jstgord's comments

well this is what Putin is gambling on - that he is willing to go closer to the nuclear brink and thus will win. That was true a month ago, I'm not sure its true today.

Wars are not decided based on pure logic - we are somewhat intelligent apes, we will risk it all to defend our tribe - particularly if we feel the aggression is unfair and unjustified.

Surprisingly, I think the West _is_ actually willing to risk nuclear war over this.

I would not be surprised if EU offers interim membership to Ukraine, and then offers air support / no fly zone - calling Putins bluff and widening the conflict.

I think Europe _should_ regard war on Ukraine as a declaration of war on Europe, and the rest of the west _should_ regard war on EU as war on all Western countries.

One reason for this is that if the West does not retaliate towards this aggression, then others will surely follow - perhaps Russia decides Lithuania is part of Russia after all, or Chinese leadership is emboldened to 'take back' Taiwan ?

Even if Russia withdraws tomorrow, can the West trust a madman with nuclear weapons ?

I think the West is at war with Russia today, even if we haven't admitted it to ourselves yet.

The wider West is only too happy to pay the price of accommodating refugees and reducing fossil fuel dependency .. and may even be happy to risk all out nuclear war to defend our "way of life" and liberal freedoms.

We now have the perfect excuse to unleash all the decades long pent up hate of Putins regime.

Ursula Von de Leyen seemed to capture the zeitgeist when she slipped up and said "Ukraine is part of us" or words to that effect. Attack on Ukraine is felt as an attack on the West .. even on the other side of the world.

indeed.. I think there is a chance Europe will offer air support in Ukraine, and get drawn into this conflict, and thus be at war with Russia. which will mean EU, USA, UK, CAN, AUS .. will be at war with Russia. ie. WWIII.

I see the attack on Ukraine as an existential threat to the West as a whole - and Im probably not the only one asking if maybe its worth risking nuclear conflict. Can we trust Putin with a nuclear arsenal in any case, even if he withdraws ?

late reply .. here in Australia, party politics means a tiny minority of coal/gas enthusiast incumbents get sway over the general populations desires [ admittedly many of whom are apathetic, but not a majority I think ]

This works both ways - if we can replace a few climate skeptics with climate action independent candidates then that might move the needle on government intransigence.

Strangely, the uptake of solar panels has been great down-under .. yet the uptake of electric vehicles has been appalling, with state governments even imposing a road tax on sales.

The real problem here is the government _subsidizes_ coal and gas, and we are even approving new gas fields for exploitation.

It is hard to maintain empathy and hope and still be a realist .. but I hope you will stay motivated and take what action you can.

We may be able to use tech in creative ways to circumvent government inaction - For example : instead of waiting for the government to roll out a carbon price or carbon tax .. everyday people may invest in a green-energy crypto token asset which is used to raise funds for clean energy projects ?

side note : Ive been actively DIS-couraging smart people in Australia to talk about nuclear, here - the problem here is it would take 15 years to even do the paperwork, and we have shown very little competence in rolling out high tech engineering projects [ NBN broadband failure as one example, submarines another ] .. so I think unless you have nuclear in place or in development already, there just isn't time. Meanwhile we could and should be building as many solar plants as possible, in parallel, essentially without such major regulation needed.

Dont let the bastards wear you down, keep doing all the things .. every ton of carbon we keep in the ground is a win that buys our kids time - so thankyou.

I'm not going to read this, yet - PGs ideas always seem to be so interesting they drown out my own - rather Ill pose a question :

What if being 'smart' is a measure of the useful 'technology' we have running as the OS in our minds ?

What if all of our smarts are merely the result of opportunity / time / resources / environment / education .. exposure to good ideas and patterns of thinking - asking questions, following trains of thought, going back to first principles, exposure to diverse language and culture, opportunity to read good books, wealth and time to devote to puzzles when young, habit of critical thinking, fluency in math, exposure to ideas such as Evolution, access to computers/internet/information, time devoted to hobbies / making things etc.

