In the past couple of days, I needed to take a look at Bekefe's Electromagnetic vibrations, waves, and radiation. Normally, I would have stopped at the engineering library at the college I work at and gotten one of the two physical copies there. Sadly, they're closed due to COVID 19, and they don't have an electronic copy.

Instead, I borrowed the Internet Archive's copy for a short time, determined that it was what I needed and bought a physical copy that should be here in a couple of days (I usually prefer physical books). I wouldn't have done that just on speculation. I needed to see of the book was what I wanted first.

This doesn't speak to the base issue of whether what the Internet Archive is doing is right or wrong, but that the overlap between physical and electronic copy use shows things are more complicated than the simple picture you paint.

I remember that.

One major difference is that in 1976, we had a lot of experience at making flu vaccines and had long since worked out the bugs in doing so. It was for a new strain, but not for a wholly new virus. It was mainly a matter of ramping up a known production technique and already existing production system for a different strain. They speeded up the testing to get it out there.

Though we've had SARS and MERS, we don't have much experience in making coronavirus vaccines. Currently, there are some good ideas on what will work but we really don't know if the targets we are using will either be safe, or give good immunity. It's a lot like making a flu vaccine for the first time. There's a lot of testing and learning that has to happen first.

Although it's likely we'll be able to develop a vaccine reasonably quickly given the characteristics of SARS-COV19, it may not work out that way. Look at the case of HIV. Almost 40 years of trying and a lot of failed attempts, but no vaccine as yet.

My county health department got taken down by a ransom-ware attack yesterday.

This just after the local university announced canceling in person classes and all kinds of things were getting canceled. Wonderful timing for it.

Never fear. We expect them to go all splodey at first.

It's just too good a joke to pass up.

We can have a nuclear boy scout on every block, and they won't have to settle for recycled smoke detectors!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They've had two Starship prototypes blow up over a few months. This will be a massive step forward.

We can have one blow up every three days!

The Hu is a Mongolian rock band. A pretty good one IMHO, and definitely not past their prime.

Yeah, modeling it as two triangles was the first thing that occurred to me as soon as I saw the "to one digit accuracy".

In the real world, close enough is often much better than exactly right.

(And I have done the catenary problem, though it's been 30 years or so. Why try remembering either a differential equations problem, or a formula I've not used since when I can do something quick, dirty and good enough?)

John Draper was running a close second.

Mine has a few more things. A pair of 200 amp electrical services. The tractor is only 57 years old, so you've got me beat on that one.

But it does have a big pole building where I can tinker to my hearts content.

Cell coverage is there and I've got a cell phone (flip phone) in my pocket turned off if I need to call 911. But that's the limit of connectivity.

Like you, I work on a lot of high tech things (lab equipment in my case), but I want a break from it.

Amazon isn't looking to fix its notoriously broke web site with AI. They are trying to fix their customers for not doing what Amazon expected them to do with AI.

In similar news, they wonder how their car can be low on oil when they just put air in the tires yesterday.

"What am I going to do, look at the stars and twiddle my thumbs"

Sounds pretty good to me. I certainly enjoy it more than using a cell phone (smart or otherwise). For example, I'd noticed Betelgeuse was looking a bit weak well before the current media storm.

Then again, I don't usually twiddle my thumbs while looking at the stars, but hey, whatever gets you through the day.

"Microsoft Wants Schoolchildren Playing Minecraft To Learn Math"

No. Microsoft wants schoolchildren playing Minecraft in order to make money.

Oh, I'm sure they'd be happy for them to learn some math while doing it as it makes selling school administrators on it that much easier, but that's hardly the base motivation.

In the good old days, 2 drinks was perfectly healthy. Obviously the laws of the universe changed so that now only 1.4 drinks are healthy.

All that experimental physics and astronomy research money showing the fine structure constant is pretty much fixed over the life of the universe was wasted. They could have just read this study and known that the laws of the universe change on an amazingly short time scale..

It's not the problem itself, it's the tools and knowledge for proving it that's the real prize.

The Collatz Conjecture is a very famous problem. One of the greats of 20th century mathematics, Paul ErdÅ's, said of it, "Mathematics may not be ready for such problems.".

What he was meaning is that we just didn't have the tools and the view in order to be able to deal with such a simple but elusive question about something as basic as the integers.

We're not there yet by any means, but perhaps mathematics is closer to being ready for such a question.