Comment author: polymathwannabe 12 January 2016 03:39:35PM 4 points [-]

Obvious in hindsight: one cause of massive bee death turned out to be neonicotinoids. In other words, newsflash: insecticides kill insects.

Was there any way this could have been anticipated?

Comment author: passive_fist 12 January 2016 10:16:43PM 6 points [-]

It's not obvious that use of a pesticide would substantially harm bees, as pesticides have been in use for a very long time, and many organophosphate pesticides are fairly non-toxic to bees. Neonicotinoids, however, are extremely toxic to bees. The use of neonicotinoids is fairly recent; large-scale use only started in the late 90's, and very soon after that beekeepers started filing petitions to the EPA. They were ignored. I'd say this is more a case of systemic and deliberate ignorance/politics rather than a 'mistake'.

Comment author: Clarity 12 January 2016 12:10:05PM *  2 points [-]

Information coupled with suprise this week:

the chance of transmission during any single episode of unprotected vaginal sex is estimated at a 1 in 2,000. Thus, the odds you were infected are 0.05 x 0.0005 = 0.000025, i.e. 1 in 40,000. That's less than your lifetime risk of getting killed by lightning (if you live in the US) and less than the chance you will die in the coming week in some sort of accident. As for other STDs, the lack of symptoms is a strong indicator that you didn't catch anything.

-Medhelp

A less authoritative but more nuanced relevant analysis is hosted here

Asset prices around the world are extremely high relative to historic norms. Across all asset classes and most parts of the world, the returns on offer are measly. But most investors buying these assets are not doing so with greed as their driving emotion, rather with a sense of reluctant resignation that they need to do something more with their cash.

-Forager

Comment author: passive_fist 12 January 2016 10:08:46PM 3 points [-]

I wouldn't put too much faith in the 1/2000 figure for chance of HIV transmission. There is no known way to calculate that with any reasonable confidence. Estimates vary from something like 1/500 to 1/2500 (this is for vaginal sex; anal sex has much higher transmission risk).

Comment author: passive_fist 09 January 2016 08:40:53PM -1 points [-]

It seems to me that a pre-requisite of talking about ISIS' motivations would be actually visiting the region and being involved with them first-hand, or else basing your opinion on information gathered from direct, reputable sources.

Right now most of the discussion on the internet - especially including this post - fail to meet this criterion. They are simply opinions based on opinions repeated by other uninformed persons which also repeat opinions from other uninformed persons. If I am wrong, then provide links to your sources.

In fact you could argue that the major factor in the West's seeming inability to deal with ISIS is the failure of intelligence gathering. The CIA and other agencies have admitted they have a hard time gathering intelligence about them (this may be misdirection on part of the CIA, however).

Comment author: polymathwannabe 04 January 2016 01:50:54PM 0 points [-]

Try unprotected sex for the first time

Do you already know what partner you'll have for this? This is literally a life-or-death situation. You can never be too paranoid.

Comment author: passive_fist 06 January 2016 12:24:28AM 0 points [-]

Statistically, withdrawal is just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy; STDs are a bigger concern but the risk can be minimized with a checkup. However, condoms are not effective at preventing transmission of many types of STDs either.

Comment author: iceman 05 January 2016 09:20:23PM 2 points [-]

Use RAID on ZFS. RAID is not a backup solution, but with the proper RAIDZ6 configuration will protect you against common hard drive failure scenarios. Put all your files on ZFS. I use a dedicated FreeNAS file server for my home storage. Once everything you have is on ZFS, turn on snapshotting. I have my NAS configured to take a snapshot every hour during the day (set to expire in a week), and one snapshot on Monday which lasts 18 months. The short lived snapshots lets me quickly recover from brain snafus like overwriting a file.

Long lived snapshotting is amazing. Once you have filesystem snapshots, incremental backups become trivial. I have two portable hard drives, one onsite and one offsite. I plug in the hard drive, issue one command, and a few minutes later, I've copied the incremental snapshot to my offline drive. My backup hard drives become append only logs of my state. ZFS also lets you configure a drive so that it stores copies of data twice, so I have that turned on just to protect against the remote chance of random bitflips on the drive.

I do this monthly, and it only burns about 10 minutes a month. However, this isn't automated. If you're willing to trust the cloud, you could improve this and make it entirely automated with something like rsync.net's ZFS snapshot support. I think other cloud providers also offer snapshotting now, too.

Comment author: passive_fist 06 January 2016 12:09:01AM 1 point [-]

I feel that this is too complicated a solution for most people to follow. And it's not a very secure backup system anyway.

You can just get an external hard drive and use any of the commonly-available full-drive backup software. Duplicity is a free one and it has GUI frontends that are basically just click-to-backup. You can also set them up to give you weekly reminders, etc.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 December 2015 02:33:10PM 11 points [-]

How to handle feeling low status? I mean the feeling that people don't respect you, and don't consider what you're doing or saying important or worthy. When I was young, I used to feel this way all the time. Now there are groups in which I don't feel this, but I still feel it occasionally, especially if I'm in new social situations. This is the worst feeling for me, and usually the number one reason why I sometimes lose motivation to do things.

The simple solution is to acquire more status, but I'm not really asking about that because you have to be able handle being low status before you can become high-status. Easiest way I've found for acquiring status in groups is this:

  1. Pick a group
  2. Become accustomed to the norms of that group
  3. Signal knowledge, experience, and talent in the areas of interest of that group. Have the right opinions and interests and follow fashion as those interests and popular opinions change. Make the right lifestyle choices. Do impressive things based on those norms. It's not good to be too obvious about these things because explicitly seeking approval signals low status in many groups. There's room for freedom in most of these areas because of countersignaling reasons.

