"Rabinowitch, Einstein, and Oppenheimer were very qualified to explain just what would happen if one of those bad boys went off over Chicago."
Having grown up on the streets of Kankakee, my brother and I mugged in Chicago, and the place wholly unimproved since then, I'm not convinced that would be a bad thing.
"We squander grant money by the billions trying to make our adorable little models work, but no matter how many purely ornamental differential equations we put in our papers, we’ve failed...."
Well, that's because of two fatal errors you guys make that my august lay personage has avoided. One is that you're using those cute differentials instead of Heisenberg's Uncertainty equations.
The other is that your perspective is wrong: you insist on looking at the thing from the outside. We're not outside anything; we're all of us inside Shroedinger's box, and no one has opened it, yet. You're in good company, though, even Pandora screwed that up. So are the aliens that, every several 10s of millions of years, throw rocks at us. Everybody better hope we don't escape from the box and get out among the stars. We're gonna come knocking, and we're gonna be pissed. And with two satellites already reaching interstellar space, we've already turned our backs on the bull and are contemptuously dragging our capes on the ground daring it.
A nit: "It may be fraudulent—or at least, unscientific—to assign a numerical probability to the odds of a nuclear exchange based on these criteria, because it leaves out so many intangibles."
Not at all. It would be fraudulent--or at least, incompetent--to assign a numerical probability without also providing the probability(s)' error bar(s) and an explanation of the bars' origins and development. It's entirely reasonable to make probability assessments so long as those assessments have their contexts.
"...worrying about the Wuhan coronavirus, which is frankly nuts."
I haven't had a chance to evaluate the quality of those sources, but I don't think it's nuts to worry about the coronavirus given the PRC's track record and their active rejection of our offer to send CDC and other disease experts to help them.
The masks are useful, too, not just for coronaviruses but for any disease capable of riding water droplets. They confine a wearer's sneezes and coughs to that wearer, and they shield others from the coughs and sneezes of non-wearers.
As to biting the heads off bats, we had a cat in Las Cruces who would eat the heads of baby rabbits and leave the rest of the corpses lying around the house. That place has got to be haunted by the ghosts of headless baby Chucky bunnies.
"Rabinowitch, Einstein, and Oppenheimer were very qualified to explain just what would happen if one of those bad boys went off over Chicago."
Having grown up on the streets of Kankakee, my brother and I mugged in Chicago, and the place wholly unimproved since then, I'm not convinced that would be a bad thing.
"We squander grant money by the billions trying to make our adorable little models work, but no matter how many purely ornamental differential equations we put in our papers, we’ve failed...."
Well, that's because of two fatal errors you guys make that my august lay personage has avoided. One is that you're using those cute differentials instead of Heisenberg's Uncertainty equations.
The other is that your perspective is wrong: you insist on looking at the thing from the outside. We're not outside anything; we're all of us inside Shroedinger's box, and no one has opened it, yet. You're in good company, though, even Pandora screwed that up. So are the aliens that, every several 10s of millions of years, throw rocks at us. Everybody better hope we don't escape from the box and get out among the stars. We're gonna come knocking, and we're gonna be pissed. And with two satellites already reaching interstellar space, we've already turned our backs on the bull and are contemptuously dragging our capes on the ground daring it.
A nit: "It may be fraudulent—or at least, unscientific—to assign a numerical probability to the odds of a nuclear exchange based on these criteria, because it leaves out so many intangibles."
Not at all. It would be fraudulent--or at least, incompetent--to assign a numerical probability without also providing the probability(s)' error bar(s) and an explanation of the bars' origins and development. It's entirely reasonable to make probability assessments so long as those assessments have their contexts.
"...worrying about the Wuhan coronavirus, which is frankly nuts."
There are these, though: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/mystery-lab-next-to-coronavirus-epicentre/news-story/3e5a32fe77263fe8ca81b091cc8d9c42
and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf
I haven't had a chance to evaluate the quality of those sources, but I don't think it's nuts to worry about the coronavirus given the PRC's track record and their active rejection of our offer to send CDC and other disease experts to help them.
The masks are useful, too, not just for coronaviruses but for any disease capable of riding water droplets. They confine a wearer's sneezes and coughs to that wearer, and they shield others from the coughs and sneezes of non-wearers.
As to biting the heads off bats, we had a cat in Las Cruces who would eat the heads of baby rabbits and leave the rest of the corpses lying around the house. That place has got to be haunted by the ghosts of headless baby Chucky bunnies.
Eric Hines