thisrod

It's a historical contingency, a strange and unlikely one. The reason we're here is that we could equally well not be here, and the universe would get on fine without us. For most of its history, it did. In most places, it still does.

The interesting question is why so few other people know that.

The facts on low-dose radiation exposure are pretty simple.

There is no useful direct evidence about the health effects of low doses of radiation, and there never will be. It's a needle in a haystack problem: the diseases caused by radiation are common, with large fluctuations; the effects of a small additional dose are small. The article claims that the impossibility of measuring outcomes is a reason to believe that small doses of radiation are harmless. It's wrong. No one knows.

There is watertight, laws-of-physics level evidence about the effects of radiation on biological tissues. There is an expert consensus on how those kinds of tissue damage lead to cancer and other diseases. This evidence supports the linear no threshold model.

The weak link is the pathology: that expert consensus could be wrong. I'm a physicist, so I'm not qualified to hold an opinion. I've never heard a specific reason to think it's wrong.

Those are the ises. For the rest of this post, suppose that the linear-no-threshold model is correct (as the available evidence suggests). The oughts that follow are also very murky.

Everyone is exposed to radiation in their daily life, and lots of lives are shortened by the effects. When you are exposed to a tiny bit of extra radiation, you are a tiny bit more likely to die from radiation; there are much worse hazards that you should worry about first.

When everyone is exposed to a tiny bit of extra radiation, many people will die prematurely. It's universally agreed that those people are just as valuable as other people, exposed to rarer and more spectacular risks, who a lot of money is spent to save. If a few less razors were confiscated at airports, and aircraft occupants were a bit better shielded from radiation, more lives could be saved overall.

Any question like that is bound to be politically controversial.

Microsoft is using IoT in a loose sense. The "thing" could be an industrial PC at the train station that plays a recorded message saying the 8:15 will run late today.

The existing daily pill is really expensive. Australia knew that PrEP would practically eliminate HIV transmission. Even so, the decision to pay for it took years and was fiercely contested. That was before COVID, and people are more willing to pay for public health today. But cheap PReP would make a big difference in the poor countries where HIV prevention really matters.

I was surprised by how many ways Sussman and Wisdom found to modernise the Landau and Lipshitz treatment. There is the obvious change, where the first time they solve some equations of motion, it's done numerically, and the solution is chaotic.

There is also a more subtle change, where they keep sneaking in the concepts of differential geometry. The word "manifold" is reserved for a footnote, but if you know what tangent spaces and sprays are, it's straightforward to translate the "local tuples" and see what they're actually talking about.

I think this is a good idea. If physics undergraduates were exposed to manifolds and tangent spaces in their analytical mechanics course, then saw some exterior calculus in their first electromagnetism course, they might be ready for curvature and geodesics when they study general relativity.

As an Amethyst user, I'm approaching this comparison from the other direction: is there one compelling reason to switch?

The improvement I'd most like to see in Amethyst is more stable window placement when I remove a monitor then add it again (I do that a lot with my laptop).

It would be fantastic to have integration between Amethyst-managed spaces, Firefox windows, and Proton Pass vaults. As in Space 1 knows that new windows should use the Google account in my Work vault, and Space 2 knows that new windows should log out from Google because there is no Google account in my Personal vault. I doubt that's an imminent prospect, though.

In general, I prefer the Amethyst approach of extending the builtin OSX window management to the Aerospace approach of replacing it. Clearly the Amethyst developers weren't convinced that it's impossible to move windows between spaces with hotkeys, because they went ahead and implemented that.

Overall, I'm really happy that these window managers are being written. I use a 42 inch monitor, which would be awkward without them.