD, and wrote them in March that I would like to participate in a challenge trial, and to urge them to get started. I got a canned response and then nothing. When all is said and done, I hope these ethicists are at least fired. We treat this pandemic as some force of nature, but really, we could have risen to the occasion and blunted its impact. It wasn't our scientists that failed us. Already in March, they had a working vaccine. It was our leaders and our ethicists.

You can give them an oral exam - basically like an interview about how much they know. I did this even pre-COVID in my office hours, and even though it took about 25 minutes per student, that's not much longer than the time to grade a written test. When you get good at this kind of testing, you can choose laser-sharp follow-up questions and figure out precisely how far the student's knowledge goes and where it stops. I modeled my own technique on a professor who did this to me when I took Solid State Physics in undergrad. I remember how conceptual his questions were, and how naked I felt when he exposed my limits. I bet he could do it almost as well over video chat.

One thing that colleges are good at is identifying talent. You see a lot of studies that say: a degree from college X will increase your lifetime earning by 2 million, but these numbers are bullshit. They don't compare matched cohorts. Elite universities identify upward-bound people, and those very people are basically bound for success no matter what they do. To estimate the value-added number accurately, studies would have to compare people who get into college X and go against people who get into college X and don't go. While these studies exist, the latter group usually still ends up in some other college. And guess what: the outcomes of the two groups are basically the same. The fancier college doesn't build them into more successful people. It's just good at identifying future winners. Nobody has systematically compared groups of students who get into Harvard and go to students who get into Harvard but instead take a job in industry. But I bet the latter would do quite well.

Companies could really free-ride on the knack that elite university admissions committees have for identifying talent. Somebody should announce that we auto-hire you with such-and-such started salary if you show up with an acceptance letter from Cal Tech or whatever. The salary might depend on the university and major. It wouldn't have to be that high, because we're talking about 17-year-olds. They may be smart, but they don't need a fortune. Part of their payment would be the opportunity to take some part in the company's marquee projects and work under a mentor/academic advisor who guides their professional development. The company could also arrange something that looks much like seminars where these young hires are together and receiving lessons from the company's senior stars.

For the student it could feel a lot like college, except instead of paying, they're being paid, and instead of doing lessons, they're actually taking part in building stuff. For the company, they're getting the same people that they would hire four years later, once they have fancy degrees and cost a fortune, but still need almost as much training.

In each case mentioned, China and Chinese companies are not responsible for the surveillance project initiated by other countries. For example, it was Singapore's idea, not China's idea, that all the lampposts in Singapore should do facial recognition. It's a pretty chilling idea, but don't blame it on China. Chinese companies are just among the bidders to execute the contract. The angle of the story is "blame China" but actually the reality is scarier: Governments in much of the world - not just China, but also Singapore, Malaysia, Serbia, Kenya, etc. - are pretty eager to set up maximal surveillance. Those governments are escaping the blame they deserve if we frame this phenomenon as somehow a Chinese problem.

They act as though all human mitochondria is basically equal unless it's "diseased" somehow, but I'm almost sure that couldn't be true. There must be more and less efficient mitochondria throughout the human population, or maybe there are mitochondrial adaptations in other eurkareotes that could be imported into human mitochondria to improve our metabolism and our use of oxygen. I hope somebody is working on this!

We've now examined thousands of planetary systems by observing the gravitational interaction of the star and the "dark stuff" (presumed to be planets) orbiting it. (We can watch the star wobble periodically as it orbits the system's center of mass, from which we can infer what else in the system has mass and how it's moving.) If primordial black holes with planet mass were common, this method would be a perfect way to detect them. But these little things wouldn't dim the star when they transit in front of it. So far we've not seen anything of the sort.

Every stock price is primarily speculation. Either you speculatively expect the company's current performance to continue into the future, or you speculatively expect that it will get better, or that it will get worse. Everyone who trades the stock makes some sort of speculative bet based on one of these expectations, and the trading price of the stock is the result of the sum of all the expectations of all the traders. That's not just a story of how Tesla stock works. That's just how stock works. Again, if you think you're clever and feel sure that the sum of the world's traders got this one stock's price wrong, you're free to wade in with your money.

You don't have to RTFA, just read the title: UC schools will not require the SAT/ACT. But you'd still be a fool if you didn't take it. They also don't require that you take calculus or even any AP courses, but if you skip all those classes, you're not getting in. I have to assume that getting rid of the SAT/ACT requirement means making a path for idiot children of rich families who make big donations. This is not for ordinary mortal applicants who didn't splash money or "win" some sort of intersectionality lottery.

Look, I know all the trials aren't quite done. But when we have a decent chance that they will show a useful effect, we shouldn't wait to start producing the medicine. And instead of being mad at doctors who are buying up the supply, get mad at the system for the fact that there is only such a small supply! Come on, people, the invasion has already begun. We should be building tanks, or really, whatever has a decent chance of helping.

Why does Trump have to make everything about a pissing contest, and why do we buy into it? Let's say that this German company really is making progress toward a vaccine. I sure hope that's true. What value is there in moving their operation across the Atlantic? Just so we can brag that the vaccine was discovered here? Who fucking cares? Trump and everyone else should be working to accelerate research, and making a promising research group pack and move in the middle of such a time-sensitive pandemic is not smart.

Yeah, it would be different if the German company was saying that it won't share its findings with the world and manufacture their vaccine only for Germans. But they're not saying that. If anything, it seems that the relocation move was meant to produce a USA-exclusive vaccine, which would be criminal and completely insane. Once we have a vaccine that works, there are countless labs around the world that can manufacture it. That anybody would withhold a successful recipe from others would be sheer dystopian depravity, and something that we just can't let happen.

If this German research group is in the lead, the USA should shower money and resources at them. Every day by which we shorten the covid-19 crisis will save us $billions. Meanwhile, we should be spinning up local manufacturing capacity, based on what we can now guess the successful vaccine will need in order to manufacture.

I don't think that's right. If a restaurant is willing to sell meals "to go," then GrubHub is allowed to buy a "to go" meal from that restaurant, as much as is any other customer. It was only in the bad old days that restaurants were able to pick and choose patrons, back when places had signs that say "NO COLORED." Since the Civil Rights Act, if you set prices and somebody shows up and pays the price, you gotta serve them, even if you don't like them.

It looks like we're approaching a time when malware starts to approximate an AI script kiddie. If somebody codes for it a neural network and allows it to spread, Darwinian forces might make it progressively better at camouflage, better at acting non-suspiciously, better at running scams, etc. I am picturing a world in which the AI makes its own money (extortion, stealing from your bank account, coin mining, etc.) and buys cloud computing time in order to improve itself. Successful mutations could be recorded on some kind of blockchain sustained by all the p0wned computers, and other strains of the mutating virus could experiment with various remixes of these elements. Once an AI gets smarter and richer, it can register its own companies, rent or buy real facilities, hire real human employees, and just keep improving itself.

Caltech is actually a very small university: the total enrollment of undergrads plus grad students is 2,238. If this judgment stands, it's going to dump a lot of money on a very small place. I really wonder what effect it will have on the campus and the curriculum!

Really interesting, all the reasons you give for why students should show up to your class. One conspicuously missing reason: The material is fascinating and important for anyone who wants to be literate in the field, and it's presented in a way that's designed to infect students with enthusiasm for the content.

I always told my students that I don't take attendance for the same reason that movie theaters don't take attendance: If you bought a ticket but you don't go to the movie, would it make sense for the theater to issue you a non-attendance fine?