Absolutely! It's not ductile enough for wire, and too frangible to bend around a coil even if you managed to make a long thin piece.
But... the early high-Tc superconductors in the 80s were ceramics, too. Even now, with much more friendly materials, the "wire" in the Commonwealth Fusion Systems tokamak prototype is actually a complex tape with multiple layers mostly for structural support.
Some details here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/fusion-2662267312
Here's a very nice, more technical presnentation at Princeton by a CFS person, showing the tape strucdture,...
(Variant of something I put as a comment on Zvi's blog.)
Yesterday I put up a blog post that walks through the 2 papers on LK-99 superconductivity in the style of what in grad school they call "Journal Club": https://www.someweekendreading.blog/high-tc-sc/
It has all the hallmarks of something very much rushed into publication: misspelled words, awkward phrasing, out-of-order paragraphs, misnumbered figures, and (most charmingly) error messages in Korean from their bibliography software. At this stage of things, all that is understandable and excusable.
A few...
"De-aligning"?
Yeah, I know: only if it were aligned in the first place. What little "alignment" it has now is fragile with respect to malign inputs, which is not really alignment at all. Prompt injection derails the fragile alignment train.
Well, I blogged about it at least a little bit. Possibly too elementary a level for most Less Wrong readers, though.
I was in your position last August, and wrote about my experiences with paxlovid (good, except I got a rebound).
In spite of staying on the upper floor, mostly in my office, my spouse caught it anyway. Omicron is very transmissible!
It's also available commercially, e.g., from King Arthur Baking. It's usually called something like "New England Boiled Cider". It has a long and interesting history linked with the anti-slavery movement, since it was an alternative to molasses which was produced on sugar plantations in the South with slave labor. It fell out of frequent use sometime during WWII, I dont' know why.
I use it a lot in apple pies, as a way to amp up the apple flavor without too much additional sweetness.
There also used to be a popular thing called "Boiled Cider Pie", whose f...
Somewhat amusingly, I wrote a paper in 1991 that makes exactly your point. (The linked page at the journal is paywalled, but you can find it if you poke around a bit.)
It was about systems with more than one decomposition into modules, for which there had to be multiple simulations. Those simulations had to be compatible in a certain way, and that led to exactly the commutative diagram you have above (figure 13).
For energy storage, you might consider the Ambri liquid metal batteries. They're being designed for this exact purpose: coupling intermittent renewable generating capacity to steady loads.
Also, they're cheap, rugged, and don't seem to lose capacity over multiple charge/discharge cycles.
JN Crossley, et al., What Is Mathematical Logic?
A 96-page intro to the basics of predicate calculus, model theory, and Gödel incompleteness. I've used it in the (distant) past a couple times when a student had trouble getting a practical grip on logic.
If you feel the need to do something in response to the advent of fusion power and high-capacity batteries, you might want to think about doing it sooner rather than later.
Fusion: I'm beginning to think this is nearer-term than most of us believe. Last September, Commonwealth Fusion Systems demonstrated a 20 Tesla superconducting magnet with a bore large enough for their tokamak.
The evidence on vaccine efficacy waning is somewhat confusing to me!
On the one hand: Some of the initial data on waning from Israel (using Pfizer) was hopelessly confounded with age, leading to a huge Simpson's paradox effect. Once you (a) figure out the Bayes error (they calculated Pr(vax | hospitalization) when they really wanted Pr(hospitalization | vax)), (b) properly stratify by age, and (c) calculate confidence limits on vaccine efficacy, the effect goes away.
On the other hand: Later Israeli data presented at the Moderna booster hearing cleaned that ...
Yes, absolutely.
The comment on study power is why I was pretty surprised at the FDA and CDC approvals, based on this study which itself says it's underpowered. I think they were mostly motivated by the safety results that boosters were at least as safe as the primers. So if it might do some good and probably does no harm, they can get to an EUA from there.
This is not the way they usually behave, but then again, these are not usual times.
“But something has really become clear: The mixing really is most impactful when you have a DNA/adenovirus vaccine first followed by the mRNA vaccine,” Gandhi said. WaPo
This is definitely true in terms of antibody fold induction: JnJ followed by either Pfizer or Moderna have the highest fold induction ratios.
However, they're starting from a lower baseline, since JnJ doesn't induce such high ab levels to begin with. (Though it might be better at training T cells and memory B cells, and have longer persistence? It's kind of frustratingly complicated, to...
Have a look at the presentation to the FDA's VRBPAC on 2021-Oct-15:
K Lyke, et al., "DMID 21-0012 - Heterologous Platform Boost Study Mix and Match", FDA VRBPAC 2021-Oct-15 Materials, retrieved 2021-Oct-15.
(If you're curious about the how the whole meeting went down, I wrote a little summary.)
Slide 22 (page 23, because the FDA tacks on a header page) should help. It's a 3x3 array of the 3 original vaccines x 3 possible booster vaccines. It shows the factor by which antibody levels are boosted by each primer/booster combination (geometric mean titer fo...
The way I used to explain "as treated" vs "intent to treat":
Under AT, you're asking a question about biology: does this treatment make a difference when it's applied rigorously to the tests and absolutely never to the controls?
Under ITT, you're asking a question about the practice of medicine, under actual combat conditions: if we tell clinicians and patients to do something, and they follow instructions as imperfectly as ever, is this treatment still a good idea?
That is: ITT bakes in mistakes, noncompliance, weird patients, etc. on top of the basic scientific effect.