fsh

68 ms·

721.
by fsh 5y ago
COVID-19 is becoming endemic. The second booster will be the virus itself.
722.
by fsh 5y ago
Neutralizing antibodies are only part of the immune response. Not having a detectable level does not at all imply having "no immunity". Antibodies are expected to disappear over time, but cellular immunity is much more long-lastin
723.
by fsh 5y ago
They will use insulated containers with dry ice, same as everywhere else. This might not work in the middle of the jungle, but most developing contries actually have roads and trucks.
724.
by fsh 5y ago
This is simply not true. The CDC has published a detailed analysis of the vaccine efficacy and known side effects [1]. This clearly shows that the benefit of being vaccinated vastly outweighs the risk due to side effects in all age groups &
725.
by fsh 5y ago
This is not quite correct. QKD could in principle be safe against eavesdropping (even though the track record so far has been very poor due to experimental imperfections), but it has no inherent protection against man-in-the-middle attacks.
726.
by fsh 5y ago
Great article and impressive demonstration of Simpson's paradox at work. This really goes to show how a too naive application of statistics can lead to completely wrong results.
727.
by fsh 5y ago
This is a pretty good analogy for the state of quantum computers right now! One difference is that (in principle) it is possible to do quantum error correction. Essentially this turns a number of imperfect "physical" qubits into a
728.
by fsh 5y ago
This is not at all what I said! Before conditional approval, possible risks have been extensively studied in very large phase 3 trials with a few ten thousand participants. For reference, the phase 3 study of the conventional TBE vaccine I
729.
by fsh 5y ago
The clinical studies clearly show that the benefit from getting the vaccine outweighs the possible risks. Otherwise the regulatory agencies would not have approved them. Why don't you simply look up the reports from the approval agency
730.
by fsh 5y ago
All of these issues have been discussed extensively for months. According to the mRNA vaccine data I've seen, for adults the benefit of protection against COVID-19 vastly outweighs any observed risks due to the vaccine. This was alread
731.
by fsh 5y ago
Pretty much any possible medical problem has a non-zero background rate in the population. When you vaccinate hundreds of millions of people, you probably sample all of those at least once. One needs to do a proper statistical analysis to d
732.
by fsh 5y ago
Rapid antigen test kits have reached retail prices well below 1€ now. They probably cost cents to produce. I guess a significant factor in the cost of PCR tests are the thermocyclers and the lab staff. Not nearly as easy to scale as rapid t
733.
by fsh 5y ago
It was not clear which vaccine development projects would succeed and which would not. For a reasonably wealthy country, the cost of the vaccine doses is completely negligible compared to the cost of the pandemic. This is why it made sense
734.
by fsh 5y ago
I have some Arab friends who are very active on social media. It doesn't surprise me that the sheer volume of their political posts triggers all kinds of anti-spam mechanisms. I have also occasionally tried researching the background o
735.
by fsh 5y ago
What "certain toxic elements than never break down" would that be? Typical lifespans are estimated to be 25-30 years. I doubt that any other power plant will run that long without requiring major maintenance.
736.
by fsh 5y ago
Sycamore would probably struggle to factor a two-digit number. Useful quantum computation is still very far away, if at all possible.
737.
by fsh 5y ago
The underlying reason is that we don't actually need a unit for temperature. The temperature of a substance is simply the mean kinetic energy of its molecules which can be given in Joule. The problem is that historically thermometers w
738.
by fsh 5y ago
This article implies that QKD could be a replacement for asymmetric cryptography, which is simply not true. In order to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, QKD requires having a pre-shared key between the participants. If you have that, why
739.
by fsh 5y ago
I've never understood this argument. Isn't the main bottleneck that you need well-labeled data for training the neural networks? How is having tons and tons of random camera footage going to help?
740.
by fsh 5y ago
I have seen this screen after an update on my laptop: https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/11/15/windows-10-is-now-n...
741.
by fsh 5y ago
I like using PyQt5 for the GUI and PyQtGraph for interactive plots. Using matplotlib as a Qt widget is also possible, but it is quite slow and tends to leak memory when dynamically updating the data. On Windows I use the NI VISA library wit
742.
by fsh 5y ago
There is a very large region between "has to be completely air-gapped" and "better should not reboot randomly".
743.
by fsh 5y ago
In my field, labview has been mostly replaced by python for building experiment control systems. Some groups manage to run their labs on Linux with maybe one dedicated Windows machine for stubborn hardware. In my setups we use quite a lot o
744.
by fsh 5y ago
Only the back half of nature magazine contains scientific papers. The front half is articles like this one that are meant for a general audience. That part part is surprisingly readable and often quite interesting.
745.
by fsh 5y ago
I'm always a bit worried about using a Windows 10 machine in the lab. You never really know when it will decide to update and randomly reboot (or show a fullscreen ad for Edge). Unfortunately with the EOL of Windows 7 there aren't
746.
by fsh 5y ago
Atomic fountains use neutral atoms. It is almost impossible to see the effect of gravity on ions since a single stray electron anywhere in your system creates a way larger Coulomb force. Fountains need to have a minimum size in order to ach
747.
by fsh 5y ago
No, the CSAC is a Rubidium standard. It measures the ~6.8 GHz ground-state hyperfine splitting in 87Rb using coherent population trapping with a modulated 780 nm diode laser. This signal is used to lock the local oscillator to the atomic tr
748.
by fsh 5y ago
All currently used vaccines use the same version of the spike protein sequence.
749.
by fsh 5y ago
Of course you can construct all kinds of interesting distributions with any random piece of data. This doesn't mean that it makes any sense to do so. Pretending that human reasoning is somehow equivalent to Bayesian inference (and abus
750.
by fsh 5y ago
Statistical modelling assumes that the observations can in some way be described as random samples drawn from an (unknown) probability distribution. One can then try to estimate properties of that distribution using the observed data. For e

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