I think one of the things that works in Silicon Valley is the recycling of 'talented' developers from one startup to another - so you have a hive-mind pool of continually honed elite creative technical skill-sets competing and cooperating to build new things from modern building blocks .. and when the 'thing' doesn't work, people can move on to the next thing until they hit a local gravity well of a startup going nova. When that happens, they get wealthy from equity .. then recycle that wealth via investment in other startups, and their time into mentoring.

Its been painful to watch this not happen in Australia over the past couple decades - a few wins, but no real ecosystem develop, despite there being a fair bit of nascent talent in game development, crypto, ML, math, biotech etc. The mining/resource boom has dominated our trade and little of that wealth has been plowed back into technology / science investment. We should be 'mining' our solar energy wealth and exporting that up into Asia via cable. We should have a hive of ML and green-tech and when one doesn't make it, the people move on to other ones.

Another way of saying this is "smart doesn't come from nowhere" .. you need a pyramid ecosystem of soil, worms, molds, bacteria where smart shoots can arise naturally. Its hard to be book-smart, startup-smart or math-smart if you're homeless and all your bandwidth is spent on shelter... or if the best job a smart person can have in your locale is selling houses and you need to do that to pay off your student debt.

Conversely, if things are too comfortable there is no need to get smart - but the wealth inequality curve is such that we needn't worry about the vanishingly small talent pool of ultra wealthy teen proto-engineer entrepreneurs who will work on hard things to hone their smarts : a more plausible benefit is they dabble with cash bets in tech startups, science research or philanthropy.

I guess Im arguing that we concentrate on the ecosystem, rather than the individual - the smart long bet is to fund math education, science outreach, K2 reading programs : looking around, is there any doubt we need to aggressively promote ideas such as Evolution or the Carbon Cycle ? I love zombie movies way too much, but am appalled that no one ever asks how they keep walking around forever without eating - its as if conservation of energy is not part of the general public's meme-set.

We all lose when young people are prevented from becoming smart by their environment - poverty, religion, anti-science, anti-education culture, political or economic instability.

What are the best ways to urgently improve this ? Maybe immigration of skilled/educated/motivated/talented people from poor countries to rich countries is one of the most effective measures that works on a short timescale [ where immigrants work in startups, tech companies or university research labs ]

In Australia, our politicians love to be seen with spade in hand at the opening of a newly built school - well designed new buildings are nice, but they don't seem to have a plan to actually educate people to a higher level in science and math, despite the buzzwords and virtue signalling. One of our best mini-exports is the AMC ( Australian Maths Competition ), its well regarded in Malaysia and Singapore, but many schools here don't even participate as its seen as too hard, or perhaps too elite or not relevant. Schools have tech sessions where they might fly a drone or use a 3D printer .. but they dont seem to dig into the internals of how these things work. We seem to have a kind of cargo-cult mindset, where we are losing the ability to fix or improve anything. We outsource our refuse processing to Asia, but now they are refusing this, so our "green solution" is to burn rubbish, rather than invest in better recycling technology. Even after the worlds largest fires and smoke over our cities, we have not really woken up to the challenge of climate change. Covid has shown up how badly we fumble at organizing ourselves into action based on science. The Empire is crumbling here on Anacreon - we need a Hari Seldon plan.

I dont think voting matters, I dont think democracy is really functioning and the Universities themselves seem to be large beurocracies guarding their massive wealth, churning out marketing and management degrees for profit. Rather, we the technologists must exert whatever power we have - either by education, marketing/dialog, building truly useful things, or using our new-wealth to buy off idiot politicians and fund the technology projects that will improve things.

Not to be alarmist .. but it really is 11:59 and our planet is dying. We need to get smart as a group and as a species.

stored procedures/functions in javascript, out of the box ?

If you read the Monash paper showing Ivermectin kills Covid at high doses in-vitro, link below, it does discuss how they surveyed various well known widely available medicines against a variety of viruses in 2012 and found that Ivermectin surprisingly seems to have an effect vs several viruses, including Zika, Dengue, West Nile Virus.

.. so, later, when Covid broke they were interested to see if IVT had an effect vs Covid - under the assumption that its anti-viral mechanism was host-centric rather than virus-specific. It did, wow :

The Monash paper - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

Regardless of whether IVT is ultimately found to be an effective treatment vs Covid in humans [ unclear and controversial at the moment ] it is certainly important to understand its mechanism of action, as it could give rise to a whole new class of broad-spectrum antivirals.

