I didn’t check the calculation, but I guess it assumes perfect conversion of motion to heat. But it’s good to know that if you can get a perfectly static chicken, you can hypersonic-slap it cooked.

I relatively often meet 4 of these:

• no speed limit (use the normal limit for this type of road)

• car tires may defy laws of nature (slippery road, usually followed by a sign saying it applies during rain)

• speed camera ahead

• no water polluting goods (not very common, but occasionally comes up. There is also no dangerous materials with an orange trapezoid instead of an ellipse)

I also saw don’t drive off the pier (around ferries), watch for skiers (in the mountains with cross-country skiing routes), and warning about planes, although in different design (around airports).

Bad title. Settings that actually do something are 0 (normal), 1 (compact) and 2 (touch). You can also do that in settings, I think.

I didn’t read the original paper yet, perhaps it’s there, but it isn’t in the linked article nor its source Ars Technica article. Can authors themselves upload their papers to these archives, and if so, how to do it correctly to make it findable both by DOI and other means? Does anyone know?

Wow, thank you, this is a great source! So less than 90% of the income is used to run the companies and do all the R&D. Honestly, that’s less than I thought and shows how greedy they are. If I read it right, they are more profitable than other large companies. Wow. So a state-owned non-profit pharma company could in theory produce new medicine 10 % cheaper and still be fine. Provided that state-owned company could be as efficient as a private one…

You don’t need profit in the sense of making lots of extra money compared to how much money you actually put in. I would be very interested in how much net profit is compared to gross in relative numbers. It’s a lot in absolute numbers, but I suspect not so much in relative. The problem why drug development is so very expensive is that you don’t just pay large sums for the drugs that are developed, but also for all those that are not, because they prove not useful during the testing. And there is way, way more than the successful ones, perhaps 100 to 1? I don’t have numers at hand. So in the end, you have to charge a lot of extra money above the production cost if you want to have enough money to develop any drugs at all.

Of course, that isn’t true for old drugs. Which is a reason why generics are so much cheaper. And also why patents need to exist.

I’m sure pharma companies abuse the system as much as they can, but not as much as it might appear at a first glance.

A state doesn’t have this kind of money to burn. If they did it, the money would have to come from somewhere. So either you increase taxes, decrease spending elsewhere, or start a business making a lot of money. Such as, say, selling the newly developed medications at a markup… It’s sad, but I’m not aware of a better way.

That being said, the cost of medications in the US is utterly ridiculous.

I have to say I’m here for pretty owls, I don’t know much about owl folklore. I know some of them are supposed to be bad omens, but that’s pretty much it.

Well, barn owl is always stunning. But I also really liked the pharaoh eagle, ural, spotted wood and sooty. And many others also didn’t know (and liked, naturally) white faced scops. But the others are great too, and I think I never saw quite a few of them. Unfortunatelly, it’s a bit confusing for me, the little I know about various owl species I don’t know in English, so it’s difficult to connect all information. Besides, English is rather lacking when it comes to naming animals and plants… There is very little system.

No, we weren’t even very inetrested in which team is which, we justbalways compared the 2 groups. It was really difficult sometimes…

Thank you for organising this! It was fun, not only for me, but also for my girlfriend and relatives I was visiting over the weekend. None of us care about Superbowl in the slightest bit, but we definitely enjoyed all the owl pictures and choosing which group was better :-)

It looks like it has feather spacesuit :-)

And can I turn this off?

I actually don’t know, it’s a good point. It’s definitely stochastic, but I don’t know how late in the development it happens. There are definitely cats with colours completely jumbled cats with large patches of each colour. But I just realised that colour comes from melanocytes. And melanocytes must migrate from the back, as they come from neural crest. Which strikes me as a great reason for straight division on the front (the cells coming from left and right meet there) that we see here, regardless of the origin of diversity of cell colours. So I think it shouldn’t matter, but it’s just a guess.

Beautiful cat! Thanks. Is there any particular reason to think it’s a chimera? If it’s a female, it’s more likely to be X chromosome inactivation.

In Boost for reddit, it was visible right away, without any clicking. It was incredibly convenient. I’d very much like to see this feature too.

I very much like Unexpected keyboard. It takes a bit of work, but you can completely change the layout, sizes of all buttons, and one button can contain multiple characters. You input all the extra ones by swiping from the key in a particular direction, which is very fast and convenient. Plus it has an easy access to input of many, many special characters, contains Ctrl, you can have gestures for copy/paste/undo and so on. But it doesn’t have any predictions yet, you have to type everything out.

It seems that improvement of images in comments will come in the next version. I expect this to be solved then. For now, I don’t think you can do anything.

Yes, I really miss this feature. I usually don’t want to open youtube most of the time and now, it’s difficult to tell when it will happen.