Ah, I think I see where you're confused. You're probably conflating the M.2 form factor with NVMe[0], which is sorta incorrect. NVMe drives can come in a variety of physical interfaces, of which, M.2 is one, but M.2 drives can be either SATA or NVMe. (or USB?)[1]
》This “total” temperature can also be described as a sum of temperatures on coarse (large) scales, temperatures on finer scales, even finer scales, etc. On large scales we see the well-known climate changes. Albert Sneppen’s study documents that the temperature differences become stronger on small scales (credit: Albert Sneppen).
》In other words, climate change makes the differences in temperature grow locally — and with large temperature differences come even more extreme weather patterns.
I don't think he discovered the conclusion per se. I think he discovered an analytical path to an already known/suspected conclusion via a novel application of cosmology math to planetary climate.
It’s been common knowledge in
atmospheric science for the past 20 years (based on personal knowledge, it’s probably decades longer). Not only does it shake out of climate models, but it’s intuitive that more heat to redistribute will increase the amplitude of all the wave-like properties of the atmosphere.
Let's not downplay the astronomical math involved and the contribution made by Albert here! Just because we "know" the solution doesn't mean it's not worth valuing putting in the work to prove the conclusion. Thanks Albert!
Whenever a topic about something that could potentially destroy humanity comes up (say, climate issues), there is always some comment that makes a reasonable argument of why things are not as bad as they seem.
The simplest counterpoint to prion cataclysm fear is that it hasn't happened yet. That implies a low chance that it'll happen anytime in the near future.
There's no evidence that any significant human population has ever been wiped out by prions at any point in the history of the species. Heck, we haven't even observed widespread (>10% infected) prion disease in any species.
At least with something like climate change, there's the fact that post-industrial activity is doing something different than pre-industrial history. But this reasoning doesn't hold for prion cataclysm. It's more like asteroid apocalypse. Yes it could happen, but statistically it's not something we have to worry about on a civilizational timeframe.
I don't see any justification for why humanity in 2021 is courting prion disaster to a greater degree than it was in 2000 BC. Animal husbandry has existed for fifteen thousand years. Maybe globalization would spread a prion outbreak faster. But the point is we've never even observed localized prion collapse. If prions were that dangerous, there should already be regional areas that have transformed into total no-go zones.
Conversely industrialized meat production is relatively recent, and so the volume of prion's being introduced into the environment is potentially much higher then the rate at which they are degrading naturally, not to mention the degree of regional cross-mixing of sources.
Prion contamination can now be shipped around the world in about 24 hours, where it can enter new populations much more easily.
Proteins do eventually break down in the environment. If you hugely multiply the number of humans and population density, you are creating a situation where prion diseases can become endemic where they couldn't have been before.
This is probably exactly what happened with CWD - deer overpopulation plus the random protein misfold created the conditions for a contagious disease where it didn't exist before.
Or could it be that we have it and don't know it. Alzheimer cases are growing as we remove other causes of death. Dementia is just accepted as a consequence of growing old. It not like we section every brain of an old person who dies.
We only noticed it on our farm animals because we brought the cycle time down as we fed downer cows to other cows as a source of protein
> I don't see any justification for why humanity in 2021 is courting prion disaster to a greater degree than it was in 2000 BC.
While the kinds of people who would fly planes into buildings, release nerve toxins in subway stations or club entire villages of outsiders to death have always existed the ability to research and manufacture prions did not exist in 2000BC.
That combination of desire to destroy the world and the legitimate ability to do it with rapidly more accessible biotechnology is a disconcerting reality that we need to account for when discussing theses things.
Imagine a religious extremists organization mass producing prions and placing them in key parts of food supply chain. We probably wouldn't have a clue until it was too late.
Biotech as a whole and its misuse by fanatics (or public servants in states with dubious moral …) is a massive concern for the 21th century, but I don't really think prions deserve a special place in this list. There's way too much scary things in here (gene drive, artificial viruses, intentional smallpox spreading, etc.)
That may be the case but it's a different issue than "Why are prions more of a threat to humanity than they were 4k years ago?"
With that said I sort of disagree with you. Prions are particularly attractive to a hypothetical bioterrorist due to the difficulty in detecting them, their durability and also the delay on effects. As I said above, once you know you have a problem it will be too late.
Keep in mind these are just the prions that nature has produced. It is quite possible that humans are able to modify existing threatening prions or develop whole new classes of threatening prions that haven't developed in nature.
Overall I think the most effective strike from a bioterrorist won't come from a single attack vector but a well timed combination of vectors. We've seen how something as minor as COVID has taken all of our attention and resources, now imagine if a terrorist timed something like COVID with a follow up strike like prions.
> hypothetical bioterrorist due to the difficulty in detecting them, their durability and also the delay on effects.
Terrorism is about fear, and that comes with spectacular actions even if it kills relatively few people, not with stealthy poisoning of big population.
You're not gonna have anything remotely as impactful as 9/11 with prions, even if you killed a million people in the long run.
Is it a good weapon for a nation state going at war, or committing a genocide. Definitely yes! But it sucks for terrorism.
> The simplest counterpoint to prion cataclysm fear is that it hasn't happened yet.
Well a prion disease (called Kuru) did affect the Fore people of New Guinea seriously in the 1950s and 1960s as I recall. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Fore people:
> Furthermore, Kuru predominantly affected women, as women more commonly partook in cannibalistic religious rituals. Because of this, there was a significant sex imbalance in Fore society.[14] By some accounts, this gender imbalance reached a 3:1 male to female ratio at its worst. This affected the family structure of the Fore, as it became commonplace for children to be raised and cared for only by their fathers.[1]
I do have the book, it's quite interesting, but I read about Kuru while it was still thought to be caused by an infectious virus. My recollection is a bit vague, but I believe it was in Time or Newsweek during the 1960s.
