It's not just a question of belief, it's also a question of their information environment. The polarization in the electorate isn't just a question of what people believe, but what information their fed. Unfortunately, information environment -> belief -> environment is forms a strong sustaining feedback loop.

It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".

I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.

There's some discussion about a similar launch ~10 years ago (in that case going to L1) https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2vb5kv/1second_laun...

Based on that, I guess the one upside would be that you have the window available every day as the L1/L2 positions never move relatively. Unlike a launch to Mars or other solar system body where you definitely want everything to be lined up efficiently.

The blog link describes the cleanup process.

They take two pictures, each taking up half the total observation period. If you subtract the two images, the deltas should be the cosmic ray flashes. You can then subtract those out. They use two pictures as opposed to more to minimize the impact of readout noise.

To deal with "stuck pixel" type errors, they can slightly shift the camera between the two observations. They can counter act the shift before doing the initial subtraction.

Signal processing / denoising of astronomical images is a field of study onto itself.

If you are like me you will find it super interesting. There is immense variety based upon what kind of telescope, what do you want to capture, whether it's for science or astrophotography (aesthetics).

If you are into math side of things you can begin with Richardson-Lucy as a starting point and stacking.

funny how this also eliminates "close" fast moving objects. which I guess is a feature for a telescope

I mean funny in the sense of "we did not find any anomalies, because we are careful to filter them out"

The study and the summary do not "assume" that the cause was inbreeding. They both assert that inbreeding could be a cause.

The article says "The team suspects these deformities and tumors indicate a lengthy history of inbreeding".

The paper abstract says "possibly because of an accumulation of expressed deleterious alleles that caused disturbances in developmental processes".

It's perfectly ok for scientists to write down and publish their speculation, as long as it's suffiently clear. I think it's quite clear in this case.

An assertion without conclusive evidence is an assumption.

They are not asserting a fact. They are asserting a possibility. Asserting a possibility is not an assumption.

Yes-ish.

There's a lot of different and overlapping programs in play here. I do not believe that autonomous F-16s are intended to be operational assets. That said...

VENOM - program that shows you can bolt on autonomous flight control into a standard F-16. Previously, the X-62A (a one-off prototype based F-16) demonstrated autonomous dogfighting back in 2023.

VENOM provides USAF/DARPA with a lot of high performance autonomous platforms (bolt-on F-16s) that they can then use to develop and validate software, tactics and training for actually fighting with autonomous systems. This would presumably be critical for getting the most of the CCA (aka loyal wingman) programs currently in development.

The AIR program referenced is basically "how do we get autonomous systems to control and fight effectively as a team (presumably arbitrary mixture of manned and unmanned systems) in a beyond visual range fight".

The ACE program referenced was basically "how do we get autonomous platforms to dogfight" with related questions like "how can we augment the human pilot in a dogfight - ie, how can we hand off the actual flying and execution of manoeuvres, and using all of the sensors to autonomous systems, and let the pilot choose actions, instead of hang flying the actions".

Well, for caffeine you might... at least in the short term.

But to be more specific:

* Protein supplements make it easier for your body to get the protein required for whatever demand you're putting on it. You need higher protein intake to growth than to sustain muscle. If you were on protein supplementation during a growth phase, and then transitioned to a maintain, and stopped supplementing, while making sure your actual diet was sufficient, then you could in principle maintain your muscle mass with no problem. The extrapolation of this is that in principle, you could always replace protein supplements with "real food", regardless of phase and get pretty much the same benefits. There may be lifestyle/ease/cost tradeoffs.

* Creatine supplementation helps your body get "a little extra" work done. The direct boost that creatine grants you is real, but also like... small. I think it's often visualized as "it helps you get that one extra rep/half rep". Where creatine pays off is that by sustainably helping you get that one extra rep, it helps create greater demand on your body over time, therefore promoting more growth. If you stopped creatine supplementation, you would probably lose that "extra rep", but all the extra growth that you got would be locked in.

* Caffeine... well, that's far more psychological. Leaving the world of sports, as a knowledge worker, I've committed myself to my addiction. The withdrawal is real, and even if I worked through the headache, I definitely do not feel as sharp.

I am experimenting with less caffeine - not a total cut. Nothing conclusive to report but my goal is to cut somewhat to understand how much caffeine is driving anxious behaviors.

Uh, dunno if I'd say that BW is dominated by "the young".

Top 4 at the latest ASL are all born before 1995 - they're all millennials. None of them are from the first generation of BW pros, but they've been in the game for a long time.

I think BW has the collapse of the infrastructure that used to support it as a ongoing televised event to blame for that one. It’s less popular among gen z so there isn’t the up and coming replacement and no one is paying them to do it as a full time job as even the mid-tier pros from its prime era were.

I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).

Unclear how China will react to orbital/near-orbital launches that track near/over China in a hot war situation.

If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.

China could also prove to the world their ASAT capabilities by shooting down military orbital payloads which overfly their territory.

The paper is an analysis performed on a larger dataset. No one created or ran a 15 year study on egg consumption. Someone ran a 15 year study that included dietary survey questions that happened to include eggs, and then someone other group mined the dataset for this analysis.

This particular study (AHS-2) was initially funded by the NIH (and has continued with NIH and mixed funding): https://publichealth.llu.edu/adventist-health-studies/videos...