science

right handed cosmic shower and DNA

https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosmic-rays-may-explain-lifes-bias-for-right-handed-dna-20200629/

Randomized trials and twitter

this is a lot #meta and also a but #GAC (italian, unnervingly obvious)

112 papers were randomly chosen to be shared on twitter by a group with ~58k followers or to not be shared. Papers that were tweeted accumulated 4x more citations compared to non-tweeted papers over 1yr.

Meta you know, a randomised trial of paper surely describing randomised experiments

GAC because it’s the network baby, read Barabasi’s link e you know that if you look for a job and tell family and frineds you get nothing, but if tell people outside your usual creche you will find. So tell a 58,000-strong Twitter group.

Barabasi went on writing precisely a book to explain the infallible formula of success, the book is titled

The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success

how a fast learning curve looks like

Screenshot 2020-03-08 at 10.35.07

gore edition, new cases and deaths, divergence in growth as case grows and experience is built on how to treat critical patients of a novel disease

But in a “learning curve” framework that works you need to be able to cope with demand, your service should not run into some sort of “diminishing return” at the margin or in a more discrete case, being able to serve the customers in order to have the very same outcomes that you are measutring gains against

In other words, ICU’s might have overflown, critical patients might have gone untreated, mortality might have spiked as a consequence, nd thereafter kept a steeper profile

Screenshot 2020-03-11 at 00.05.17

the disaster medicine protcol was issued by the society of anestesiologists on the 6th, clearly a situation was building up and its exponential nature was not lost on doctors fighting the disease https://www.esanum.it/today/posts/covid-19-le-raccomandazioni-della-siaarti

Reanalysis

“without models, there are no data. I’m not talking about the difference between “raw” and “cooked” data. I mean this literally. Today, no collection of signals or observations—even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet—becomes global in time and space without first passing through a series of data models.”

“Paul N. Edwards – A Vast Machine_ Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming”

” A reanalysis project involves reprocessing observational data spanning an extended historical period using a consistent modern analysis system, to produce a dataset that can be used for meteorological and climatological studies.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_reanalysis

 

Philosophers should talk more about climate change. Yes, philosophers.

“You have probably heard the common deniers’ complaint that climate scientists adapt models when new data comes in. That is supposedly unscientific because, here it comes (..) But the deniers’ argument merely demonstrates they know even less about scientific methodology than particle physicists. Revising a hypothesis when new data comes in is perfectly fine. In fact, it is what you expect good scientists to do.”

 

of men and rats

water rats learn in 2 years to eat poisonous cane toads, the great oper air experiment that is Australia

Australian water rats cut cane toads open with ‘surgical precision’ to feast on their hearts

Pellagra ravaged some areas of Europe were corn was staple long after it was imported from the Americas. The Europeans did not import the right method to prepare it which would enrich it of vitamin E and did not develop a remedy for centuries. Maybe water rats would have done better

“despite the long prevalence of a corn-based diet in Central and South America, pellagra did not occur there. In those cultures, ground corn was first boiled in lime water, a procedure which releases the small amount of niacin contained in the corn. In addition, beans traditionally accompanied tortillas made from the boiled cornmeal.” https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2016/jul/12/clif-cleaveland-pellagrand-history-south/375065/

Golden rice is GM rice enriched with vitamin, its story is worth reading

Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’

 

The shape of the universe

Screenshot 2019-06-07 at 14.13.58

(Shuttercock)

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-debate-hawkings-idea-that-the-universe-had-no-beginning-20190606/

well, not quiet, the article is the story of the hot debate around Hawking’s shuttercock modelScreenshot 2019-06-07 at 14.19.35

“In the 1940s, Feynman devised a scheme for calculating the most likely outcomes of quantum mechanical events. To predict, say, the likeliest outcomes of a particle collision, Feynman found that you could sum up all possible paths that the colliding particles could take, weighting straightforward paths more than convoluted ones in the sum. Calculating this “path integral” gives you the wave function: a probability distribution indicating the different possible states of the particles after the collision.

Likewise, Hartle and Hawking expressed the wave function of the universe — which describes its likely states — as the sum of all possible ways that it might have smoothly expanded from a point.”

amplituhedron

We’re not building a machine that calculates answers, he says; instead, we’re discovering questions. Nature’s shape-shifting laws seem to be the answer to an unknown mathematical question. This is why Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues find their studies of the amplituhedron so promising. Calculating the volume of the amplituhedron is a question in geometry—one that mathematicians might have pondered, had they discovered the object first. Somehow, the answer to the question of the amplituhedron’s volume describes the behavior of particles—and that answer, in turn, can be rewritten in terms of space and time

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron