Large scale heat management: controlling or influencing temperature flows on a geographic (regional or global) scale. Heat management is one of the deep fundamental problems in life and engineering, but humans have never tried to do anything smarter or more ambitious in this area than standard HVAC stuff.

Humans like moderate temperatures, say 55-75 F, but we spend quite a lot of our time in discomfort or even pain because the actual temperature is outside this range. But the problem isn't that heat (or cold) is in short supply, it's just distributed unevenly. This fact hit home for me when I was riding in an Uber because terrible winter weather knocked out Boston's subway system, and the driver told me she had just returned from a trip to Brazil, which was mostly unpleasant because the heat made it impossible to do anything outside.

Here are some options:

• Heat banking: store heat during the summer in large reservoirs of water. Release it during the winter.
• Heat trade: hot regions send heat to cold regions; both sides are happier.
• Heat sequestration: there are huge pools of cold water about 1000m underneath the ocean surface, when your city is too hot, send some heat down there.

I'm actually quite confident some version of this idea will work, because there are two vastly powerful forces working in its favor:

• Economics: in heat trade, both parties feel that they are exchanging a good for a bad. This kind of exchange almost never happens, most normal trade relies on the parties valuing something at a different magnitude of positive or negative value, but with the same sign.
• The Great Second Law: Humans suffer from temperature unevenness but Nature actually prefers temperatures to equilibriate. We just have to help Nature do what it already wants to do.

I would like to read that review but can't access it (either through my Uni or sci-hub). Can you provide the pdf of this review please ?

Thanks for this small litterature review.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, what you should do if someone talks metaphysics is point out that they haven't given signification to some of their words. Although he says that philosophy should only care about reality (and if it's reality, it's physics, biology, etc and not philosophy), he also says that philosophy is here to clarify our thoughts, and I can't help but agree.

The "kind of crazy" of the postmodern though aren't the minority, they kinda all lack rigor and fail to give signification to their words (but use them nonetheless) - and moreover have what we'll call the "disease of the metaphor", doing many unnecessary or even obscuring metaphors.

I also agree that there is value in studying philosophy - but having the rationality to question it should come first. (Kinda obvious that I do side with the so called anti-philosophy huh)

Placebo doesn't affect objective outcomes anyway.

Elaborate? I'm pretty sure that's not correct, at the very least when it comes to pain, immune system things, autonomic stuff, and possibly some musculoskeletal stuff.

The article isn't so much about Reiki as about intentionally utilizing the placebo effect in medicine. And that there is some evidence that, for the group of people that currently believe (medicine x) is effective, the placebo effect of fake (medicine x) may be stronger than that of fake (medicine y) and (medicine x) has fewer medically significant side effects than (medicine y).

Greatly interested, and once I am free of my current activities (in a few weeks) I'll be able to delve in it.

The main idea of WGS is having >all< the SNPs whereas you only get the most common SNPs with the SNP tests.

I'm not really sure how you would use the data from WGS (let's say the genome is assembled too - or maybe that would cost more ?). You would probably use BLAT on your local machine to search for genes with known SNPs. I don't think you could do anything more (finding novel SNPs is out of reach here).

I would guess the main idea would be to be able to check for new SNPs as more and more are found in the literature. However, the literature is not that easy to skim through except for the most common SNPs that are already included in the SNP tests.

Going back on the literature: for most multi-factorial diseases, you will see data coming from GWAS and linkage disequilibrium studies that will be really hard to interpret. A SNP popping up like that does not necessarily mean that you've got the trait associated with it.

My comment was probably not really well oriented, but I should still conclude. In my opinion, do a WGS only if you've got enough knowledge of bioinformatics (and I mean an engineer's level). SNP tests are cheap and will provide you with almost everything you could get from a WGS.

AFAIK the literature still says antidepressants have an effect better than placebo.

Do you have specific meta analysis in mind?

Science is not that simple, I'm not sure you can draw such conclusions.

There was/is indeed a problem in the reporting of the evidence, that diminished the effect of antidepressant in the literature. Reporting bias is an important and serious matter in science.

That does not mean however that the antidepressant effects got down to a placebo effect. It seems that Kirsch does a lot of hand-waving to put aside the treatment effect. He did the same thing in 2008.

AFAIK the literature still says antidepressants have an effect better than placebo.

How would you test that the FAE leads to in average better judgments ? And better than what ? Eliminating the FAE does not mean only considering external factors either, or you'd have another bias.