Viewing profile — blix

Patronage programs for people with advanced degrees is a woefully inadequate solution to the current economic pressures. Large segments of the first-world working and middle classe…

the denouncing of heresy may be even more important.

You don't want the people to be uneducated, because you have no control over their thought processes, which could be dangerous an unpredictable. And it leaves space for someone els…

The effort significantly predates the recent changes in US media ownership. I would actually argue that the ownership change is mostly orthogonal to the ongoing trend of centraliza…

I'm not gonna argue whether it is true or false, but the scale of the conspiracy you are proposing is pretty massive. Multiple orders of magnitude bigger than anything that is curr…

It is not jist Bibi, but also the IAEA and other international organizations. And at least the last 5 US administrations. I suppose they could also all be in Israel's pocket though…

I am not convinced that a population that just recently had 30k people die in a revolt is gonna immediately rally around their oppressors after a foreign power kills 2k. I have yet…

Destroying the gulf states would dramatically reduce the importance of the Strait, which would make mining it or otherwise shutting it down somewhat pointless anyway. It is a bit o…

What action can Iran take today that they couldn't take a year ago? No one who has been paying attention should be surprised that Iran can shut down the straight. It has been a kno…

All policy aimed at preventing nuclear Iran has one goal: buy time. I think it is hard to argue that time has not been bought (though how much and whether the price was right is an…

The Pax Americana was already over when Russia siezed Crimea.

I inspect and modify my own weights literally all the time. I just do it on a more abstract level than individual neurons. I call this process "learning"

I did some cursory research and that seems to be a common estimate for modern osmosis-based desalination energy costs. If you have a better estimate, feel free to supply it.

Fukuoka's desalination plant treats about 16400 m^3 of water per day. Assuming 3kWh per m^3 of water, this works out to a time-averaged power consuption of ~2000kW. The osmotic pow…

Applied physics. I'd prefer not to get too specific. Most of my peers are working for the US DoD or DoE now.

I wish this comment was more representative of my personal experience in science. Instead I got PIs happy to say that weak evidence "proved" their theory and to try suppress eviden…

The technology enables the policy. If the cost and risk were higher, there would be fewer strikes.

The issue is not really with the difference in impact between drone attacks and other types of aerial attacks, but with the dramatic increase in scale, resulting from reduced cost …

"Shocking" carries a meaning of a being sudden, surprising, or startling. It's this aspect that is being challenged, not the emotional reaction.

Obama also created ICE as we know it today. And normalized drone strikes.

Using something similar to a benzene ring with spokes sticking out of it is absolutely a reasonable choice for depicting sodium hexametaphosphate in a schematic. This is actually a…

experienced players who know their teammates well can reliably get 3-4s. if you only go for safe 2s against these opponents you will lose every time.

I've seen almost no one outside during the day all summer lol. Phoenix this summer has the deadest daytime sidewalks of any place I've ever lived.

My doctor told me after an intestinal surgery that I would never be able to eat vegetables again.

Do you really think the engineers building a robot to go into Fukishima have never once looked at the first handful of google results for "radiation hardened camera"?