> The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are not part of society and that people don't have an influence about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy.
I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.
(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.
To be clear, we're talking about funding of the arts here. Without going down the rabbit hole of debating all of your critiques of the civil servant, if you really have this view of the public sector of the government of the US, then public spending on arts funding is pretty far down the totem pole as far as problems go.
I will say I think your general picture of civil servants as a cabal of lobbyists and special interest does apply to a portion (arguably a disproportionately powerful portion) of them, but the population of civil servants is huge and is definitely not monolithic.
> For instance Lat goes 0-180 but Lon goes -90 to 90
Surely this is several typos? Longitude, which marks east-west, must span 360 degrees (-180 to 180, perhaps? although 0 to 360 is just as reasonable). Latitude, marking north-south, spans only 180 degrees, and therefore is presumably -90 to 90 (so that 0 is the equator).
If I ever need to confirm which is which, I use the the mnemonic above. I usually imagine latitude corresponding to rings on the earth moving up and down along the surface. This image is triggered by thinking about "altitude" in the context of latitude for me.
The latitude defines which of these "rings" the point is on.
Try thinking of it like latitude being like a ladder's rungs. Though this does have the horrifying side effect that sometimes you'll pronounce it laddertude in your head.
Moreover, I've used minute-by-minute forecasts myself, and (at least where I lived at the time) they were quite accurate. My use case was "where is a 30 minute gap when I can walk home without getting soaked", and I never once got soaked. So much of the OP falls into the category of things-I-know-to-be-false-from-experience.
The article really has a strong vibe of "algorithms are faulty, we need humans in the loop to make sure they're behaving well!", with a hidden assumption of "humans are less faulty than algorithms". That's an empirical assertion to be determined on a domain-by-domain basis. It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything). The same is increasingly true of other domains as well.
Perhaps someday, incorrect, largely content-free FUD articles about how algorithms suck will themselves be written entirely by algorithms.
This is pushing way too many of my buttons, so I'll just close by pointing out (on the other side of the apps/humans scale) that a substantial fraction of the time, when I check the weather on NWS, it says something like "Today's high: 56; current temperature: 58". I certainly hope that a human in the loop would fix that problem.
> It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything).
No, this is actually totally false. There is a world championship in computer-aided correspondence chess [1], and you won't get anywhere near the top ranks by having "enough modesty to just not do anything."
I think that strengthens the point, don't you? Deep blue could beat humans a long time ago, and it's still the case that computers don't need humans to play chess, and play it better than humans do.
> and it's still the case that computers don't need humans to play chess,
Sure, I guess
> and play it better than humans do.
In the sense that they can beat humans in a 1v1, yes.
But none of that is relevant to the original claim, which is that a human in the loop makes a computer play worse--i.e., that human+computer is worse than computer alone. This claim is false, as the ICCF championship demonstrates each year.
I can’t comment on America, but when I lived in Amsterdam everyone I knew used an app called Buienradar for this exact use case. The accuracy was astonishing.
To explain why I thought this was interesting: from what I read, a Tanomoshiko is (mostly "was") an informal mechanism for loans. If one person was in financial hardship, a group of several people would each contribute a small sum of money, thus curing the hardship. Instead of ordinary repayment, the group would now repeat the same act in a few weeks, but choosing another person in the group (perhaps at random) to receive the money. This would repeat until everyone had been payed.
There were and are taboos around loans in many societies (our own included). This seems like it's probably part of a broader family of methods for working around those taboos.
I came across this only from a side remark in Yukichi Fukuzawa's autobiography. I don't know of a good source (the wikipedia article is admittedly not great).
> Editors’ note, [30] March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
And from "The Scientist":
> Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.
A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.
