I wonder if someday we get even more absurd. Musk wagers company money on the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl, announces this on Twitter, then hedges his bet when Vegas moved the line after a bunch of pro chiefs action. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t hedge funds that do sports gambling already.
I always try to use HIV as my point of reference for COVID-19. We got off lucky by that measure. So maybe my pessimism is unfounded, but I really wish we had learned more lessons from HIV.
Half a year into the pandemic the president of the United States was filling stadiums was maskless supporters. The WHO seems completely willing to fall on their sword over COVID, and indeed they failed in many ways. But in the long run, we’re seeing a disaster of anti intellectualism around the world, and the next pandemic may be just as bad as this one.
For the list of mutations, there is a convenient Wikipedia article [1]. For example, the South Africa variant has mutation E484K which means mutate amino acid 484 from Glutamic Acid to Lysine. It’s just that simple; you could even download a spike protein crystal structure from RCSB and try rolling your own mutations!
Why a mutation improves transmission takes a lot of investigating to understand. I am not sure why you were under the impression that we know the mechanisms. If you type something like “E484K molecular dynamics” you can find a lot of computer simulations trying to investigate the mechanism, this is standard biological research. Of course we E484K you have a mutation from a negative to a positive residue, so that might give you a hint why it’s harder for the antibody to stick.
I can assure you that here in Japan we do not care about Trump. Perhaps we should be more grateful to his good support for the Pfizer vaccine, which is the one we are now deploying at scale (after the government here did their own review of the evidence).
It seems like the flu virus is the example you want right? Every year the vaccines delivered is a cocktail based on the predicted most common variants, because no one vaccine can protect against them all.
This is a reminder that a lot of this comes down to the whims of whoever is staffed at HR. I’ve often read contradictory advice about resumes in articles written by people in charge of hiring. It’s not a big surprise, a lot of these views are arbitrary (though they will insist otherwise!)
I wonder how serializing a novel would mesh with most author’s work flow. I guess most would want to write it first and release monthly an already finished product?
> The galactic center, according to the scientists, “provides an ideal” central location for “advanced civilizations to place a powerful transmitter to efficiently send beacons across the entire Milky Way,” in what is yet another advantage to this strategy.
Can anyone comment on this? What is the idea of such a beacon?
It sounds to me like what the author is really saying is that a quantum theory of gravity would look like some of these modified gravity equations in the classical limit. Of course it would be nice to kill two birds with one stone and knock out quantum gravity and dark matter with one discovery. I am curious if some of the proposed theories could be made to look like that.
It drives me crazy when people complain about charity ceo pay. Half a million is a drop in the bucket compared to their actually expenses. If you reduce the ceo pay, you’ll find your ceo leaves every few months because they’re being offered ten times more somewhere else.
It would be far better if Facebook just said: “he tried to undermine democracy in the home country of our employees, so we banned him because we don’t want that”. This charade just leaves them open to people calling them hypocrites in the future.
Great story. I wonder if somewhere on a site like the daily wtf you can find the sys admin’s retelling where he relays in horror how a bubble sort almost brought down the system!
IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.