QT:{{”
Sahil is sticking with tennis and golf.
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Posts Tagged ‘quote’
Kids Can’t Go to School. Should They Play Youth Sports? – WSJ
October 3, 2020The Elusive Peril of Space Junk | The New Yorker
October 3, 2020QT:{{
““Imagine how dangerous sailing the high seas would be if all the ships ever lost in history were still drifting on top of the water,” ESA’s director general said at the time. “That is the current situation in orbit, and it cannot be allowed to continue.””
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The Elusive Peril of Space Junk
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/the-elusive-peril-of-space-junk
Taking Virtual Reality for a Test Drive | The New Yorker
September 6, 2020https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/taking-virtual-reality-for-a-test-drive
QT:{{
In order to get a feel for the future, Jak Wilmot, the
twenty-two-year-old co-founder of a V.R. content studio called Disrupt, lived inside a headset for a week in February—and, of course, live-streamed every second. Cocooned in his five-hundred-square-foot apartment in Atlanta, the windows blacked out so that his circadian clock would not be affected by natural light, he slept, ate, exercised, socialized, and worked in virtual reality. He did not take his headset off even to shower, keeping the electronics dry under a homemade rig that looked like a plastic-wrapped stool perched on top of his head. What he missed most, he told me, was “not seeing day or night cycles,” adding that “to counteract this I ended up loading in simulations that would match the real-world time—a sunrise field in the morning, nighttime sky at night.” At the end of hour one hundred and sixty-eight, you can watch Wilmot ceremoniously lift his headset off his head, squint, and break into a smile. The smile gives way to laughter as he goes outside and looks up at the sky. “Oh, my gosh, the graphics,” he says. “They’re so good.”
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When did people arrive in the Americas? New evidence stokes debate
September 6, 2020QT from Nature podcast:{{”
I mean first of all, I think we do have a big problem with deliberate outright fraud, but that’s a kind of separate thing from what happens much more commonly. I think there’s a much more common, and in some ways much more kind of insidious because it’s so widespread, problem of bias towards finding exciting, statistically significant results in the literature. So, if you look at the scientific literature, a huge proportion of the findings that are published there are positive results, right, way more than we would expect. In one study, it’s something like over 90% or maybe even more that.
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22 July 2020
Why Aren’t We Talking More About Ventilation? – The Atlantic
August 15, 2020Found this a useful article. Ventilation & indoor air is important.
Why Aren’t We Talking More About Ventilation? – The Atlantic
QT:{{”
In particular, the size of infectious particles really matters, because that determines how they travel—are they big enough to be quickly pulled down by gravity or are they small enough to float around? Since the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization has considered the primary mode of COVID-19 transmission to be respiratory droplets. These droplets are defined as particles bigger than 5 to 10 microns in diameter, and WHO guidelines say that once they are sprayed out of someone’s mouth, they travel
ballistically and fall to the ground within close range of the infected person. For the WHO, that range is about three feet; for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also considers droplets to be the primary mode of transmission, it’s six feet. The dominance of a ballistic-droplet mode of transmission in this pandemic would mean that we should focus mostly on staying out of droplets’ range, especially to prevent them from falling on our unprotected mouth, nose, and eyes—hence the social-distancing guidelines. …
Many scientists believe that the virus is emitted from our mouths also in much smaller particles, which are infectious but also tiny enough that they can remain suspended in the air, float around, be pushed by air currents, and accumulate in enclosed spaces—because of their small size, they are not as subject to gravity’s downward pull. Don Milton, a medical doctor and an environmental-health professor at the University of Maryland, compares larger droplets “to the spray from a Windex dispenser” and the smaller, airborne particles (aerosols) “to the mist from an ultrasonic humidifier.”
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Plus, this debate has a long history: From the mid-19th century into the 20th century, infectious-disease specialists fought a long and hard-won battle against “miasma” theories of disease that posited that filth and noxious odors, instead of germs, were responsible for disease. In a seminal 1910 book, the public-health pioneer Charles Chapin distinguished “spray borne” diseases (WHO’s droplets that maximally travel only a few feet) from “dust borne” ones—spread by aerosols, or airborne transmission. He concluded that most pathogens were either “spray-borne” or spread through contact, and worried that an over-reliance on “air-borne” theories would needlessly scare the public or cause them to neglect hand-washing. More than a century later, there are still echoes of those concerns.
