conistonwater

Pointless pedantry, just because I've been watching TWiV: the PCR test is detecting virus RNA because coronaviruses have RNA, and there's no DNA there. The rest I absolutely agree with.

True, in fact I think a lot of those ideas are not even remotely new. For example, in shogi (Japanese chess), stalemate is a loss for the stalemated side (because that side can't make progress), and three-fold repetition is a loss for the side giving checks (because that side chose not to make progress).

I remember the Kramnik-DeepMind collaboration studied the stalemate=win variant, I don't remember what the results were.

What would be the wisdom of Black winning stalemates, though?

> 1. e4: "This game is a game that I lost because of a tactical oversight on my part. I had a tactical idea in mind, but in this game, black resigned. I would have played on for a while, but I was able to find a way to convert my material advantage into a win."

I think so too: the mice went from 27g to 38g (32g for control mice), so they gained a lot of weight on this diet. For a human that would be like going from normal weight to borderline obese in six months. But I wonder if the mice were still growing up during the study (they were 6 months old at the start), maybe they got merely overweight.

> Stimuli previously tested were other Mozart compositions16, Beethoven’s Fur Elise19, and a string version of K44810.

Why would you not test other things too? Are there not enough of these IED episodes, or you have to wait around for too long for them to happen? Beethoven had piano sonatas, a lot of them, and Rachmaninov had some compositions for two pianos. There were composers around Mozart's time that wrote music in a similar style. Can people with these IED episodes test this theory for themselves using some music on their phones?

It's worth noting that the consensus in the MathOverflow thread seems to have been that it was a complete waste of time to spend any further time on that paper and the proof. That's the opinion that they reached based on the general issues with the proof itself, and not any promotion committee decisions: specifically the fact that multiple mathematicians tried to read the paper in detail, in seminars, to understand it, and reported that they failed. That would certainly do it!

I don't have an opinion myself on whether it was a mistake to spend more time on it, but you can clearly see professional mathematicians deciding not to work on something "important" for the legitimate reason that they thought it was unsalvageable. If that's correct, then a promotion committee should penalize people for doing it anyway.

You're right, but I'm not sure how to refer to something that doesn't seem to have been ready after this much time.

If you're going to use the scientific notation for billions, you should just use it for everything. I don't think it's so obtuse anyway, it's exactly how I'd spell that number in code.

The "Russian counterparts", if I understand correctly, are something like two different entities. One is the Russian government itself, which is mostly interested in PR. E.g., I read a rumour somewhere that part of the reason that Nauka module was so out of control was that they rushed it so that some tourists get to film something in it when they go up this autumn. I'm not sure how true it is that it was rushed.

But the other entity is Roscosmos, which is partially subservient to the government (like any government agency), but partially consists of scientist types that would care more about space than PR. Quite similar to Nasa, really. So Nasa would have to deal with the State Department, the Russian government, and the Russian scientists all at once, it's not like they literally have a single counterpart to deal with. What I read about the Nauka failures was mostly sourced to Roscosmos and people working there, while Nasa was relatively quiet.

But Earth-based stuff isn't designed to last too long precisely because it can be maintained. Why wouldn't the ISS be somewhat different in this regard? I don't really see how this analogy is supposed to work.