Not the same guy, but Bigelow did become a billionaire owning Budget Suites, the terrestrial hotel chain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Their transhab concept seems an interesting take on being able to make larger constructs that expand, much like the JWST solar sail.

Generally by around junior year of undergrad as a physics major, you realize "holy shit, it's just progressively improving models all the way down - and none of these models get to a 'real' understanding of what's going on underneath the hood".

That's the reality. We don't know what quantum measurement or wave function collapse 'is', where the boundary between classical behavior and quantum behavior sits, why general relativity works well but we can't seem to get it to play nice with quantum mechanics - and the proposals to do so don't really yield a satisfying sense of understanding either.

Anyway, I find it very surprising that these would be revelations to any physicist. The thousandth time you write the "approximately equal to" operator as an undergrad or drop all the higher order terms from a diff-eq it is self-evident what level of understanding you can get from physics.

That's weird, according to this chart Israel has been about on par with the US on a per capita basis. Their earlier peaks were higher, but they were lower than us for the past several months and now we're both on the upswing. So i'm not sure why you're calling them out in particular when they're seeing pretty much the same thing the US is.

And what's your evidence that "most of the people in critical condition with the delta variant are people who were already vaccinated"?

According to this Reuters story "Vaccine effectiveness in preventing both infection and symptomatic disease fell to 64% since June 6, the Health Ministry said. At the same time the vaccine was 93% effective in preventing hospitalizations and serious illness from the coronavirus.".

So reports from reliable sources with actual numbers say that the vaccines aren't as effective against delta, but still a hell of a lot better than not being vaccinated.

Huh, this sounded interesting so i decided to look into it.

The NOAA data sure makes it look like the number of hurricanes has gone down, but that's just for the US. So i tried to find a list of all Atlantic hurricanes, and wikipedia had the most concise list i could find.

Based on that it looks like the Atlantic had a brief dip in hurricane intensity in the 70s and 80s, but both the total number of storms and the number of major hurricanes has increased since then.

Comparing the two, it seems like the US had a very bad decade from 1940 to 1950, in which 41% of all Atlantic hurricanes hit the US, including 38% of the major ones. From 1950 to 1960 was a little lower at 27%/32%, and since then it's stayed mostly in the 20-30% range, hitting a low of 22%/19% in the 90s. Unfortunately the NOAA chart stops in 2004, so i can't compare past that point without finding/compiling additional data.

So if you look at just the US data, particularly the NOAA list, it looks like Hurricanes peaked in the 40s and 50s and have been getting better since then, but if you look at the whole Atlantic hurricanes have been a lot more constant, with a gradual increase in both number and intensity in the past few decades. But luckily for the US most of them have hit other areas.

The interesting question is, have we just been getting lucky recently? Or is there something that's causing hurricanes to be more likely to miss the US?

I'm excited about the possibility of sharing the road with AI cars. However i'm definitely uncomfortable with the idea of sharing the road with them the way things are right now.

We're in the middle of an exponential growth curve in terms of AI driver competency. _If_ it continues at its current pace then in 5-10 years we could probably have AI do all the driving.

But the problem with being in the middle of a curve is that you can't tell when it's going to end. We've learned in a lot of different areas that getting AI to handle part of the problem is pretty easy, but there are always some parts that turn out to be a lot tougher than expected. Kind of a "last mile" problem of AI.There is a nebulous line above which it makes sense to have AIs do all the driving, and below which there's a lot of uncertainty, and we have no idea for sure yet if the current approach to AI cars will pass that threshold or not.

I am not a geneticist, but i'm pretty sure there's a difference between a species having a genetic legacy and a species not being extinct. It's pretty accepted at this point that birds descended from dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean that T-Rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, etc aren't still extinct. A legacy is something that survives after you're gone, by definition it doesn't make you not gone. We don't see any people of this particular variety of big head wandering around today, so unless you're suggesting there's a hidden tribe somewhere they are extinct, regardless of whether they have any genetic heritage surviving among Homo Sapiens.

I wouldn't call it a conclusion, but it seems like a very plausible supposition given a single data point. The fact that it is a single data point is exactly the reason to suppose that. We've been digging up ancient human remains for quite awhile, and this is apparently the first time we've seen anything like this. Until we find a second example it is very possible, possibly even likely, that it is an aberration of some kind. Which is not to say it shouldn't be studied and the area where it was found shouldn't be investigated for more possible cases, but until they are found i would personally hold back on "rethinking evolution".

This seems like a weird take? Yes there are a lot of other issues that pose a higher risk to young people than Covid. However we don't happen to have a vaccine lying around that will prevent those other issues.

Yes the question of whether/how children should be vaccinated is being approached with greater urgency than might be merited strictly on the direct risk to them, but per the above point it is something we do have a relatively simple and effective fix for, and it doesn't do a lot of good to sit around and debate for a long period of time. Children are a part of our community, and if vaccinating them is the best thing it's definitely better to do it sooner than later. The longer we wait on it the more time there is for them to catch an asymptomatic case and pass it on to someone who is more at risk, and the more time there is for the virus to circulate around that unvaccinated portion of the population and possibly mutate into something that is a bigger risk for adults or possibly even a bigger risk for children.