Another interesting paper is the Pasteur study of IVT effectiveness vs covid in guinea-pigs - https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202114122 [ I feel compelled to give further social proof from a big name institution, given the firestorm of social media opinion ]

I can only speculate that the trials showing both effectiveness and ineffectiveness of IVT in humans vs covid, differ so widely due to some confounding factor - the simplest which I can propose is that IVT is absorbed 2.5x more if taken with fatty food .. which is what you want to get the high doses purported to be effective vs covid .. yet, the medicine is normally taken on an empty stomach to treat intestinal parasites, so it can stay largely in the gut, and not be absorbed into the rest of the body.

charming article, as always, from burntsushi.

You may also enjoy his xsv util [ https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv ] for wrangling large csv files.

.. and yet, its hard to explain the basic observational science of Ivermectin vs sars-CoV2 :

Monash study, effect in vitro : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

Pasteur Institute study, effect in guinea-pigs : https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202114122

Are the Pasteur Institute scientists also crackpots ? Their recent study does show Ivermectin reduces symptoms, such as loss of smell, in Covid infected guinea-pigs : https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202114122

Then there is the basic in-vitro science showing Ivermectin killing SARS-CoV2 in human cell cultures : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

All well and good.. but does it work in humans ?

Harder question to answer, but combined there seems to be mounting evidence : see lists at http://ivmmeta.com

I feel people might be less immediately/aggressively/cynically dismissive of Ivermectin if they were aware of the recent Pasteur Institute study showing Ivermectin reduces Covid symptoms in animals : https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202114122

I thought the rebel-wisdom discussion was a pretty good way to try and bridge the divide and have a rational discussion.

Whether Ivermectin works, should be a question science can answer, even if its a messy process.

Regardless of hype / opinions .. science can answer the question - I hope sooner rather than later.

There seem to be plausible evidence Ivermectin works both to prevent Covid and treat in early stages : see, eg this meta-analysis of clinical trials by Andrew Hill : https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/of...

The human story from doctors in the field is compelling viewing : see testimony by Dr Pierre Kory, discussion of treatment by Dr Jackie Stone in Zimbabwe etc ..

The picture is cloudy - some plausible trials show neutral or no results, some trials show stunning effectiveness.

One thing many studies dont report is the way in which Ivermectin was given - taken with fatty food, the uptake is 2.5x compared with taken on an empty stomach. This and wide range of dosages could potentially explain why we see such extreme differences in trial outcomes ?

It does not help people come to a real understanding when a) right wing anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists promote Ivermectin in the same breath as other herbal remedies and b) youtube and mainstream media ban and censor much discussion of Ivermectin.

The original Monash in-vitro study is interesting - if Ivermectin truly is a broad-spectrum anti-VIRAL, thats a discovery on the order of Penicillin, with vast implications for medicine and human health.. beyond covid.

Interesting take, from one of the early RNA vaccine pioneers : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwbmJnacbgs

There _is_ some evidence for Ivermectin being a broad spectrum anti-viral.. discussed here :

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/9/9/2100

Each on its own merits, rather than conflate the two ?

There does seem to be some strong evidence for Ivermectin, such as the recent Andrew Hill meta-analysis : https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/of...

Science at the forefront is pretty noisy/messy, but places like Malaysia, Indonesia - where vaccine levels are modest and Delta exploding - dont have the luxury to wait till a totally clear picture emerges.

I am perplexed that even in 'first world countries' authorities aren't distributing vitC + vitD + Zinc .. which seems of some benefit in strengthening natural immune response.

Fascinating proposed mechanism of action :

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

and early discussion of it as abroad-spectrum anti-viral, at least in-vitro:

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/9/9/2100

Currently, an incredibly divisive topic in social media, widely censored on youtube... the noise does make it hard to have rational discussion about the science and clinical picture.

I'm hoping that the current Oxford 'principle' trial will in time, lend enough social-proof to the existing weight of data showing Ivermectin efficacy in preventing spread and preventing death of Covid19.

We need this treatment in addition to the vaccines.

compelling testimony.