ImaCake

49 ms·

571.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I don't find this evidence compelling. Also did any of you read the leaked proposal? [0] It would have been super useful to fund this! The intercept has done a massive disservice to the grant proposal here with their poor portrayal of
572.
by ImaCake 5y ago
A lot of comments against this, but I think this is a pretty good summary of why I think this is a zoonotic spillover event. To put it bluntly, evolution is much more creative than us and SARS-COV2 seems like a master stroke. Much of the ar
573.
by ImaCake 5y ago
>The viral phylogeny and history of it's evolution ... point to it being a natural zoonotic spillover event. Wuhan had a virus institute because it is a place where novel viruses are found, not the other way around.
574.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I would say this is an ad aimed at a professional audience. I read the science equivalent of these in Nature sometimes. Sure, they are biased and misleading. But it is usually clear enough who sponsored the piece and so you get a useful p
575.
by ImaCake 5y ago
There’s a good xkcd for this one. It is worth remembering just how many people there are and how big the world is. Considering this, I think it is pretty easy to find yourself in a group that is multiple standard deviations away from the
576.
by ImaCake 5y ago
The first third is very intense, I also was a bit fatigued for that middle third. When I have reread Seveneves I have skipped it. I really like the last third, but it does feel like a completely different book.
577.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I really liked Seveneves, but totally understand why someone wouldn't like parts of it. I am curious as to which third you skimmed though as the book is effectively three different books with very different moods.
578.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Absolutely agree with this. Good financial advice is boring . It basically boils down to don't spend your money on unneeded things and put the savings in safe-ish long term, low cost investments (cash, bonds, index funds). Anything el
579.
by ImaCake 5y ago
That's a good point. Australia has a similar federalist structure as the USA, although we have less than 10 states/territories of any consequence. The COVID response has a been fix of both state and commonwealth (federal). The com
580.
by ImaCake 5y ago
It looks like a lot of those references are the results of an edit war on the page. The consensus seems to be it was a lab leak (probably). You can read about alternative hypotheses on the talk page here: https://en.wikipedia.org
581.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Isn't a chimera akin to putting part of one organism with another? I think this would make the astrazeneca vaccine a chimera (Adenovirus with SARS-COV2 spike protein). Obviously the AZ vaccine has not causes a pandemic so maybe the dis
582.
by ImaCake 5y ago
America has a history of responding poorly to pandemics. They let HIV rip through their population before getting serious about it. Regan famously denied it was even happening. It is interesting to contrast this with Australia's quick
583.
by ImaCake 5y ago
It is valid to disagree with the parent comment about wanting to know why this all happened. But you carry a lot of ideological baggage along with it. "men with guns patrolling the streets" is the police and was routine before the
584.
by ImaCake 5y ago
OP's link is fascinating. It is interesting to see that there is strong evidence for a lab leak leading to a pandemic at least once in the past. I think it is striking how clear cut the evidence for this is: a strain absent for 30 year
585.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I've been using the beta for a week or so. It's pretty nice honestly. I got the beta because you can setup different wallpapers for each of your virtual desktops. I really like that feature and found nothing else either much bette
586.
by ImaCake 5y ago
To take this further. Most science is a slave to grant funding. Grant funders like certain things and most of them are not biostatisticians. That is not to say that hypercapitalism is the problem here. I think any competitive system even
587.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Hah, I was kinda hoping someone would know a trick I just hadn't found yet! Thanks for this. I set an alias so `open='explorer.exe'` which saves me some typing and muscle memory.
588.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Windows terminal + wsl is good, but I think the native terminal in MacOS is still much better to use. In the Win 11 beta the ease of use is pretty similar, but the unix terminal is just better integrated into MacOS. Probably my favourite te
589.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I like your perspective here. One of the more powerful arguments for society to embrace those who deviate from the perceived mental norms is they have so much to teach us. The more we understand each other, the better we can accomodate them
590.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Sure, there's a bit of a phenonemon where a small group of labs come to dominate a field of research through a positive feedback loop. They have some initial success, and then can get funding, they then have increased resources to effe
591.
by ImaCake 5y ago
A word of caution about machine learning models in academia. The advertised predictive ability or AUC is often inflated, sometimes by a lot. I am not sure why, but I imagine it comes down to the usual p-hacking incentives. Maybe it is becau
592.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I agree completely with this comment. The numbers in this paper are a casually spectacular defense of the vaccines. You would be hard pressed to find 100k unvaccinated people anywhere in the world with outcomes like that. Nonetheless, the
593.
by ImaCake 5y ago
A quick word on test attributes and why we still don't have a more rapid test than PCR. Tests for disease rely on two numbers: 1. "sensitivity" - the proportion of people with COVID who get a positive test 2. "specificit
594.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Wouldn't polymarket be subject to incomplete information? Thus leading to bias. Polymarket would just reflect the market sentiment given a fairly robust analysis of the available information, admittedly a pretty useful idea. The other
595.
by ImaCake 5y ago
> Was M = 26,098.4, SD = 12,253.4 enough to infer a uniform distribution? No unfortunately it is not. It's perfectly plausible to have a normal distribution with mean = 26k and sd = 12k. Although those numbers do look kinda weird, b
596.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Submission statement: The author argues for decentralising databases in science while maintain consistent file formats. I am not sure about this. In genetic epidemiology we have three databases for genome wide association summary data calle
597.
Bespoke open databases would be cheaper and easier to analyse(nature.com)
1 points by ImaCake 5y ago|1 comments
598.
by ImaCake 5y ago
The published academic article seems to estimate an upper bound of about 4%, but I might be interpreting that wrong. It is worth noting that the information is here based on single nucleotide variants which don’t tell us everything about
599.
by ImaCake 5y ago
There is space for intuition, but the argument the author makes is that intuition is making a mistake here (as it often does). Namely that we think increased phone use is correlated with (or even causal for) negative mental health, but the
600.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Submission statement: Maturing big data analysis of biodiversity has lead us to some strange and surprising conclusions about biodiversity: it is not decreasing, even as the extinction rate far exceeds what it was before human domination

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