rflrob (u/rflrob) - Readit News

rflrob commented on Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar... · Posted by u/benbreen

BigTTYGothGF · 4 months ago

If you bump that up to 110 years you bring in Woodrow Wilson, one of the all-time worst presidents.

rflrob · 4 months ago

I’m curious how you came to that conclusion. While he’s certainly not in the pantheon of best presidents, he ends up around the 75th percentile in rankings by historians. Even subtracting a few spots, he’s nowhere near close to “one of the all-time worst“. Or are you faulting him for not resigning when incapacitated by a stroke?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_preside...

rflrob commented on The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/bookmtn

anonymousDan · 4 months ago

I don't understand why the nuclear industry wouldn't pile in to fund research into this area (as a potential way to clean up nuclear waste). Probably I don't understand how this fungus actually works and it is impossible!

rflrob · 4 months ago

I don’t see a straightforward way this would actually help with the cleanup. A hypothetical microbe that “eats” oil would be useful in an oil spill as would chemically break down the oil and harvest its carbon.

A radiotropic fungus that’s in TFA can’t meaningfully affect the rate at which nuclear decay is happening. What it can do, supposedly, is to harvest the energy that the nuclear decay is releasing; normally there’s too much energy for an organism to safely handle.

At the risk of vastly oversimplifying, you can’t plug your phone into high voltage transmission lines. These fungi are using melanin to moderate the extra energy, stepping it down into a range that’s useful (or at least minimally harmful).

rflrob commented on Economists don't know what's going on economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ajross · a year ago

> But I can't see what is what "the economy" has given to us in return.

Stuff. You like stuff, I like stuff. If you had more stuff of one kind you could do different stuff, good stuff, even. And the people out there doing good stuff could do even more if they had more stuff to do it with. Everywhere you look, people like stuff. People with more stuff are happier on average, every time it's measured. People with serious stuff deficits end up being the ones to start wars, even.

"The Economy" is just the stuff. There's no magic here. You're imagining a villain, but it's all just stuff.

rflrob · a year ago

To tag on, the economy gives us more than just physical "stuff" (though that's one of the easiest things to measure). Do you enjoy travel? How about clean water, yoga classes, or therapy? What about the ability to post a message to complete strangers over the internet? As much as we could, in theory, do all of those things without having an economy to support it, money is a shockingly good way to give you whatever it is that you value.

Yes, some people have more money than they know what to do with (and, I would argue, than is good for them or us), but I've seen no reasonable suggestions that as many of us can have what we want without a reasonably open market economy. I don't think we're at a local optimum in the fine details of the rules for that economy, but I don't think moving to a whole different part of the possibility space is likely to be better than where we are now.

rflrob commented on Tumor-derived erythropoietin acts as immunosuppressive switch in cancer immunity science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

hinkley · a year ago

Oh I know we are trying to genomically test them for oncology research and potential treatment plans, but do they do paternity tests on them?

I was trying to remember which mammal in Australia gets tumors from fighting, and I found a reference to a mother getting melanoma from her daughter. It’s unclear to me whether the cancer transmission was rare or the identification is rare.

rflrob · a year ago

There’s very often a comparison to the somatic (i.e. non-cancer) genome of the same patient. It’s a great way to quality control that there wasn’t some sample mixup in the lab.

Transmission of cancer is rare in humans—if it were not, it would make someone’s career to find many cases of it. While we can’t say that all sheep are white, we’ve looked at enough of them to say that black sheep are not common. Furthermore, it’s very clear how the Tasmanian devil cancer is spread—it’s around the mouth while they are biting each others faces; it’s not as obvious how one would spread most human cancers.

rflrob commented on Cheap blood test detects pancreatic cancer before it spreads nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rbanffy

thinkingtoilet · a year ago

If the test is cheap, you could run it 2 or 3 times. Then the false positive rate would be pretty low and you could proceed with more intense treatments/diagnostics.

rflrob · a year ago

That assumes that what causes the false positive is some kind of analytical noise in the test. The bigger concern is biological noise that would persist if you tested the patient again.

It might still be useful to know you have weird protease activity that isn’t cancer derived, but the more of these tests we do, the more likely it is that for every person, there’ll be at least one non-cancer oddity that looks like cancer signal for at least some test.

rflrob commented on Developing a cancer drug without Big Pharma: this hospital shows it can be done ftm.nl/artikelen/ruzie-tu... · Posted by u/yread

DrScientist · a year ago

> prove that it’s better than what currently exists.