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But that’s not all. The super-spreader–event triad seems to rely on three V’s: venue, ventilation, and vocalization. Most super-spreader events occur at an indoor venue, especially a poorly ventilated one (meaning air is not being exchanged, diluted, or filtered), where lots of people are talking, chanting, or singing. Some examples of where super-spreader events have taken place are restaurants, bars, clubs, choir practices, weddings, funerals, cruise ships, nursing homes, prisons, and meatpacking plants.
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However, to date, there is also no evidence of truly long-range transmission of COVID-19, or any pattern of spread like that of measles. Screaming “it’s airborne!” can give the wrong impression to an already weary and panicked public, …Cowling told me that it’s better to call these “short-range aerosols,” as that communicates the nature of the threat more accurately: Most of these particles are concentrated around the infected person, but, under the right circumstances, they can accumulate and get around.
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However, in the community, accepting aerosol risks would mean that people around COVID-19 patients at home or anyone high-risk, such as the immunocompromised, should at least be provided with higher-grade masks such as N95s, which do a better job of keeping aerosols out. …
When windows cannot be opened, classrooms could run portable HEPA filters, which are capable of trapping viruses this small, and which sell for as little as a few hundred dollars. Marr advises schools to measure airflow rates in each classroom, upgrade filters in the HVAC system to MERV 13 or higher (these are air filter grades), and aspire to meet or exceed ASHRAE (the professional society that provides HVAC guidance and standards) standards. Jimenez told me that many building-wide air-conditioning systems have a setting for how much air they take in from outside, and that it is usually minimized to be energy-efficient.
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Lessons Learned: The Hacker Way
August 14, 2020http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2012/02/hacker-way.html
QT:{{”
Move Fast
Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough
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Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, New Study Finds – The New York Times
August 9, 2020QT:{{”
Children under 10 were roughly half as likely as adults to spread the virus to others, consistent with other studies. That may be because children generally exhale less air — and therefore less virus-laden air — or because they exhale that air closer to the ground, making it less likely that adults would breathe it in.
Even so, the number of new infections seeded by children may rise when schools reopen, the study authors cautioned. “Young children may show higher attack rates when the school closure ends, contributing to community transmission of Covid-19,” they wrote. Other studies have also suggested that the large number of contacts for schoolchildren, who interact with dozens of others for a good part of the day, may cancel out their smaller risk of infecting others.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html
Insights & Outcomes: a new spin on quantum research, and the biology of sex | YaleNews
August 3, 2020https://news.yale.edu/2020/07/30/insights-outcomes-new-spin-quantum-research-and-biology-sex
QT:{{”
ENCODE and the dance between genes and DNA/RNA
Since 2003, the lab of Yale’s Mark Gerstein has played a major role in an international effort to catalog data on the complex interactions between genes and the segments of DNA and RNA that regulate their functions. The latest findings of the ENCODE project were published July 29 in 30 papers, four spearheaded by Gerstein’s lab, in a variety of scientific journals. Jing Zhang and Donghoon Lee from Gerstein’s lab have created a video illustrating science’s evolving understanding of the complex regulatory networks that can contribute to cancer and other diseases. The latest findings by the Gerstein lab and other major ENCODE contributors can be found on the Gerstein lab website. “}}
Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition – The New York Times
July 28, 2020QT:{{”
Slack said on Wednesday that it had filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, accusing the tech giant of using its market power to try to crush the upstart rival.
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“Slack threatens Microsoft’s hold on business email, the cornerstone of Office, which means Slack threatens Microsoft’s lock on enterprise software,” Jonathan Prince, vice president of communications and policy at Slack, said in a statement.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/technology/slack-microsoft-antitrust.html
N.Y.C. Public Schools Will Not Fully Reopen in September – The New York Times
July 14, 2020QT:{{”
City Hall does not yet know precisely how many parents are planning to keep their children home from school but will begin formally asking families next week. If the number of students who opt for full-time remote learning turns out to be much higher or lower than anticipated, the models could change again. Like many urban school districts, New York has moved away from neighborhood high schools to schools that admit students from all over the city — many of whom have long trips on public transportation.
A Department of Education survey of about 400,000 parents found that about 75 percent of families are tentatively willing to send their children back to school.
He said the proposal, with students attending school physically for a range of one to three days a week, does not allow his family to do much specific planning.
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….
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nyc-schools-reopening-plan.html