The wild speculation that I've read that is somewhat related to the grant proposal, because it was submitted to DARPA. The speculation is following (paraphrasing):
> WIV is a dual research institution. What that means is there's been military research done by PLA at WIV. Ecohealth Alliance is a front for two different things: 1. outsource risky pathogens experiments, which is done by NIH, NIAID and other organizations 2. spying on Chinese military operations at WIV, which is done by US military and intelligence organizations. That's why Daszak is intricately linked to US administration and has been untouchable so far. EHA has been essentially voilating NIH grant terms and denied NIH requests to submit all the experiments data. That explains US govt's reluctance to have a proper investigation.
I am in no way claiming there's any evidence to it, especially EHA is partially funded by US intelligence operation. You be the judge.
"the SARS-CoV-2 spike, similarly to the more distantly related Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV), contains a polybasic CS, characterized as being a suboptimal furin CS. This polybasic CS is absent from the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, although similar polybasic CSs are found in more distantly related coronaviruses"
> but there are many strong indications that it did.
Nope, there really aren't. We're now finding more and more naturally-evolved viruses in cave-dwelling bats that share plenty of features with SARS-CoV2, including the 'weird' features everyone was talking about at the beginning of the pandemic. All it really takes is to go and look for them. Occam's razor says this virus too is just one of many.
10's of thousands of animals have been tested for a predecessor to human Covid-19 though, for two years now, and nothing has been found, despite looking very hard and in ways that 'should have' found something had it been there. In all other known zoonotic crossovers, where we had the modern capability to test, the virus or a very close relative was quickly found.
Since we have exhaustively eliminated zoonotic origin, whatever is left must be the cause, even if it did not have the preponderance of circumstantial evidence that lab escape does.
> BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2; one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago.
> RaTG13 is 96.1% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and the two viruses probably shared a common ancestor 40–70 years ago.
Once you let ideology infiltrate your reasoning, you’re no longer doing science. Just because you don’t like the implications of a particular piece of research doesn’t mean you get to dismiss it.
I think the parent poster was talikng about BANAL virus discovered in Laos, which apparently is closest to SARS-CoV2, but it doesn't have Furin Cleavage Site.
> The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.
From [1]. So yes, the claim made by the parent poster is patently false.
Given that the vast majority of mainstream article posts are from a place of opposite bias, I think it's a breath of fresh air to have a different bias at the forefront every once in a while.
This is a false equivalence. The opinion of someone who does not believe in science is not magically equal to those of people who do and are well versed in it when it comes to debating scientific matters.
Your post is a false equivalence, you can believe in science while not parroting a particular establishment/authoritarian narrative of science (which also includes misinformation/ignoring other science) to further a particular narrative with a particular bias.
Okay, I understand that there's some sort of world-wide supply-chain issue. Recently I've heard about fuel shortages of various shorts. It's unclear how related the mess in Lebanon is, since the article states
> Prior to the outages, citizens had for months only been given a few hours of electricity per day
and I thought the fuel shortages were a recent phenomenon.
Regardless: does anyone have a link to a decent primer on what's going on (regarding supply chains, fuel, and all the other recent economic disruptions)? I'm not interested in the usual politically motivated "just so" stories, just a list of what's happening, what parts are definitely understood, and what parts are not understood.
What I can piece together post the Lebanon war, Saudi Arabia and other gulf states provided substantial aid to Lebanon to reconstruct. But in 2016 Saudi Arabia cut off its aid when relations got spoiled. Lebanon has lots of government corruption so much of aid was wasted. Then there is the explosion last year that set them back even more. Foreign countries want reforms before they will donate further.
You could trace it back to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Lebanon supports the Arab states, the Palestinians spill into Lebanon, and fighting continues over various decades (50's, 70's, 80's, 90's), including a civil war that took 16 years, after which point it's sort of Syria, Israel and Hezbollah grappling through Lebanon, of course with the other usual cast of characters (US, UK, Iran, Saudi, and a dozen different rebel groups).
But probably the majority of the current crisis stems from the 2006 war.
This depends on the compiler of course. Most will not because it is not worth it, but I expect that there is at least one compiler out there with the option to exhaustively search the allocation space for that very last nanosecond of runtime optimization. Probably inside an HFT firm somewhere.
I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.
(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.