It was a scary sounding disease so I remembered it when years later it was discovered to be caused by prions and reported in The New York Times.
This is the right way to think about it. That said, a 1% infection rate that isn't at all a threat to the species given normal biological processes* will cause us to completely flip our shit. While we wouldn't be wiped out, everybody would be real upset for a long while. Look at COVID.
*Technology has given us things like nukes, so...could be harder to predict these days.
I'm not afraid of being hit by some asteroid hanging there, but if one day we spotted an asteroid whose trajectory was straight to earth, then being terrified would be quite legitimate.
Actually, there is some good news. Many types of prions diseases do not spread from animals to humans (so far). There have been some studies around this with CWD, but also Scapie has been around for hundreds or even thousands of years and never made the jump. Even in areas with CWD, we see that herd numbers do typically rebound. It's believed that there is some genetic factor that prevents the onset of the symptoms, like the body's proteins are less likely to fold in that way, so you only accumulate what you eat, or that the body can clean up the misfolded proteins. So it's not like it would wipe out everyone. I think I remember reading that some people are also researching prion treatments with some limited sucess. I would imagine they would come up with something even more quickly if there was a epidemic type of situation, similar to how medical researchers around the world focused on covid.
Not to be a doomer but there are scenarios where neither genetic variation nor research would solve the problem. The correct mix of virality, incubation and lethality would do it. Pneumonic plague is terrifyingly close. I wish there was a bigger interest and investment in biology, I think it’s the only viable path forward for humanity.
I was just discussing prions. Other pathogens do seem to present a bigger risk. I don't think anything would have 100% kill rate. Even weaponized microbes have like 99.8% or something. That still leaves about 16 million people. Plus there's all those preppers with their bunkers, some uncontacted tribes, people who live in isolated areas. Then it becomes more of a matter of how to organize, do they have the knowledge to survive in those types of conditions, etc. The species will survive, but it will be a very different world.
Actually there is a positive anecdote often cited. The Fore people of New Guinea engaged in ritual cannibalism which lead to the propagation of prions across generations. When they stopped, the generations of disease also stopped.
The Fora people even developed a prion that confers resistance to kuru:
> researchers [...] discovered a naturally occurring variant of a prion protein in a population from Papua New Guinea that confers strong resistance to kuru
> This community [...] has developed their own biologically unique response [...] this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades
You jinxed it, so I'll be the "some comment": prions won't spread everywhere all at once, so humanity will probably self-isolate in at least a few prion-free clusters.
Prion caused disease is indeed terrifying on individual level but, from its impact over the species' survival, it isn't that menacing. The decay takes decades, which is enough for breeding the next generation. Human life expectancy may get shorter, which sucks, of course, but humans lived shorter lives for most of their history. So no, it's not that bad. Even assuming that the entire human population will get infected from young age with no way to avoid it, it won't be that bad. It would come with a bit of adjustment, like having to raise kids sooner because the luxury to postpone (for life enjoyment or other pursuits) won't be there, but things will go on.
Well, prion diseases are very rare in humans (or at least their transmission is rare), and there is no evolutive pressure to create a super-prion that can infect more people, like happens with other pathogens. Thus, the most likely situation is that it will continue to be very rare until we are able to change it into virtually non-existent by technology.
They are a really scary thing, but it's a meteor strike style of scary, nobody really expects it to happen before we can deal with it.
What you describe are common features available to all customers of Danish banks. Free of charge in any decent bank. You get the “Dankort” (den card) for free. It’s a debit card that’s universally supported in all shops with zero surcharge. It’s trivial and a common service to share accounts with multiple cards in your family.
The western shore of Jutland may qualify as the North Sea but the other two regions definitely don't.
Morever, the top layer of the Kattegatt has a much lower salinity compared to the ocean due to significant outflow of warm brackish water from the Baltic, carrying all the pollutants to the North Sea through the Skagerrak.
To be fair, the situation has actually been improving since the late 90s with tighter regulation on effluents, however I'd rather wait another 10 year before this patch of sea clears up itself.
Vendor locked. Many companies have huge applications bound tightly to the Oracle database. Often the business logic is just stored procedures. That makes it incredibly difficult to migrate and developers will have a hard time convincing management that the cost of migration would be worth it.
More intellectual laziness in this thread. To start, what definition of bubble are you using? Where no plausible scenario can justify forward valuations? Where there is evidence people are doing transactions for the sole reason to flip the assets at a higher price?
Because even if you don't think it's "likely," I can think of plenty of cases where student loan data makes "sense" or is "logical," and you've provided no evidence (of which there is usually at least online anecdotal evidence, see: Dotcom Crash, Bitcoin) that people are making these loans solely to flip them. If you try to argue that the Loan-to-Originate model leads to this behavior, you may have to reconcile a lot of things in this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2700179
I am not debating this rather this is merely a contribution regarding tuition, room & board fees, from 1975-76 to 2014-15 adjusted for inflation: I averaged the cost out to 12.5% a year on average.
Turkey started warning the Russian plane before it had crossed the border:
"In line with the military rules of engagement, the Turkish authorities repeatedly warned an unidentified aircraft that they were 15 kilometers or less away from the border"
... and they did it in a very stupid way. I am damn sure that during 10 years of occupation of Iraq, US air force came numerous times within 15km distance from Iranian border, yet they didn't attack a single time.
There had been several incidents on Syria border, Turkey warned both Syria (and downed their helicopters and airplanes before) and Russia that it is very serious about this.
How so - if the radar image is correct, the plane flew over the strip in Turkey twice, giving them quite a bit of time before and after the first pass to give warnings ?
It does add up, if you read the article more closely. The warnings were issued when the plane was approaching Turkish airspace. The article clearly states this.
