Not the same at all, no.

Not sure what your point is, but let me phrase this differently.

Even assuming that DEI hires do exist, from the data, the number of non-black people who failed to be hired for professorships in England because a black person was hired instead is 1%. So, if all DEI hiring of black people didn't exist, the number of non-black people hired would increase by a factor of 1.01.

This is a small effect.

Indeed, the ice age ended finally... about 7000 years ago.

And the entirety of human history has risen during the inter-glacial. We've built a civilization well adapted to the climate as it currently is.

So, why would we went to change it?

O'Neill settlements, of course, must be run with zero fossil fuels supplying energy, and with all manufacturing completely closed cycle: no atmosphere, rivers, or landfills to exhaust waste into. And the ecology likewise a closed system.

Once you have solved the problem of the closed-ecology of an orbital O'Neill settlement, you need only implement that approach on the Earth.

So, YES! Let's push forward with O'Neill space settlements! Because we need that technology for Earth.

I guess I assumed it went without saying to the slashdot audience that stupid use of statistics is not helpful. Apparently I assumed wrong.

As a dozen old slashdot posts will tell you, correlation is not causation. Statistics are not a substitute for thinking, they are a tool for separating signal from random noise, but you still have to figure out what the signal means.

The fact that only 1% of the professors in British universities are black means that at UK universities hiring somebody because they're black must be less than 1% of the hires.

So if, in fact,"DEI hires" exist, they are a trivial fraction of the total.

Optimally, we want to correct to exactly the right amount.

Several things to keep in mind. First, yes, racism (and by that I mean racism against blacks) still exists. Second, not everything is racism. Third, statistics are a good way to detect whether racism exists, but, viewing 3 in light of 2, you can't use statistics to ascribe any particular firing, or failure of one candidate to get a job, to racism. Finally, fourth, when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be useful as a metric ("Goodhart's Law") (because people then try to game the metric, not the underlying thing being measured.

And, going back to point 1: not only does racism still exist, it tends to be invisible if it's not aimed at you (and sometimes even when it is aimed at you.) The fact that you don't see racism doesn't mean it's not there.

This is a good end goal, but we are orders of magnitude away from the calculational ability to do that. What we do know is how DNA codes for proteins. What we are just solving (via AI-- not large language models, but actual calculational models) is how proteins fold into shape. What we are beginning to understand, but don't yet fully understand, is how the protein-making process is turned on and off at the right times to regulate the processes of life. What we can't yet do at all is unravel how the machinery of making proteins turns into the entire complicated chemical processes of the organism.

We have a long way yet to go.

The intensity of light coming out of a black hole's accretion disk is orders of magnitude larger than any lightbulb or LED. If all you knew about astronomy was how stars work, yes, you'd expect that brightly-glowing things would be powered by fusion. But no, turns out that gravitational contraction, for ultra-massive compact objects, can be amazingly effective in producing radiative energy out of the potential energy of infalling matter.

True that! (This is one of the gaping flaws in the science of the film "Interstellar:" the astronauts (and their robot) would all die very quickly of radiation exposure.)

It is reasonable to conclude absolutely nothing from this one instance.

Some guy taking an unknown and uncalibrated amount of a mushroom of unverified origin, and doing this with no medical knowledge, no medical advice, and no medical supervision gives exactly no useful information about the clinical efficacy.

See The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics.

Which NOAA scientists are you referring to with the word "they"?

Eight humans were on the ark (according to the book of Genesis): Noah, his wife (not named in the bible), his three sons, and their wives.

The six foot distance was from when various scientists hypothesized that the virus was communicated by large (>10 micron) droplets, e.g., the size droplets which would be produced by sneezing or coughing. These droplets don't remain suspended in the air, but fall to the ground, and hence if you are out of ballistic transport range, you don't inhale them. Good conjecture, but it turned out that this particular virus was communicated by small (micron size) aerosols, which do remain suspended in the air for long periods of time. (Took some very good epidemiology work to nail that down.)

I was paying a lot of attention to what the actual medical scientists were saying at the time, and they were saying "we don't know. Here's our best guess at the moment" over and over and over.

But people were desperate to hear definite conclusions, not "here's what we think so far." If you think you were hearing "here are things we know for sure," that was you ignoring the part where reports say things like "if confirmed, this result means..." or "According to senior scientist x, further work is needed to see if this conclusion holds up."

For the most part, results are skewed by the popular press, who want to be the first to report what is new and exciting, not "here's a study that confirms things that preliminary results had already suggested."