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Comment Re:What's next for dark matter theorists? (Score 1) 64

This is just some normal (non-dark) matter that we expected to be out there but was previously unobserved. It has nothing to do with dark matter or dark matter theories. We infer vast amounts of (otherwise unobservable) dark matter from its effect on gravity, and that has not changed from this.

Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Comment Re:Yes, obviously? (Score 1) 177

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.

Comment The Web3 Fraud (Score 4, Insightful) 65

What is .xyz?

Hype.

"So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only âoeutilityâ for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."

https://www.usenix.org/publica...

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