stvswn (u/stvswn) - Readit News

stvswn commented on Rest Easy commentary.org/articles/j... · Posted by u/lermontov

aredox · 5 months ago

>As an adolescent, I remember sleeping eight-, nine-, 10-hour periods. Now if I can do two or three hours at a stretch, I feel vaguely triumphant.

Wow. So little sleep is very bad for health (mental and physical).

stvswn · 5 months ago

Well, he's 88.

stvswn commented on CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us... · Posted by u/doctaj

DiogenesKynikos · 7 months ago

The demonization of the Ecohealth Alliance is one of the more depressing aspects of the response to the pandemic.

EHA has been warning for decades that a coronavirus pandemic is likely, and that governments should be taking steps to prepare for it and to make it less likely. Then, they're proved right, but instead of society thanking them, they're subject to a politically motivated witch hunt, with the aim of distracting from the US government's disastrous pandemic response.

stvswn · 7 months ago

It's begging the question to claim they were proven right. Sure, they were proven right in some respect, but if the research itself caused it (and let's be real, it did) then they were proven right in a manner that doesn't really speak well of their record. And yes, they were influential in arguing for continued grant money to study coronaviruses. They were also influential in arguing against the Obama administrations restrictions on gain of function research and seem to have sought ways around the restrictions (we know from comments on the DEFUSE paper). They didn't publicly disclose the DEFUSE paper, a whistleblower in the DoD had to leak it. It is relevant because it suggested adding a FCS to natural coronaviruses to make it more virulent to humans. It seems like as soon as a virus with FCS appeared on the scene, their first reaction should have been "oh no, did someone do that research we proposed somewhere? We have to tell someone!" -- but, alas, no. Let's keep crying that they're being demonized, though.

stvswn commented on CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us... · Posted by u/doctaj

stvswn · 7 months ago

It's pretty wild to me that a good portion of commenters here seem to think that only one side can politicize Covid's origins when the cited article itself says that the conclusion predates the new administration.

The natural origin bitter-clingers are still citing papers that claim to lean towards natural origin with the thinnest possible evidence. I admit I'm not a virologist, but I am a bit skeptical that this community would be completely forthright with us.

I can't shake the feeling like there might be fire where there's smoke: the Chinese government has not provided access to the WIV's data, for instance. The Chinese government deleted the virus's genome sequence from GenBank before later releasing it publicly. The closest relative to Covid-19 in known databases is RatG13, a virus from bats that was discovered in caves thousands of miles away, a complex that the researchers at WIV had used to collect samples. Peter Dasnak of EcoHealth alliance had previously submitted a plan to the DoD to introduce furin cleavage sites to existing coronaviruses to do gain-of-function research (or some euphemism for GOF to evade restrictions), a proposal that was declined, but within which there are still comments extant where they discuss outsourcing the riskiest research to China. Peter Dasnak led the delegation from WHO to China but never publicly disclosed that he had, only several years earlier, been interested in research that would have produced a virus that very specifically resembled Covid. A small group of influential scientists and bureaucrats were discussing via email that it certainly appeared to be a lab leak to them until they met in person to speak with Dr. Fauci in February 2020, after which they abruptly stopped discussing the possibility of lab-leak and worked to submit the Proximal Origin letter to Nature that claimed a consensus among scientists that it must be natural origin -- based on the airtight logic that if a lab wanted to make a coronavirus it probably would have done it differently. Those authors did not disclose the influence of Peter Dasnak and Dr Fauci in drafting the letter. Subsequently, the US government used the existence of the letter as authoritative evidence of a natural origin in order to lean on social media companies to censor speech about the potential of a lab leak. Meanwhile, the fact remains that in order for Covid to have made a jump from an animal species, it would have to be extant in the population of an animal species -- or a variant clearly one mutation away would need to be. It's been 5 years and we haven't found an animal with Covid.

