JProthero

14 ms·

31.
by JProthero 5y ago
A 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (an important virus affecting cattle) was traced to effluent released from a laboratory in the UK [1]. A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory
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by JProthero 5y ago
Muon-Catalyzed Fusion [1]. Briefly it's a genuine, and scientifically uncontroversial, form of 'cold' fusion enabled by muons — a more massive relative of the electron that was in the news recently thanks to the potentially i
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by JProthero 6y ago
> What's the material difference, in your opinion, between the threat of the central bank selling back existing government bonds, and the government just creating new bonds of precisely the same type. In the former case (where the
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by JProthero 6y ago
> Wait a second there. There are different attitudes about falsifiability? Yes. My understanding is that Karl Popper first proposed falsifiability as a criterion for a scientific theory in part because he found that some supposedly sci
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by JProthero 6y ago
The 'Ian Bell' referred to in this comment should be John Bell (John Stewart Bell).
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by JProthero 6y ago
From the article: > The first of these ideas says that if demand for a product rises and the supply does not then its price is going to increase. Economists would say this is so basic that no one could really argue with it. So let me do
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by JProthero 6y ago
It might also be worth noting that the current practice of quantitative easing incorporates a potential corrective mechanism for inflation that the traditional monetary expansion associated with historical episodes of hyperinflation did not
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by JProthero 6y ago
The original observation about galaxy rotation curves never meant much to me. I didn't know enough astrophysics to have an intuitive appreciation of the significance of the disagreement between the theory and the measurements, and I fe
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by JProthero 6y ago
Thanks for this; reading your explanation reminds me of the objections I had too.
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by JProthero 6y ago
The author of the article apparently shares your view about dark matter — could you explain what you find objectionable about it? It seems to me that there is a class of concepts in theoretical physics that some people take an almost instin
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by JProthero 6y ago
I often find I've already read the article before I see it linked on HN, and its appearance on HN confirms that like-minded people also found it interesting, which is nice. There are usually about 1-3 articles on the first page that I&
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by JProthero 6y ago
> Unfortunately each day I click 3x more links on HN than I have time to read through, so I don't always end up reading the article (which ends up in an ever-growing to-read list) I can sympathise with this.
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Some sea slugs can shed their body, regrow it, and might survive on sunlight(arstechnica.com)
1 points by JProthero 6y ago|0 comments
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by JProthero 6y ago
This might explain why the disappearance was a surprise to me. I never paid much attention to the Subreddit, other than checking to see why there had been an unannounced absence of new episodes for several months. I remember that both the h
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by JProthero 6y ago
Thanks for mentioning PeerTube — I've been keeping an eye on it for a while now. It has some of the features I noted, including one I didn't but should have; it's open source. I think PeerTube or systems like it have a lot pr
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by JProthero 6y ago
I think I agree that uploaders face more of a threat from censorious activists reviewing their old material than they do from retroactive deletion prompted by YouTube policy changes, but surely self-hosting would provide some protection, as
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by JProthero 6y ago
This is my view too. I'm hopeful that eventually some combination of technologies that already exist (peer-to-peer sharing, tor, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, maybe even wireless mesh networking) will evolve into a decentralised
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by JProthero 6y ago
I share the scepticism about the ability of startups to disrupt away the network effects that underlie these quasi-monopolies, but it does seem to me as though decentralisation is the logical and desirable end-point. How and when that point
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by JProthero 6y ago
I've watched both Grey's and Haran's videos since their early years on YouTube, and I'd be curious to know what the story is behind the disappearance of their podcast. It seemed like an odd development to me in view of h
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by JProthero 6y ago
The original article being discussed in this thread is about a doctor who believed that a form of 'body-switching' should be possible for humans, albeit in a relatively crude surgically-mediated fashion. With the benefit of curren
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by JProthero 6y ago
You might be on to something there: https://youtu.be/AtKnsxlUWr8?t=44
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by JProthero 6y ago
In the philosophy of personal identity, teleportation is an intellectual contrivance only intended to help clarify thinking about personal identity. Another version of the same concept is the 'Swampman' thought experiment [1], whi
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by JProthero 6y ago
There is a long tradition in academic philosophy of using this model of teleportation as a device for investigating questions of personal identity. Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' is probably the best-known treatment [1]
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by JProthero 6y ago
Perhaps the results of hand transplantation procedures, which have already been carried out successfully [1], could provide some insight into this question. The functionality that hand transplant recipients obtain from the transplant appare
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by JProthero 6y ago
Here's a link to the video of an interview with Steve Furber [1], who worked on the chip's development, discussing this. [1] https://youtu.be/1jOJl8gRPyQ?t=508
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by JProthero 6y ago
That was exactly my thought on reading that part of the article: that the author was describing Pagerank, but substituting Pagerank's design objective of algorithmically outsourcing quality judgments to the global community of website
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by JProthero 6y ago
I have noticed the same problem with DuckDuckGo searches recently. I hope that a verbatim search function will be restored in the future; I think it's an essential basic tool for a search engine, and without it the user can be left wit
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by JProthero 6y ago
I can't see why Newton would lie to his friends and relations about something like this, but in the absence of a time machine and a brain scanner your interpretation is as valid as any other. In any case, regardless of whether Newton&#
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by JProthero 6y ago
This is only partly a myth; there are contemporary accounts from Newton's acquaintances noting how he described being inspired by observing the fall of an apple from a tree. It was the fact that an apple falls from a tree specifically
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by JProthero 6y ago
The weight of a sample of matter depends on its total mass energy, and heat contributes to that total. If matter is cooled, it will weigh less, and vice-versa; if it is heated it will weigh more. At the kinds of temperatures that normally e

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