Pob lwc!

If you cram the syllables in, you can almost make it fit to the Clash:
LUCA was a prokaryote-grade anaerobic acetogen
But they never hurt nobody
They just loved to live that way
And they loved to steal your electron-acceptors other than molecular oxygen

Increasingly convinced you’ve identified a core reason why AI has not (yet) boosted productivity at a macro level.

Yeah I've been wondering similarly. I don't know, and I'm not sure if surveillance is able to tell us yet. The US defunding the CDC, who do a lot of the global coordination, won't be helping. I do know an H3N2 strain was one of the three selected so definitely worth getting it in arms.

If you've missed your GP's flu clinic but are eligible for a free flu jab you can get them free at Boots too! (Probably also other pharmacies).

And while I was writing a post about Betteridge’s Law (any question in a headline can be answered “no”) being wrong here for once, they’ve changed the headline from “Will a new mutated flu strain cause a harsh winter?” to “Experts say this could be the worst flu season for a decade - here's why”.

The NHS has issued a “flu jab SOS”. If you’ve been procrastinating, it’s now urgent. If you get a flu vax some years, make this year one of them. Get it at a pharmacist for <£25 or free from your GP if 65+/carer/health condition.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Yes! Stupid autocorrect! Hodgkin. Thanks.

State of Welsh rugby at the moment, wouldn’t be completely implausible that international level players would have to turn to sex work.

Speedcubing (competitive solving of twisty puzzles like Rubik's cube) is also mostly a self-improvement activity: a huge roomful of (mostly) kids trying to beat their own personal records.
You're unlikely to be the best in the world, but you can get better than you were - if you push the edges. 3/3

I first noticed this with skateboarders. They spend hours mucking about, trying things out, and falling off a lot. At least the really good ones do. Archery's similar: you move the target back until you're struggling to hit golds reliably. Almost all athletes don't even get bronze most times.
2/

Yes - one of the fun things was discovering - or trying to - what actually went on across the whole university. You can pack a lot of diversity in to even a highly-centralised system. And PSRBs have requirements for degree recognition that must be met, so policy has to be at least that flexible.

Yeah writing densely to fit in a single post didn’t help, sorry!

I am almost surely familiar with it.
(Sadly, it’s one of those things I encounter less in adult life than I expected. Like quicksand but more interesting and less threat. The opposite of selection effects/biases, confounding, and correlation/causation muddles, which I see the whole damn time.)

So my view was that mean of “best x out of y” cannot possibly turn out lower than using all y for any individual, and that this was pretty obvious. It was not obvious to several (non STEM) folk. Asking for a counter example wouldn’t have helped - they worried the idea would sneak in detriment.

“How confident are you that the actual outcome will fall within the range of scenarios shown?”
“Pretty confident.”
“Care to put a number on that?”
“1”