Yes, fair bit of confusion here. Diodes can form logic gates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_logic) but can't store information. (except the nice burn it out diode storage in another comment :) ).

Quantum computers with thousands of qbits can potentially do things quickly that classical computers with billions of bits are very slow at. It is a good start toward an entirely new technology. Quantum computers won't replace classical computers, but they are likely to do some revolutionary things in the next 50 years.

Adjust the incentives so that vision and hard work offer a path to respect and a good life. That is the change needed. There are several major trends that have eroded the incentives connecting vision and hard work with respect and success. Scott Adams has explored many of them in Dilbert over the years. A major problem is treatment of engineering as labor that you can train anyone to do. The process of selecting highly talented and highly motivated people to design and build and discover is essential to innovation. But the anti-elitist attitudes of many in the educational system are ensuring that no one is left behind and in the process ensuring that no one gets ahead either. I have seen a major corrosive affect on the merit system as a side effect of the important growing awareness of gender and racial prejudice. When carefully formed judgements about who is really good at a job are often met with accusations of prejudice, everyone just stops talking about excellence.

Another piece is that the role of science has fundamentally changed. Innovation in the 21st century is rarely produced by theoretical or abstract scientific research on reductionist fundamental science. I was trained as a physicist and it became increasingly clear to me over my career that discovery of the Higgs boson is so very disconnected from technology in direct contrast to much science in the 19th century that is used as the foundation of many stories about science driven innovation. The innovation we need in the 21st century is to develop the ability to manage and control extremely complex systems like epidemics and economies. New models of how to guide the best young minds on paths that offer rewards for major contributions toward these goals are needed.

Culture changes slowly. I agree about the safety of the MCAS. I suspect the overall safety of the flight control systems on this plane are probably now much better than the typical plane the public flies in. It is just how short sighted culture works...obsess over the thing everyone is talking about today. So I am happy to fly in a 737 MAX when it is flight certified. The problem is that short sighted culture isn't just Boeing. It is everywhere from consumer electronics to civil engineering infrastructure to politics: techno-fixes that advance someone's short term interests without tackling the underlying hard problems. You end up with fragile systems that break quickly and lead to distrust of all systems and then to chaos.

It seems we agree on the main point which is that burning fossil fuels needs to be replaced by wind turbines (and other renewable energy sources) in order to protect the birds among other things. Many people bringing up environmental problems with renewable energy are really opposed to the deployment of renewables, and these voices cause a lot of harm. The fact that the problems they bring up (like bird deaths or recycling solar panels) are relatively minor in comparison with other much bigger threats is an important fact that should be stated in the main post. After stating that wind turbine killing of birds is a minor factor in the conservation of almost all species, then sure, let's study the problem and save all we can. But be sure to spend a quantitatively appropriate amount of time and space on slash-dot working to create better laws that prevent people from letting their pet carnivores freely roam the environment.

The cats angle on this topic is highly relevant. For anyone deeply worried about bird deaths, check out the graphics by David MacCay on much larger sources of bird deaths: https://www.withouthotair.com/...

This is the right approach. There are real costs to satellite constellations for astronomy and in contaminating pristine views of the night sky. But there are real benefits of universal communication access. While there are only order 10,000 satellites, I suspect the costs to astronomy are manageable and can be outweighed by the benefit. But eventually, a sky with a million satellites doesn't work for several reasons. I think space junk is a bigger piece of the problem with these constellations than disruption of ground based astronomy. It is becoming economically feasible to put up enough satellites to create a Kessler cascade and make quite a large range of possible orbits unusable for 10,000 years. There are not agreements in place to prevent a company from making a long term mess of this. They should be required to keep all large constellations at altitudes low enough that the satellites naturally deorbit in less than 20 years so that decisions made today do not cause problems for our grandchildren.

Education has always been a social endeavor. In the experience of many during the past two months, this is more clear than ever. Online tools try to catch up with old fashioned ways of coming to understand the ideas of others, and almost always fail badly. COVID-19 has simply made the problems with online education more obvious because it forced many people who were used to the benefits of in-person education to try to make do with online substitutes. It is hard to see the best path through to the end of this pandemic, but over the next decade, learning in-person in-community with a cohort of engaged learners is going to be more obvious than ever as the best way to learn.

It would be very nice if we could suppress the virus to the level of Taiwan or New Zealand. But there doesn't seem to be a feasible way to do that. We would have to institute a new lock-down much more stringent than the first. The rest of my message is just ahead of the naive assumptions that in in late May we have the option of shutting down enough to suppress the virus to levels that each new infection will be identified quickly and tracked and quarantined. Even New Zealand and Taiwan are going to have to remain pretty well isolated from India, Brazil, the US and Europe if they hope to keep tracking and tracing all cases. My main point is that most places in Europe and the US are converging on the strategy that Sweden adopted initially: partial shutdown while learning how to minimize transmission while remaining open. Some places needed an initial strict shutdown. We would be much better off if we had a sufficiently strict and organized initial shutdown to match Taiwan. But we didn't. Now we have to follow Sweden.

