Viewing profile — costigan

Could you say a bit more about your workflow? I'm used to having source code files open in emacs (or zemacs) and a lisp REPL in another buffer. I edit the source files directly and…

The commenter's point was to disagree with the previous comment that "souls aren't real". Lack of evidence either way means we don't know. Occam's razor, while a good heuristic, is…

It hasn't been limited to probationary employees. Here's one example: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-ban-renewing-sen... Agencies have also been directed to make plans…

It does. That's what the negotiation on overhead rates is for.

Didn't the NIH freeze the review meetings in this year's proposal review process, putting all grant funding that would start next fiscal year in question? This is separate from the…

Doesn't he own four private jets with another on order?

Only if the organization with the money wants to do that. Flip it around. Do you think the sports program at any major university pays for physics research facilities (or any topic…

The federal workforce, as a percentage of all jobs in the U.S. was 4% in the 50's, decreased steadily to 2% in 2000 and has held roughly steady since then. (The source is https://u…

Let's take one example. The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) is a two-year post-residency program that trains health professionals in applied epidemiology. These officers are cr…

Research funding awarded to universities and to performers internal to NASA (back when there was a reasonable amount of that) had overhead rates that were similar to the NIH rates.…

This equivalence between a company that provides one app that, if it were to disappear, would hurt no one, and a government that has thousands of functions, many of which are life-…

I don't know. Mark Hamill is a voice acting chameleon. James Earl Jones was himself, which was great for many roles and impossible to improve upon for some. Their strengths lie on …

My understanding is that they do need to follow the treaty requirements if they launch from a country that has signed it or, maybe, are incorporated in such a country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection From the article: Category II: Any mission to locations of significant interest for chemical evolution and the origin of life, bu…

I was in the south bay, and walked and exercised outside frequently after about the first month. Santa Clara County had a similar policy concerning separation distance outside, and…

Was it Twitter's policy or not? (Of course it was, as we see by how easily it was changed by the new owner.)

I think you misread the article slightly. The 26% of zombie papers are inside the 44% of papers that contained at least some flawed data. Look at the figure just below this quote w…

That may have been the purchaser's expectation, but their deal was with the seller (and bank), not the community in general. In none of the legal papers I signed when purchasing my…

> NIL is an empty list.... It isn't. It has none of the mechanics of an empty list in Python etc. I can see how NIL is confusing when coming from Python, but I think this comment h…

Stolen is a vague word. If there's evidence she believes there was sufficient fraud to have changed the result, I would be interested. If she was referring to the stolen Podesta em…

The excess deaths are quite possibly attributable to both the virus and the vaccines if, as one plausible but very unproven example, they're due to inflammation and/or micro-clotti…

The canonical references (e.g., http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.834J-f01/Williams-remote-age... ) are pretty good. If you are interested in diving very deeply into the topic, I thi…

I think lisp is still used in various nooks and crannies of NASA. As a small example, I was the payload software engineer for the LCROSS mission (a robotic mission in 2009 that dem…

You're certainly right but still missing the point. The 10 injuries were most likely not due to a vulnerable part of the sub. They were likely due to a sudden change in the sub's m…

Just to be completely clear, this was satire. The professor who wrote it is very well-regarded by his students.