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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Headline should read, DeepMind calculated 2.2 million hypothetically stable crystal structures with the possibility to advance everything from materials science to biology (emphasis mine)

    There’s a large difference between a hypothetical crystal structure and being able to produce that crystal structure in the real world. And an even larger difference between the hypothetical and the ability to produce the crystal structure in an efficient and cost-effective enough manner to be usable. There are already multiple materials that are known that would make better batteries than lithium-ion batteries, but either the manufacturing method is too hard or expensive, or the materials are extremely rare. So it’s nice DeepMind was able to do this, but it’s years from being usable still.




  • There’s multiple levels so the answer is “sort of.” Very generally, the Minister of Defense (or equivalent) has a national defense council that will have heads of armed forces and maybe a few senior civilian members. The council creates the overall battle plan with specific generals or admirals creating plans for specific battles or campaigns that conform to the overarching goals set by the defense council. The Prime Minister has a cabinet. The cabinet will receive info from the defense council. Intelligence agencies and departments involved with any economic warfare. The PM and cabinet can give direction to individual councils and departments to coordinate the overarching strategy of the entire country. The defense council will then adjust plans based on Cabinet’s directives. The PM is probably given detailed briefings of battlefield progress and aims for the military for the short-, medium-, and long-term for the conflict and can veto specific plans. But the PM won’t help to plan attacks or modify those plans usually. That’s the purview of generals and admirals.


  • So, in reading through this, I see several problems, but the authors note these mostly. The primary being that they used two different methods of detecting DNA in the vaccine samples and got two wildly different values. The qPCR returned normal numbers and their fluorometry had wildly higher numbers. It's been years since I've done a fluorometry study, but I feel like my qPCR numbers were usually more reliable. If that's still the case, saying that widely distributed vaccines have high amounts of DNA in them is just wrong, because the qPCR values returned numbers well under the FDA acceptable amount of DNA in the COVID vaccine.

    And saying that they detected DNA fragments at all is something of an 'uh duh, yeah' statement for the title. You'll always find SOME DNA fragments. As long as they are under some identified acceptable boundary (hopefully itself established in other studies) then it shouldn't affect the vaccine's efficacy or increase SAEs. Add to that VAERS is there to report EVERY adverse event that happens during vaccine trials and afterward, finding a correlation between DNA found in vaccines and increased reports in VAERS is like finding a correlation between increases in butter sales in Maine correlates with increased murder rates in Chicago. It's somewhat interesting right now, but definitely doesn't rise to the level "holy shit, we need to re-science this ASAP!"







  • At least the the ships being warships carrying civilians things has a real life analog. Many (but not all) colony ships sailing Earth oceans were usually heavily armed. This was to deter pirates or privateers from raiding the ships the day after they left port and taking all the supplies they’d need for their colony. And the ships were full of women and children. And more than a few got into battles somewhere along their voyage. Then when the colonists got where they were going, in some instances they’d just pull the guns off the ship and set them up to defend the colony.





  • Did the US provide direct training in how to destabilize and overthrow a government? Because they have teams that can provide that training. It’s routinely used in the Western hemisphere. If they gave the coup leaders anti-insurgency training, that’s an entirely different situation.

    The problem is probably more coincidental. US training makes units better. There’s a base level of thought in the US military though which you can describe as “you follow orders of the duly elected representatives of the US government.” If you don’t instill that base thinking, all the training does is make military units that are going to succeed at coups.

    So is this article dealing with the reality of trying to rewrite a foreign military’s thought process and it’s relationship to its civilian government? Does it discuss the difficulties in doing that while trying to train them for counterinsurgency operations? If it’s just making a casual (not causal) connection between the coup leaders and the fact that at some point those leaders had US training, it’s propaganda.




  • But that isn’t how governments are supposed to work. If you don’t like a guy, vote him out next election. Nigeria should know this, as it did what Niger is currently doing 30 years ago. The reason ECOWAS is intervening is because of the amount of chaos that the junta will bring to the region. They’re trying to regulate their own area of the globe. And if look at Niger’s history, you’ll see why. They’re on their SEVENTH REPUBLIC. Because they set up a republic, then a general has a hissy fit when the duly elected leader pisses them off and they go a couping. Then all hell breaks loose for a few years until they do it again. Nigeria, in particular, should be looking to help keep the seventh republic stable.