Then there are generally impressive things like having a Ph.D, a high-paying job, or being really skilled in some area which are high status in many groups.

I've noticed that some people who are very intelligent, and especially those who are socially intelligent, can often make people respect them even in new groups because they always find interesting and relevant things to say. I'm not that kind of person.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, Dec. 28 - Jan. 3, 2016
Comment author: passive_fist 02 January 2016 08:37:30AM *  0 points [-]

Then there are generally impressive things like having a Ph.D, a high-paying job, or being really skilled in some area which are high status in many groups.

For Ph.D., what kind of groups are you thinking about? (aside from university circles obviously)

Comment author: username2 28 December 2015 12:34:12PM 1 point [-]

Has anyone learned to play an instrument as an adult? Is it realistic to do that without hiring a tutor? To be more specific, I want to learn to play the piano. I have never played a musical instrument before.

Comment author: passive_fist 28 December 2015 08:19:30PM *  2 points [-]

I might or might not be an example of someone who has done that. I learned to play guitar from scratch at 28 years old. However, I had previously learned to play the piano when I was a teenager, so that might have made it easier. However the two are very different instruments. YMMV.

A lot of the difficulty in picking up a new instrument may just be lack of time. When I was a teenager I was spending 5+ hours a day playing the piano. I am not exaggerating in the least. As an adult it is very hard to find 30 minutes a day of time. It took me about 3 years to become very good at the piano. Another few years would probably have made me even better. This is consistent with the 10,000 hour rule. A naive calculation would conclude that it would take 30 years of practice at 30 min/day to become equally good at the guitar.

Comment author: turchin 28 December 2015 10:31:29AM 0 points [-]
  1. This is a map of possible risks, not a map of claims. All it says is that if pure fusion (or other simple nukes) will be created it will make situation with proliferation much more difficult. For example laser enrichment is much simpler than traditional and it was recognised as proliferation risk. We can't say how, but tech progress is making nukes cheaper and simpler and it is a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_laser_excitation
  2. It can kill anyone, but not everyone. The world have around 5 million villages and small towns, and you need at least one bomb for each one to kill. On the peak of cold war the world had less than 100 000 bombs. If you really want to kill everyone, you should try something special like artificial nuclear winter or summer.
Comment author: passive_fist 28 December 2015 11:52:51AM *  0 points [-]

I realize that it's a map of risks, I'm just saying the possibilities don't even remotely fall into comparable levels of risk. "Death from nuclear ICBM" is quite imaginable and possible. Not only that, there was a time when it almost seemed imminent and inevitable. And it could easily become that way again. Whereas "death from cold fusion" is essentially of zero meaningful concern.

Maybe it would be useful if you could attach some kind of crude probabilities to your estimates. I can fill a pdf with items like "death from massive leprechaun attack" but it wouldn't be a very useful guide.

Comment author: turchin 23 December 2015 09:17:18AM *  0 points [-]
  1. The only way to really prove that pure fusion weapons are possible would be demonstrate them.... But I will answer more generally. We known that tech progress exist and it tends to make things more effective, cheap and widespread. It do it in many domains. In the middle of 20 century we saw quick progress in nuclear weapons. Could we assume that no any progress is possible in this domain? I think we can't take it for granted. The quote from DOE can't prove that pure weapons are impossible, as I would expect that would say the same if they find the way to create them but want to keep in secret. This claim was made the same year - 1998 - as was published an article which describes 3 ton pure bomb (upgradable to 10 t neutron bomb with U-238 blanket) http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07jones.pdf It was almost 20 years ago and we don't know if any progress was made on the topic. Personally I think that pure weapons may be created by some unexpected combination, like cold fusion device compressed by Z-pinch.
  2. MAD doctrine kills only two superpowers, but nuclear blackmail kills all human population of the world as collateral damage. The difference is human extinction.
Comment author: passive_fist 28 December 2015 02:30:17AM 0 points [-]
  1. Strictly speaking, the only major barrier to development of fission weapons (once the possibility of prompt criticality was realized) was enrichment. Even a simple gun-type bomb design suffices if you want to build a fission weapon, but you have to get the nuclear material first, and that's where the bulk of the scientific and technological effort in the Manhattan project was focused. Even today, enrichment is still only the major barrier to aspiring nuclear states/groups. Once it was identified that this was the problem that needed to be solved, the scientists quickly came up with a plan on how to tackle it. But there is no plan or pathway to pure fusion weapons. As far as we know, they could be physically impossible. I'm not discounting the possibility of some incredibly secret pure fusion weapon, but if such a weapon existed it would be exceedingly silly to spend billions of dollars on facilities like NIF or the Z machine - and keep in mind that these projects were funded by and do research for the government agencies responsible for nuclear weapons development. What's the point? (Also, cold fusion does not exist.)

  2. Wrong. A country with a sizeable stockpile of nuclear ICBMs can target and kill anyone it wishes. It's not restricted to just bombing the other superpower.

Comment author: ChristianKl 27 December 2015 06:02:33PM *  0 points [-]

Then again, only Clarity would somehow get his open thread downvoted to a negative balance

We have a pattern where the Open threads are opened by MrMind. If he forgets somebody else can open the thread but in this case I don't see any reason to say MrMind forgot based on him not opening the thread when Monday starts in Australia.

Comment author: passive_fist 27 December 2015 09:09:48PM *  5 points [-]

So only MrMind is allowed to create open threads? Who gave him this sole authority? When was this decided by the community?

Why does it even matter who creates an open thread?

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