Of course we'll never get the smoking gun because the data you'd need -- the experimental data from WIV -- is likely gone forever. Why would that be? Why wouldn't a leading research center on coronavirus virology -- perhaps the foremost in the world -- hide its records when the big event that represents its entire reason for existence -- a coronovirus pandemic -- has shown up in the world, conveniently on its doorstep? Shouldn't that be their time to shine? Are you going to blame that on Trump's rhetoric? Why hasn't all of Baric's data from UNC been released to the public yet, then?

It is really pretty amazing to me that many people will likely go to their grave thinking "oh, no, no scientists released a paper that says the natural origin is still a live theory, I don't have to listen to any of this conspiracy nonsense" simply because they can't live in a world where Trump was right.

stvswn commented on All clocks are 30 seconds late victorpoughon.fr/all-cloc... · Posted by u/fouronnes3

Bootvis · 8 months ago

The article does have a picture of an analog clock (The Big Ben) I think. The problem is not analog but showing seconds or not.

stvswn · 8 months ago

I don't think so, because the sweeping motion of minute hand is effectively continuous rather than discrete, so there's no truncation. At 4:53:30 the minute hand will be correctly in between 4:53 and 4:54, if one (like the author) cares about such precision.

stvswn commented on How Gothic architecture became spooky architecturaldigest.com/s... · Posted by u/teleforce

jhbadger · 10 months ago

And the (perhaps unintentionally spooky) 1925 Edward Hopper painting House by the Railroad depicting one of these Gilded Age houses, which is said to have inspired the fictional houses in the Addams Family and in Psycho.

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

stvswn · 10 months ago

One town over from my own hometown is Westfield, NJ where Charles Addams is from, and there's a house on Elm Street that looks a lot like the Addams Family house -- especially the one he drew in New Yorker cartoons. The town has a festival in his honor every year around Halloween and the house in particular features proudly as _the_ Addams Family house.

stvswn commented on How Gothic architecture became spooky architecturaldigest.com/s... · Posted by u/teleforce

amiga386 · 10 months ago

I don't think Gothic architecture ever drove the plots of Gothic romance or horror, apart from a few choice novels. It was mostly used as a setting.

The spookiness, at least for Americans, came like so:

1. Gilded Age upper classes built the fanciest mansions they could afford, in the Neo-Gothic style which was fashionable at the time

2. Like the English country houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_country_houses_...), eventually these rich owners couldn't afford the upkeep of these massively oversized and ornate dwellings. And nobody would buy them. So they moved out and left the mansions to become ruins

3. Now lots of people know about the old abandoned mansion on the hill. Gothic! Spooky! That includes Charles Addams, who starts making jolly cartoons in the New Yorker about the odd family that live in a big spooky mansion, and it includes Alfred Hitchcock who thinks a run-down mansion is a great setting for Psycho

stvswn · 10 months ago

I agree with the idea that there's something dramatic about evil things happening in an old house where one might find a mysterious aristocrat behaving badly, but I think the theme goes back to Regency era Britain an, when the industrial revolution was upending society and old aristocrats were going broke while new industrialists were getting rich -- causing the old manor house in disrepair trope to be something you might find in England. One person who inherited such a manor house, but not the wealth to maintain it, was Lord Byron. His manor, Newstead Abbey, is out of haunted-house central casting and, as a romantic, he plays to all those tropes. He had also visited the Balkans and was aware of Vampire myths, so when it's time to participate in the famous scary-story-contest in 1816 (where Mary Shelley submitted _Frankenstein_), Byron tells a story of a vampire who seems a lot like himself. This story is ripped off by Byron's physician who published his own story (The Vampyre) where the main character is absolutely Byronic. Bram Stoker's Dracula ends up with a similarly Byronic idea of Dracula, and now we have a deeply embedded cultural heritage of creepy stuff happening in run-down manor houses -- maybe just because Lord Byron himself haunted such a setting.

stvswn commented on In Jordan, a ‘stunning’ discovery under Petra’s ancient stone nytimes.com/2024/10/14/wo... · Posted by u/aguaviva

chasil · a year ago

They are not all buried in the same place. Mark is famously in Venice.

https://www.ncregister.com/blog/where-are-the-12-apostles-no...

stvswn · a year ago

Or, that _could_ be Alexander the Great.

stvswn commented on Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine axios.com/2024/06/28/supr... · Posted by u/wumeow

kergonath · a year ago

That is not a question of good guys and bad guys. It’s just that a system where the legislative branch micro-manages things like electrical safety in new homes to what you’re allowed to put in baby formula is completely unworkable. If “the bad guys” get into power, then the agency is still checked by the courts that are perfectly able to stop blatant overreach.

