I think it is safe to say that we have progressed from fusion power being forever 50 years away to fusion power being forever 10 years away.

I wonder how many random sentences that had it generate before they could pick one that made sense.

Intel projects catching up to TSMC by 2025. If they achieve this, then, by your own analysis, there will no longer be nearly as strong an incentive for the U.S. to go to war with China over Taiwan. This puts Taiwan at risk in the latter half of this decade.

True. However, it doesn't matter. China wants Taiwan even if it is a smoking ruin. Takes 50 years to rebuild it? Fine.

Support for reunification with China is diminishing, but it is by no means absent:
"An increasing number of Taiwanese people feel more closely tied to Taiwan than to the mainland. More than 62 percent of the island’s residents regarded themselves as exclusively Taiwanese in 2021, a survey by National Chengchi University found. By comparison, 32 percent identified as both Taiwanese and Chinese, down from 40 percent a decade earlier. Only about 3 percent considered themselves only Chinese, a figure that has decreased since 1994, when 26 percent identified that way."

I agree that China would like to scare Taiwan into joining them. However, if that doesn't work, then an invasion is a very real possibility. Per one military analysis:
"With the at least theoretical capability of moving almost two million soldiers in one “lift,” the Chinese would probably be able to mass sufficient infantry somewhere to overwhelm the defenders. Once ashore, the sheer size of China’s total force, given air and sea superiority, would make it difficult for the Taiwanese to counterattack effectively. It is unlikely they could entirely eliminate a beachhead—even with their qualitatively superior armored forces."

Finally, China's president is now 68. He will want to achieve reunification in his lifetime. At what point, does he start to feel that time is running out? 5 years? 10 years?

That's exactly correct. It's not statistically important.
If the 95% confidence interval crosses 1 (in this case it's 0.13-1.3 from what I see in another post), then there is a > 5% chance that the result is from chance alone. In clinical research, a study is arbitrarily defined as negative unless the data shows that there is a > 95% chance that the result is real (not a false positive).

In this case, the P value is 0.17, so, if you looked at the study and declared it a success, then there is a 17% chance you would be wrong (an unacceptably high level). Therefore, this study is a failure - it fails to show that the intervention (Ivermectin treatment) worked.

Does that mean, that the study proved that the intervention didn't work? No. IIRC, you have to do something called a "power study" to show that a study has enough statistical power to prove that a treatment doesn't work (and I'm pretty sure that this study wasn't nearly large enough for that).

However, the history of medicine is littered with studies that, even though they met the >95% criteria (which Ivermectin has not), later were found to be wrong, so doctors generally want to see multiple studies from different groups all showing the same thing before they are willing to believe the result.

From the article:

"“The study was done in patients whose cancer was already diagnosed based on other tests and this screening technology still needs to be tested in actual screening trials before routine use.
“But it already allows a glance at early cancer detection in the future which will almost certainly be built around liquid biopsy tests, which detect cancer DNA in the bloodstream.”
Meanwhile, the results of the NHS pilot of the test, which will include 140,000 participants, are expected by 2023."

This test was developed using patients who have diagnosed cancers. That means those patient's had tumors advanced enough to become symptomatic or be caught be existing screening. However, I suspect that trying to detect smaller cancers in much earlier stages may be far more difficult. And it sounds like it is not sensitive enough to replace good screening tests that we already have like the colonoscopy. Once we see how it performs in the mentioned pilot study and how much it costs, then we can start the process of figuring out what it will be good for.

The last time I read about Micro LED TV, it was at a conference and they had a Micro LED wall. The article I read noted that the energy requirements were huge and they needed dedicated air conditioners to keep the wall from overheating. I wonder if they have solved the heat and efficiency issues - anyone know?

First, the possibility of asymptomatic transmission: When one of the vaccines was tested early-on in monkeys (I forget which one - it could have even been J&J or Novavax), the monkeys were protected from severe disease but still contracted asymptomatic disease in their noses. This would suggest that they are capable of spreading the virus while asymptomatic. Your mucous membranes are protected primarily by a different antibody (IgA) than the antibody they have been measuring for the vaccine efficacy (IgG). I don't know if any data showing that the vaccines generate an IgA response.

The other factor, however, is behavioral. If you tell people they are in the clear after the vaccine and they stop wearing masks, how do enforce mask wearing and social distancing for everyone else? Do you check everyone's vaccine card? I have one - it's just printed on paper with some signatures and could easily be forged. Also, if some people are allowed to stop wearing masks, others would also stop wearing them even though they hadn't received the vaccine. This would fuel a third surge while we are still in the middle of the second.

It probably doesn't need to be kept that cold (paywalled):

https://www.newscientist.com/a...

This is actually the easiest problem to solve. Just charge docking fees or whatnot based on how polluting the ship is. Presto! It is now three times cheaper to use Sweden's new car carrier.

Interesting. That last article I remember reading on this subject (I don't recall where - anyone?) basically said that development of "AI" would stall because training it had become too expensive. I wonder which will win out?

https://www.erinbromage.com/po...

This article is a good and relatively reassuring read:

https://www.newyorker.com/news...

The portion most relevant to this discussion is here:

"In South Korea, the success of mass testing in containing the spread of the disease has raised the possibility that asymptomatic carriers were causing outbreaks. But another implication of the experience in Singapore and Hong Kong is that these essentially invisible cases of the coronavirus may not be driving as many serious infections as some scientists have projected. Health officials there did not conduct mass testing of the population to look for infected people without symptoms. They focused on aggressively searching out and testing only those who developed suspicious symptoms or had high-risk exposures in the community. They accepted that the virus might circulate among people who notice nothing. Yet their strategy brought cases under control."

So, asymptomatic carriers may not be much of a problem. I think we still have a lot to learn about this virus.

Although young people are less likely to die, 38% of patients requiring hospitalization were between the ages of 20 and 54. And if the hospitals are full...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...

I hope you are right. However, in Italy, the cases rose from 1 case to 21,000 cases in 3 weeks. Conditions there are different from much of the U.S., but in some places like NYC, you might see a similarly dramatic rise in cases.

I have heard that the main reason that Mars has very little atmosphere is because the solar wind strips it away in the absence of a magnetic field. There seems to be an assumption that we will one day terraform Mars. However, even if we could create a new atmosphere (which we can't), wouldn't the solar wind just strip it away again?