Yes. I would emphasize an opposite way in which the 'shut down the planet' voices are cherry picking. They are focusing on this spring and summer rather than the next year or more before a vaccine arrives. If Sweden has learned anything about what works for keeping the economy open and people living life, they will be in a much better position than the 'shut everything down or someone might die' crowd. They have definitely succeded in remaining open without overwhelming their medical system. The real question is about total quality of life for people on planet earth in the years beyond 2022. There is a good argument that the Sweden path has that goal more clearly in mind than their critics do.

The rhetoric on this topic has become so inflamed that few people are thinking straight. In that context, we need some simple models to understand the pathologies of various proposals. Consider a system where only one skill matters and it can be reliably measured. But that skill has contributions from innate ability and from development during upbringing and training. At a point of selection (college admission or hiring decision etc) the simplest option is to simply measure current skill and select the best. But that misses some with high innate ability who have had inferior training. If you care most about immediate performance, the simple skill based cutoff is still the best option. But if you want to select for only innate ability, you can can condition measured skill on various metrics of training and upbringing. Applying preferential selection (think affirmative action) based on all significant conditions can fully correct (on average) the outcomes and produce rankings that capture the top of the innate ability distribution. But there is an ugly side of this outcome. You now have a cohort in which present skill is correlated with upbringing and certain upbringings are strong evidence of inferior present skill.

One deep problem is that in certain contexts, it really is present skill that matters. Many comments address surgeon or research scientist. It really doesn't matter what your innate ability is on the team developing the COVID vaccination if it is going to take you a decade of training to develop the expertise needed to do a job. In other contexts, like university admissions, it is easier to argue that innate ability is the key factor and we can tolerate differences of skill correlated with upbringing in order to allow those with weaker upbringings to join the community and reach their potential. But note that in hiring after university, it becomes much harder to justify preferential selection for people who are being hired to do a job.

And that takes us to a core of the problem which is the radicals who think 'meritocracy' is the problem and that we must stop measuring skill and ability and celebrate everyone. The only context in which that makes any sense to me is if the task to be done really doesn't matter. For any task that matters, selection of people who are best at it will always produce such superior results that any society that abandons this basic form of meritocracy will simply lose the competition for survival. There are many problems with the current system of measuring merit because there are an enormous number of dimensions of merit and because each of these is difficult to measure. Add in the nasty history of racism and colonialism using meritocratic rhetoric to sustain their unjust systems, and we are in a tough situation. But the only option is to rebuild selection systems that can be trusted to place talented and well trained people in the right positions.

The approach of letting younger and well people get this is an approach that many are evaluating. If a significant fraction of the population were to take that approach, we may really need the Army Corp hospitals because many younger people do need medical attention and they will transmit it to many older people. It is a terrible plan, except that no one seems to have a significantly better plan. :). Many people don't seem to realize how impossible it is for everyone on the planet to just stay at home waiting for a vaccine. I sort of support your approach because of a fear that a much worse outcome is brewing. The lower classes have to risk the health of themselves and their loved ones in order to earn a living while many of the more wealthy (including me) can keep our jobs working from home in safety...at least until this system goes unstable. The political instabilities of this system need to be considered much more carefully. With large numbers of people around the world without jobs and with a failing economy, we could easily end up in a place where preventing the spread of COVID is among our lesser problems.

The fall is indeed the real problem. And it is not clear that there are workable plans that will allow campuses to reopen safely in the fall. We can hope that the virus is suppressed to a point that a sanitary version of business as usual with contact tracing and regular testing will work in the fall. Even that requires a massive investment in testing and tracing staff and tools. But if the virus is still pandemic in the community in August, that isn't going to work. We would then likely have to cancel the fall semester which will force many institutions to close permanently. Other options are pretty radical like restructuring the undergraduate experience so that each student is only in contact with a small cohort, maybe 100 other students, and contacts between cohorts are rare and carefully tracked. Interactions with faculty and staff would have to be at 6 ft or more distance. Or the really radical option of accepting that we need to just let people get this at a rate that can be managed in the hospitals.

Well written. A communication barrier that we really need to overcome is the bad habit of assuming bad motives. People see "opponents" who propose sacrificing economic activity for suppression of transmission and assume they want the government to control everything. People see "opponents" who propose accepting transmission and deaths for the sake of maintaining a functioning production, distribution, and education system and they assume they think money is more important than people. In fact, there are very few options that don't involve quite a few deaths over the next year. So clear thinking is going to have to abandon the "life is priceless" assumptions and start taking seriously the trade-offs between losing people to heart attacks, suicide, and starvation due to the collapse of our social and economic systems versus losing people to COVID. The truth is that neither option is really catastrophic to civilization. COVID kills much less than 1% and most people will survive an economic and social collapse. But we have decisions to make about how to minimize the suffering, and right now there isn't a lot of public conversation about the competing value systems. If we can start talking to each other and stop assuming bad motives, we could find compromises and paths to move forward united.

This is likely true. And is a clear way to state the difficult crisis coming up. In some ways, the first two months of this are easy in comparison with the period over the next 6 to 12 months when we can't remain closed and we don't have the leadership or social cohesion to open up safely.

The problem with news reports and focus on "people are dying" is that they never get past that unavoidable fact to a discussion of choices among realistic options. New Zealand isn't a realistic option for the US or Europe. It is sufficiently isolated and small that it can effectively screen importation. I haven't studied Austrailia's response yet. Give us some policies that are realistic in the US.