There's a middle ground here. Require institutions that have supported too many fraudulent papers to see external confirmation of results as part of the peer review process before allowing publication, and not from sister-institutions under their own umbrella.

Honestly I wouldn't mind seeing an industry of what are essentially escrow services for this sort of thing. Institutions of what essentially are skeptics who nevertheless will look at testing and/or replicating original research while being disinterested in the success or failure of the research itself. The skeptics will both seek replication and will take the 20-foot view to look at why this is happening and if other explanations might exist for the mechanism.

For what it's worth I spent time doing software quality assurance and my job was to act as a foil to developers, who often were too close to their own projects and sometimes missed gigantic red flags because said project was their baby. As a disinterested outsider my job was to try to break their stuff in a realistic, plausible way, even if that way was something of an edge-case. And far too often it took my manager speaking with their manager to speak with them to get them to address the faults or flaws because they were too emotionally invested to be able to be critical about their own work.

Tenkeys aren't as useful when you're constantly switching back and forth between a laptop and a desktop. If you spend more of your time on the laptop then you get used to typing numbers with the top row and the numpad ends up superfluous.

I end up working a lot with IP addresses and I still don't really miss the lack of numpad anymore. I just got used to it.

Respectfully I must disagree. The US military switched from the Beretta 92/M9 to the Sig Sauer P320/M17 in order to gain a few more rounds and to save a few ounces of weight. There was nothing wrong with their prior service pistol that couldn't be resolved with reordering a batch of them to replace the clapped-out ones that had seen decades of use, the M9s were compatible with NATO partners and the supply chain for them was well established. They chose to make a change for what on-paper was only marginally improved performance.

Bombs like the MOAB that are designed to bust bunkers absolutely would benefit from higher yields. If it would perform as a bomb as well as the studies suggest, it might well offer the most powerful conventional bombs that the US has. I could see that being a big reason to do it alone, since it doesn't cross the nuclear threshold while still being more powerful.

We produce a lot of things that cost more energy to make than they release on-use. It's a matter of how that energy is released and how it's delivered to the point of release.

The Manhattan Project and subsequent nuclear weapons programs demonstrated how much effort and energy we are willing to put into producing bombs. The bombs are incredibly powerful, but cost immense amounts of energy to produce, slowly, over time.

I have no doubt that an explosive twice as dense as TNT would be of interest presuming that it's shelf-stable for a sufficient and reliable period of time and can be set off reliably and simply. If nothing else it might either reduce the weight of conventional bombs or other ordnance, or might increase yields when using them so the same size and mass munition delivers more effect.

I won't dispute that.

The trouble is, there are still folks who think that, "the observer" means consciousness. The term "observer" itself is a problem. The double-slit experiment demonstrates that quantum effects are more than just interaction because arguably the slit assembly as a filter is an interaction, but the "observer" seems to be a slightly more involved interaction.

Of course, the word, "Theory" was also a bit of a poor choice because those who wish to dismiss science will use, "it's just a theory!" as if decades of research and experimentation to come up with the most plausible explanation to-date can be dismissed as easily as the rambling ill-conceived conclusions of someone with no background or education.

yes, I'm aware I'm arguing about semantics now, but unfortunately so are a lot of other people.

The orbit of Mercury would disagree that Newton was, strictly speaking, right.

Isaac Newton was one of the smartest human beings to ever live, but even he acknowledged, "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

He knew how he got where he did scientifically and he knew that others would come after him that would improve upon the knowledge that he himself had improved upon. There's no shame in having created the best, most rational explanation for something, and explanation that stood for hundreds of years as best, before an even better explanation could be devised.

While a lot of complaints are made, and justifiably, that some more modern Theories and hypotheses aren't testable, there are a lot of aspects of Quantum Physics from the turn of the twentieth century that are likewise untestable. Youtube channel Kurzgesagt just posted a video on the Many Worlds interpretation that frankly left me annoyed, because it itself demonstrated confirmation bias while claiming that it was proof of the Theory. Normally I really like their videos, but this one left me doubting that they had done as much research on the topic as they claim to do.

The problem is that they can do a whole bunch of very useful mathematics that can lead to results, but that doesn't mean that the intermediate steps in the math are as ultimately true as the final result appears to be. Remember, at one point humanity thought Newton was right, but subsequent math from Einstein demonstrated a better mathematical model to match observations. The mathematics in some aspects of Quantum Physics might well match observations well, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't better mathematical explanations for what we see that that humanity hasn't managed to devise.

When aspects of Quantum Physics can be experimentally demonstrated, like quantum tunneling, then it's fairly safe to conclude that those aspects are largely settled, but for things like Many World, the concept of the collapse of the wave function, even the definition of the term "observer", it becomes harder to take some claims especially seriously.

Having a wimpy direct path that just goes from Airport - Downtown - Convention center is perfect for a huge number of cities.

So many places it can be really rough to get from the airport to the downtown area any time around rush hour (which in a lot of cities is around a 3-4 hour window).

Some places with rail kind of have this - like the train that goes from Midway into Chicago. But even THAT has a lot of stops and is not great for travelers, even if it's nice for residents.

I also have to say that a system where you are riding in smaller vehicles I am a big fan of because it eliminates the problem where homeless people are just handing up on the train which create danger, nasty messes, and of course awful smells. Though awful smells is not restricted to the homeless of course, that can be any other passengers also so nice to be removed from them too.

...when Microsoft pushed dotnet and mono and C# and a few projects embraced while everyone else went, "ew."?

Exactly. Records are not the same as opinion pieces in most cases. Records can still be damaging as hell, but they don't usually carry the sort of personal information that can be incredibly provocative as stated opinions or descriptions of behaviors.

Mmmhmm.

I don't want the AI response. It's wrong often enough that I can't trust it even if it happens to be right.

But the high point of Internet search was altavista.digital.com, so I guess I don't expect much anymore.

It can give me wrong answers when I ask it basic questions about ham radio equipment.

I was curious if an older mobile radio from Yaesu could receive the FM commercial broadcast band. It told me it could in the generic Google search AI field that I never asked for. When I found the Yaesu manual, Yaesu said that model could not.

I suspect that because the radio can receive 108MHz+, and the commercial band stops at 108MHz, it was conflating the two rather than seeing 108MHz as a boundary, but regardless of why it was getting the answer wrong.

And apparently they're having trouble keeping it up.

Airbus was so busy trying to bring out a competitor to the 747 because they could, that they didn't stop to ask if they should.

Boeing had studied doing more with the upper deck but ultimately didn't extend it a second time. They even looked at other uses for the void-space above the main deck where the fuselage roof was low, and again didn't end up actually doing anything with that space.

Given that they had a well established platform that long-predated the MD takeover and they decided against it, there were signs that it was a dead-end.

Why? I don't see anything particularly mendacious with the statement.