OTOH, congress physically cannot keep abreast of the state of the art in all of medicine to have an informed opinion on whether to ban or control a specific compound that turned out to be carcinogenic, to give but one example.

stvswn · a year ago

It is incorrect, but widespread among left-leaning pundits, that this ruling will force Congress to micromanage everything that would normally be left to the agencies. Agencies can still make rules. If Congress would like to be out of the details business, they can even write statutes that explicitly delegate rule making to the agencies. What this does is prevent agencies from acting in ways that are easily interpreted as _not_ conforming with law. The Chevron test told judges that they have to defer to the agencies _even when_ they conclude that the agencies are misreading the laws, as long as the agencies aren't being manifestly unreasonable. This has led to agencies very savilly expanding their power without any new statutory authority simply because they have good lawyers who know how to craft it in a way that survives a Chevron test. The SC just said something I find completely reasonable: from now on, judges have to interpret the law as its written and decide cases based on whether or not the agency is complying with the law. They cannot abrogate their duties to be the experts on legal analysis simply out of a desire to defer to the agency's interpretation. I think it's correctly decided because Chevron is an illogical mess -- why is it that in one situation and one situation only, our legal system treated one of the parties in a suit as inherently having more authority to intepret the law than a court itself? It is not persuasive to me that we should say "well, because the courts can't be experts," as this is not an argument that works in any other situation where a court must make legal rulings in the face of experts -- such as bankruptcy proceedings, antitrust cases, etc.

stvswn commented on Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine axios.com/2024/06/28/supr... · Posted by u/wumeow

yongjik · a year ago

Err, we've seen what happened when the Bad Guys (TM) won the election. They pack the Supreme Court with their friendly Bad Guys (TM) so that the Court can make decisions in their favor. (If you object, feel free to switch Good/Bad guys, and it will be still true.)

So "Please consider that supreme courts may also limit the power of the Bad Guys" is clearly false, because when the Team X has power, they will make sure Team X is in every branch of the government, and their justices will decide whatever the executive branch is doing is very kosher and constitutional, as long as it's their team.

In the end, the system can only hold as long as even "Bad Guys" are good enough that they're not willing to break the system from inside. You keep electing the Real Bad Guys, the system will fail. Checks and balances aren't magic.

stvswn · a year ago

Simply because you're not a fan of the outcomes doesn't mean that the appointments of justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were illegitimate. Chevron deference started under the Stevens court and the deference it entailed related to the Reagan administration. That this has become a conservative hobby horse since then has nothing to do with policy preferences that only cut one way in a partisan way, and has everything to do with a deeper disagreement over the separation of powers and the role of the judiciary. Chevron deference isn't "the system" it's simply one precedent that has been faltering for years. There's no reason for any "side" to see this as the sky falling unless you really, really want to preserve some federal regulation that is TOO IMPORTANT to allow statutes to clarify.

stvswn commented on Steve Jurvetson's personal collection of Apollo Lunar Module parts flickr.com/photos/jurvets... · Posted by u/gessha

spoonjim · a year ago

Crazy that you can sexually harass women and buy up one of the world's amazing collections of space exploration artifacts. Karma is such a laughable concept

stvswn · a year ago

The only misconduct _alleged_ is that he had extramarital affairs and led women on:

"Those sources said DFJ’s external investigators at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett discovered from at least two women — who confirmed their accounts to Recode — that Jurvetson had allegedly carried out affairs with multiple women simultaneously. Some of the women also said they felt led on by the married man and were unaware of the other relationships." https://www.vox.com/2017/11/18/16647078/steve-jurvetson-dfj-...