Viewing profile — conistonwater

Pointless pedantry, just because I've been watching TWiV: the PCR test is detecting virus RNA because coronaviruses have RNA, and there's no DNA there. The rest I absolutely agree …

True, in fact I think a lot of those ideas are not even remotely new. For example, in shogi (Japanese chess), stalemate is a loss for the stalemated side (because that side can't m…

Wikipedia isn't very good at explaining go, Sensei's Library is much better and has the advantage of being written by go players for other go players: https://senseis.xmp.net/?Kika…

> 1. e4: "This game is a game that I lost because of a tactical oversight on my part. I had a tactical idea in mind, but in this game, black resigned. I would have played on for a …

I think so too: the mice went from 27g to 38g (32g for control mice), so they gained a lot of weight on this diet. For a human that would be like going from normal weight to border…

> Stimuli previously tested were other Mozart compositions16, Beethoven’s Fur Elise19, and a string version of K44810. Why would you not test other things too? Are there not enough…

This might be Regulation DD, set by the Federal Reserve if you're in the US, or something similar if you're elsewhere: https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/caletters/2009/0914.…

There was an episode the TWiV podcast a few months ago where they discussed the biology-based evidence for why SARS-COV-2 wasn't made in a lab. I think it was this one: https://www…

It's worth noting that the consensus in the MathOverflow thread seems to have been that it was a complete waste of time to spend any further time on that paper and the proof. That'…

You're right, but I'm not sure how to refer to something that doesn't seem to have been ready after this much time.

If you're going to use the scientific notation for billions, you should just use it for everything. I don't think it's so obtuse anyway, it's exactly how I'd spell that number in c…

Is that actually true? According to [1], McDonalds (in 2020) was buying EUR160e6 worth of Irish beef accounting for 20% of its beef sales across Europe. It would make quite a loss …

The "Russian counterparts", if I understand correctly, are something like two different entities. One is the Russian government itself, which is mostly interested in PR. E.g., I re…

But Earth-based stuff isn't designed to last too long precisely because it can be maintained. Why wouldn't the ISS be somewhat different in this regard? I don't really see how this…

When there was a fire on Mir, Nasa said "Small Fire Extinguished on Mir" [1], and the actual thing was pretty severe: "The flames were large enough to span the breadth of Kvant-1, …

There are already some countries that made a business of looking the other way when somebody wants to launder some money, that's been going on forever and isn't related to Bitcoin.…

Doesn't that undermine the argument the Bitcoin is a good store of value, if that's the trouble you have to go to with an "unspendable fortune"?

I agree with the other comment about there being a lot of predecessors to IEEE floating point numbers. What happened was that when people designed other, non-IEEE floating point ar…

The first one reads like somebody just found out about functional programming and functors and tried to "improve" a straightforward bunch of if statements. I can read the second pr…

> Except the boringness of it. There is no solution to it, except running in a large park or nature. I like podcasts and audio books. Since I started running I got through a lot of…

If you find that your slowest running pace is still not conversational (which happens a lot ), try the run-walk method, and accumulate as much total running time as you can with en…

Painful, exhausting, and boring is a combination that usually means you are running too fast for your fitness level. It's usually recommended people run at a pace that allows them …

There was a very good book, Being Mortal , where one of the points is that from the point of view of a doctor working with old people our bodies slowly but surely degrade until we …