Those doctors were definitely a problem, though I would argue generally a different problem than medical dogma. Getting rid of foolish conclusions arising from motivated reasoning is...really hard. I'm more optimistic about mitigating dogma.

I get the sense there is a tremendous amount of medical dogma that gets passed on even to today's MDs. The most famous example of course was the cause of ulcers (dogmatically due to stress, found in the late 20th century to be bacterial). But a recent famous example was the medical community's deadly dogma concerning aerial viral transmission, brilliantly covered in this Wired article and subsequently broadly discussed elsewhere. This example of tumors containing bacteria has the same flavor of scientific mispractice.

There are a lot of beliefs in the medical community resting on shaky old studies like that, or on no research at all. The typical medical education consists of tremendous feats of rote memorization rather than scientific thought (just ask any MD how they got through organic chemistry).

I generalize here; I know this to be a problem for US medical doctors. I am not sure to what extent the rest of the world recapitulates the issue. But since France for example is full of actual doctors recommending homeopathy(!) I am not optimistic.

Let us not forget the rollicking adventures in Revenger by Alistair Reynolds, with pirate ships using solar sails.

I wish more regulators would step up on crypto and international scams.

As it stands, the Europeans, Brits, Koreans, Japanese and other advanced economies could do more but seem not to scare anybody into behaving well, let alone go after these dodgy characters.

You're probably right, but sometimes these things get serious. Last year, US investment banks ended up getting fined a collective $1.8B for not having copies of employee messages (including $200M for JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley).

That was the SEC, though, and regulatory rather than legal. So it's hard to foretell how Google will be treated.

They claim to have calibrated the weight, the size and the bounce.

From the pictures, though, this ball looks like it has a lot more drag to it. Which, to my mind, is pretty cool if it allows players to add extra spin and "bend" their shots a bit.

It's not quite like that, because Apple's own quality control is necessarily imperfect. Let's say that the India manufacturer constructs 2,000,000 cases, of which 1,000,000 pass internal QC and go on to Apple, and that the manufacturer's internal QC has a 5% miss rate. Then Apple got 50,000 bad cases. If Apple's own QC checks have a miss rate of 1%, then 500 bad phones go out to end users.

In contrast, if the Chinese manufacturer constructs 10,000 bad cases and 990,000 good ones, sending them all to Apple even without having any internal QC, then only 100 bad phones ultimately go to end users.

I like the entire story but now I am feeling unfulfilled. What is the hack?!

I teach as an adjunct in a masters' program at UChicago. Just this quarter, I added an explicit A.I. policy:

I will be interested to see what effect this has,

Well, the USDCoin is audited by just such a firm. It's not one of the Big 4, but I believe Grant Thornton is one of the world's ten largest brick-and-mortar firms.

There is not much advantage in it for the sponsors of USD Coin, other than some sense of beneficence, because the backing instruments in their case are not providing much return on capital.

A big reason for stablecoins to exist is that they help avoid the need for numerous conversions between dollars and tokens. Instead, those transactions become token-for-token, which involves lower transaction fees. It also keeps the transactions entirely within blockchain systems for easier coding, and (somewhat) more predictable outcomes.

I say "predictable" but of course the risk of disaster, especially for Tether, seems high to me.

This week there was a pretty good opinion piece in The Economist about the FTX debacle being a bright spot for "decentralized exchanges". In those entities, transactions are by necessity token-for-token. In the more normal exchanges, like Finance, most traded volume is also removed from notional dollars, being found instead as futures contracts.

I'm not actually much a believer in the value of cryptocurrencies, but if I am wrong and there is value in cryptocurrencies then there is also value in well-collateralized stablecoins.

I run an antenna + digital tuner setup (used to be Myth but I gave up and switched to Channels).

In practice, nearly everyone who does this also uses an internet connection because getting programming schedules over the internet is much better than getting them from the over-the-air broadcasts. (OTA scheduling info does not go as far into the future and does not seem to update as reliably).

Of course, these Interactive features will be different order of magnitude of connection. It would be perfectly possible to get programming schedules over dialup, but these will be, well, interactive, and probably require lower latencies and higher bandwidths.

True in most cases, but I must say, I cashed a $400 check from Facebook this year due to one of those class actions.

As someone who works a lot in Python, C/C++ and R (and so goes back and forth from bracket- to whitespace-delimited), I have never felt very strongly on the whitespace issue. On the whole I guess I kind of like it.

I have wondered what type of coder get's all riled up about whitespace-delimited blocks....

..and I think you have identified a significant population of such coders.

Zuckerberg may even be right about WhatsApp being more secure. But I am certainly not going to believe that statement based on his say-so.