>nother popular argument is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know how effective Chile’s reforms were because there was no good comparison group. There’s no comparable data from a neighboring country, such as Argentina, and it may be that Chile’s children would have gained weight faster if the reforms hadn’t passed.
>It’s a valid concern, but the data show that Chile’s obesity rates weren’t rising in the years before the reform.
This last sentence is a real 'wat' moment. Practically every country has rising obesity rates. So I went looking for some data and found that over the whole population, obesity rates in Chile were rising rapidly prior to 2016. And also after 2016. If there has been any effect it's pretty small.
>This is one of the most polarizing choices one can make as a biomedical research scientist. The alternative to the hockey stick is to use glass beads that you autoclave then sprinkle on the plate and roll around. People are very passionate about their chosen method and will attempt to convert you.
It turns out vim vs emacs is a universal phenomenon.
>That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me.
Well, kinda. But Haber-Bosch uses an iron catalyst. This is cheap, but it requires very high temperatures and pressures. There has been some recent work on ruthenium catalysts (particularly a Japanese company Tsubame BHB) which are more expensive, but allow the reaction to proceed under milder conditions. A particular goal is to have smaller facilities which can then be colocated with power generation. So you are exchanging a higher fixed cost for hopefully lower variable costs. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing here, though.
Carbon does not beat metal structurally. Some organic polymers are competitive in tensile strength. In flexural strength and fracture toughness, alloys continue to rule. And when carbon materials are competitive in strength and toughness, they tend to be highly temperature-sensitive and have sudden failure modes, which is not great for operating in space. Consider e.g. the Titan submarine that failed due to carbon fiber composite fatigue.
Biology ignored some of the most abundant elements because they can't be worked with under the constrained temperature and pressure conditions where biological systems operate. Biology barely uses any silicon, even though it is the second-most common element in the biosphere. Biology does not use aluminum, the third-most common element, at all. Biology does use iron but cannot reduce it to the pure metal. In fact, biological systems produce no metals. Structurally, biology relies on weak minerals like calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate, rather than much stronger ones like quartz and alumina, because of the difficulty of biochemical processing.
This isn't insurmountable for a probe. Biology can get stuck in local optima. Humans have the Periodic Table and quantum mechanics. But it means we are on untrodden ground. Refining titanium, today, uses a massive molybdenum-lined reactor operating at 1600 C (2900 F). The alternative processes (FFC and Chinuka) use liquid calcium chloride, mp 773 C. The square-cube law points to enormous energy losses trying to scale these processes down. And that's just one element.
On the contrary, my first thought upon reading the title was "I hope it's not just Japan again". No disrespect to Japan, but articles about Japanese tidiness are a dime a dozen.
It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and never looked back. Which is not solely a license issue; you can definitely release GPL software for FreeBSD, but the "license war" culture (to the extent it really existed) may have been an issue.
And I guess I do think that FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux. Maybe the chaos was necessary for growth, but it still seems to be a hurdle for new Linux users in the current day.
i think what the chaos did was enable more individual contributors. you didn't have to join the BSD team to get a core OS tool accepted into the system. anyone could just mix and match the tools and apps they liked. it's not that BSD prevented that but that they just didn't invite it. you can create your own spin of a distribution and if it gets enough users and contributors it gets accepted as an official version. there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel. try making a official BSD spin using GNU coreutils.
> The development of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has officially terminated as of July 2023 due to the lack of interest and volunteers. You may find the official announcement here[1]
> BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans.
oh boy its' much worse than that: KDE/GNOME were already largely precarious before that.
The whole Xorg thing was really dependant on gpu drivers and the story between linux gpu drivers and *bsd gpu drivers was so much different. Having the BSDs be fairly different didn't really help (eg: only FreeBSD had official nvidia drivers, albeit proprietary).
Gnome did take a lot of backlash and Gnome essentially became a meme at some point ("what's the use case for that?")
Gnome did take a strong dependency on systemd (both gnome and systemd are developed by Red Hat, btw).
And Gnome also did push a lot for wayland (that wasn't implemented on the various BSDs for a long time).
I haven't checked in a while, but I think Gnome is wayland-only nowadays ?
Ultimately, the real issue with KDE/GNOME and the BSDs is that the BSDs are largely irrelevant and essentially only relevant for some specific use-cases where desktop usage is not involved.
The author has a point about dextromethorphan and phenylephrine. However, he does guaifenisin dirty:
>You’ll also find lots of cough medication with guaifenesin, which has similarly thin scientific backing.
He links ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24003241/ ) which shows that guaifenisin had no measurable effect on sputum volume or consistency (p = 0.12 for volume). But there are other studies with broader outcome measures which show positive effects:
>The pilot study was a randomized, double-blind study where patients were dosed with either 1200 mg extended-release guaifenesin (n = 188) or placebo (n = 190), every 12 hours for 7 days [...]
>Subjective measures of efficacy at Day 4 showed the most prominent difference between treatment groups, in favor of guaifenesin.
>The DCPD assessment of symptoms also indicated advantages for ER guaifenesin over placebo for the between-day changes from baseline in response to the questions “Over the last 24 hours how often did your phlegm prevent you from going to public places?” (Day 2; p = 0.0016) and “Over the last 24 hours, how difficult was it for you to bring up phlegm?” (Day 5; p = 0.0070).
G tends to do well in subjective (symptomatic) assessments, even when subjects are blinded, but poorly in objective assessments. However, this isn't enough to condemn it.
That they lost about 80% of their lawsuits throws doubt on that.
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