I'm not saying that vaccinating children under 12 or even 12-17 is a slam-dunk, but saying "let's put the vaccination discussion on hold until we've solved the statistically more significant problems of motor vehicle accidents, homicides and suicides" isn't practical.

It's probably less about convincing people to switch than enticing people/companies who haven't already committed to something yet. Slack is reportedly used by 750,000 companies (according to google.) Which sounds like a lot, but even just in the US alone, according to bizjournals.com, "The Census Bureau estimated in 2016 that there were about 7.7 million establishments across the country where at least one paid employee worked."

Obviously a lot of those companies are very small, but a company with say, three people, one of whom handles IT on the side, is a lot more likely to be swayed by "it's already installed and ready to go." And if enough small companies make that decision then pretty soon Microsoft can start touting "Successful companies prefer Teams 2 to 1 over Slack", and use that statistic to convince larger companies that Teams is the way to go, etc. Or at least that's probably what they're hoping.

"because you're an idiot"

It seems like something that could be a reasonable idea to a layperson. Just stating that it's not true without any elaboration because you don't like the way he put forth the idea adds very little to the conversation, and you also managed to be a jerk while doing so.

That's true, but if these icebergs are actually an average size for an average year than it doesn't mean much at all. On the other hand if they're much larger than normal it's definitely significant but it could actually mean any number of things and have any number of causes, which might already be known or might bear further investigation.

But blurb writers don't want to talk about the details because that's not as noteworthy or clickbaity, so they're just emphasizing the size without any context. And i think given the current situation the world is in making a big deal about giant icebergs forming without any other context implies that Antarctica is losing ice more rapidly and in turn implies that climate change is accelerating/getting worse/something. Which is almost certainly true in general, but i'm a stickler about not wanting to support a good argument with bad/irrelevant data.

So a new 1,668 square mile ice berg is now the new "largest iceberg afloat", surpassing a 1,034 square mile iceberg that was already currently afloat.

So is this a big deal? Are there normally a couple 1000+ square mile icebergs every year, making this totally run of the mill? Or is there sometimes a single giant iceberg in a year but not usually two, which is why we're hearing about the second one when the first one didn't make a big splash in the news? Or in a normal year is 100 square miles considered "large" and even one, much less two icebergs of this size is incredibly rare or even unprecedented?

I'm sure i can easily find the answer if i go digging (maybe even just by RTFA,) but it's frustrating that the news, including slashdot, is sensationalizing it because the numbers are "big" and they can make silly comparisons to other objects without providing the context for the average reader to know whether this is actually significant news or just a fluff piece about how large ice is large.

And best of all, there's nothing stopping someone else, or multiple someone elses, from setting up one or more competing system. Nothing says the same URL can't be written to blockchains multiple times.

South Dakota, according to both the page you linked and other sources, has had 1,962 deaths. California has had 61,186 deaths.

South Dakota has a population of 886,667. California has a population of 39,538,223.

Dividing deaths by population and multiplying by 100,000 gives the result of California deaths per 100k population: 154.8. South Dakota deaths per 100k population: 221.3. So per capita South Dakota is doing worse than California overall.

California has definitely been far from perfect. (In my opinion they were far too willing to cave to corporate interests and right wing loons.) However South Dakota has been even worse and is just trying to hide the issue behind their low total population.

"Going to a health care provider" is not the same as "medical intervention." In a lot of those cases people are just going to the doctor and complaining that they don't feel well and are being sent back home with some antivirals or recommendations to rest, drink lots of liquids, and maybe get some sudafed. Even aside from the fact that people are far less likely to go into the doctor for "minor" issues in the current situation, i haven't seen any numbers about how many have seen a health care provider about covid symptoms without being hospitalized.

The numbers we do know (so far, with some margin for error.)

Sick: Flu - 35.5 million. Covid - 16.5 million

Hospitalized: Flu - 490k (1.38% of infections). Covid - ~900k (5.45% of infections)

(There are 100k currently in the hospital, but according to the CDC current cumulative hospitalization was 278.7 per 100k a week and half ago.)

Deaths: Flu - 34k (0.096% of total infections, 6.98% of hospitalizations.) Covid - 300k (1.8% of total infections, 33% of hospitalizations.)

So currently you're about half as likely to get Covid as you are the flu (16.5 million vs 35.5 million) because even if it hasn't been perfect we've been taking some precautions.

However if you do catch it you're almost 4 times as likely to end up in the hospital, and if it's bad enough for you to be hospitalized you're almost 5 times as likely to die. Or overall you're about 18 times as likely to die if you catch covid vs the flu.

Obviously any individuals particular odds will depend a great deal on their own situation, but those are the averages overall.

Clearly you haven't been sniffing enough dry erase markers.