So how do you do that ethically? How do you justify taking off something that you know works to some extent and try something completely new or worse placebo? ie don't you have to construct the trial in the context of existing treatments etc?

These are the kind of challenges that makes drug development slow - in the end you don't do one trial, but a series of trials, slowly building confidence and making the case.

Often that's what takes the time during the clinical phase.

Of course it would be much faster to go straight to a big trial that would show how well your treatment works in conditions optimal to it - however that kind of 'move-fast break-things' approach involves potentially breaking things which happen to be people.

Regulation just reflects the cautious 'first do no harm' philosophy.

Now let's be honest - big pharma will simultaneous complain about regulation and the cost of development, and at the same time know it creates barriers to entry - there is always some frustration about the slowest of regulatory authorities to adopt new methods - however you wouldn't want your regulatory to be gungho.

rflrob · a year ago

> or worse placebo

Just to be clear, most drug trials for anything where we have an effective treatment are not “new drug vs placebo”, but instead “new drug vs standard of care”. Thus the goal being to prove it’s better than what already exists.

rflrob commented on Butterflies accumulate static electricity to attract pollen without contact bristol.ac.uk/news/2024/j... · Posted by u/thunderbong

tocs3 · 2 years ago

To start a discussion:

“This means that they don’t even need to touch flowers in order to pollinate them,"

So, the butterflies build up the charge as the fly around. Then they get near a flower and the pollen flies up and sticks to the butterfly. How does this pollinate other flowers? The pollen is stuck to the butterfly and not the flowers. Also, it seams it would mostly stick to the wings.

Just curios. It is a pretty amazing world around us.

rflrob · 2 years ago

I always hesitate to ascribe motives to non-human animals, but the butterfly shouldn’t particularly “care” whether the pollen gets from its body back to a plant. If the butterfly is eating the pollen, then maybe there’s an advantage to hoovering up more just by getting close, but that doesn’t mean it wants to give any pollen back to other plants.

On the other hand, if the butterfly is eating the nectar and the pollination is an ancillary effect, then you have to start invoking more complicated mechanisms. Maybe successful pollination of the plants increases the food supply later? Maybe the flowers are not neutrally charged, but instead become oppositely charged when the pollen is ready to bias pollinators to come close at appropriate times? You can always construct some just-so story that fits the observed evidence, but where it becomes science is when you make predictions and test them.

rflrob commented on Startups building balloons to hoist tourists cnbc.com/2024/07/13/ballo... · Posted by u/amichail

the__alchemist · 2 years ago

Could you talk us through this one? I am interested in the equation of "above one atmosphere" to between 0 and 1.

rflrob · 2 years ago

I’m not OP, but the startup ethos of the last few decades has been to move fast and break things, fake it til you make it, and generally operate on the bleeding edge to deliver incredible products (and, occasionally non-credible, cough Theranos).

My concern would be that the team would cut safety corners until the probability of success just barely rises above some threshold, rather than engineering everything to have as low a risk as is feasible. Is 0-1atm easier than 1-infinity atm? Yes, but that just means you can cut more corners.

rflrob commented on Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries bbc.com/news/articles/c6p... · Posted by u/no_exit

rgovostes · 2 years ago

See also the Banana Massacre instigated by the United Fruit Company against plantation workers making outrageous demands like limiting the work week to 6 days. 100 years later, that company operates under the name Chiquita.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre

rflrob · 2 years ago

Also the Guatemalan coup that was heavily lobbied for by the United Fruit Company.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%2527%...

rflrob commented on The Texas Triangle: A rising megaregion unlike all others (2021) kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge... · Posted by u/sorenKaram

saghm · 2 years ago

I feel like I'm missing some nuance, because it looks like it's basically just taking the largest population cities in the US and drawing circles around the ones near each other. "Most economic activity happens where the most people live" doesn't seem like a particularly novel insight.

rflrob · 2 years ago

The claim, as I understand it, is that commerce within a megaregion is more tightly integrated than commerce between megaregions. If this is the case, there should be more trade between Baltimore and Boston than Baltimore and Raleigh (controlling for population/GDP/infrastructure, I suppose, and therein lies the rub), despite the fact the latter pair is closer.