lukewarm_ozone

joined 1 month ago
[–] lukewarm_ozone 2 points 1 day ago

The thing I said I did? Yes; here's the processed image:

If you mean the math in the post, I can't read it in this picture but it's probably just some boring body-of-rotation-related integrals, so basically the same thing as I did but breaking apart the vase's visible shape into analytically simple parts, whereas I got the shape from the image directly.

[–] lukewarm_ozone 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This roughly checks out. I'm getting 66%, based on the methodology of cutting out the jug's shape from the picture and numerically integrating the filled and empty volume (e.g. if a row is d pixels wide, it contributes d^2 to the volume, either filled or empty depending on whether it's above or below the water level).

[–] lukewarm_ozone 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Ivermectin is a human antiparasitic too. But more importantly, I'm pretty most of this is just a myth. The stories I've seen about mass ivermectin hospitalizations turned out to be hoaxes, see e.g. here. If you literally took an entire horse-sized dose (200μg/kg for a 700kg horse, so 140mg) as a 60kg human, you'd get a dose of 2.3mg/kg, 11x the recommended amount for infestation - which has been tested in humans to be safe. Ivermectin is amazingly safe for a drug; you have to really try to get an overdose.

So I think a few people (seems to be ~several hundred for all of US in 2021) did somehow manage to actually get themselves poisoned (I'd love to know how; I think I saw a statistic once about what dosages were found in ivermectin poisoning cases but I can't find it in my bookmarks, and the few actual case reports I can find don't provide a dosage), but most of the "horse dewormer" stories in the media were just political propaganda.

(The above isn't getting into the question of whether ivermectin is effective against COVID, though. I think it was reasonable to think so back during the start of the pandemic, since the studies were really quite suggestive, and it was a safe drug to try, and the studies weren't even debunked at the end - rather, it was found that the improvements were most likely due to the drug treating the coincidental parasite infestations the patients had. It's not so reasonable now that we have better studies and real working anti-COVID drugs, and the people who suggest taking ivermectin for COVID nowadays sure are crazies, but I personally would not shame people for doing it back in 2021 or so. Taking one of the only drugs that seemed to be effective against a terrifying pandemic is just a smart thing to do, if it's this safe.)

[–] lukewarm_ozone 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

...do you truly think it's better for billionaires not to donate to charity than to do so? Because I'm sorry, but whatever complicated moral justification you have for berating them for it, these donations still have a large positive impact on the world.

[–] lukewarm_ozone 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Quite possibly the enemies have a better idea of the players' hitpoint total than the DM, since they can, like, see how the player characters look, and probably have been tracking the battle much more closely than the DM has.

[–] lukewarm_ozone 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Hmm, interesting. Somewhat compelling, but:

  • it's a rather small (n=38) Chinese pilot study
  • the effect on the sleep latency is sizable (a latency decrease from 31±14 to 18±12 minutes, effect size of 0.85), but there's no effect on actual sleep duration.
  • the sleep measurements were subjective (sleep diaries, not actigraphy)

I'm also a bit concerned why it's the only study with this methodology in this later meta-analysis - all of the other "behavioral intervention" studies in it experiment with stuff like "extended time-in-bed". In other words, there seems to not have been any followup or replication of this study.

[–] lukewarm_ozone 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Security as in cybersecurity, yes. Security as in not getting caught violating government bans, not so much - if you're in a country where getting repressed by your government is a real possibility, it helps a lot for it to not be possible to see exactly what sites you visit. Reminder: even over HTTPS, the domain name (like lemmy.world) is normally not encrypted. Encrypted Client Hello can solve this, but it has only started being commonly used a year ago or so, and more importantly requires the host to support it.

[–] lukewarm_ozone 51 points 3 days ago (3 children)
[–] lukewarm_ozone 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

For jobs behind the camera, there are something like, only 13% of women employed in the film industry.

That doesn't necessarily imply sexism at all, note. If it turns out women are just 6 times less likely than men to want to have these jobs, then this percentage would be 13% in a perfect non-sexist world. (Though 13% is concerningly low; the percentage of women that go into computer science is around 20-25% and that's one of the strongest effects. Plausibly the remaining 1.5-2x difference here is due to sexism; I can buy filmmaking being one of the most sexist industries).

[–] lukewarm_ozone 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

It kills parasitic infections caused by worms. Cancer is not a parasitic infection caused by a worm. It’s like asking if a mouse trap can fix climate change. No, because they are in no way related.

That's not a convincing argument. It suffices to say that ivermectin was considered as a candidate for a cancer drug as early as 2018, with a proposed mechanism of action and everything. It's not as simple as "cancer is not a parasitic infection", because pharmacology is never this simple. That paper also mentions positive study results both in vitro and in vivo. There is also a lot of later research (search ivermectin cancer on google scholar), but it's potentially biased by the horrifying memetic war that happened in America during the covid pandemic.

My conclusion from ten minutes of googling is that quite possibly it's a real weak anti-cancer drug much like the already-known ones. It's hard to be sure of those things - we're in an age where there's enough research and publication bias and politics that you can't trust individual studies^1^. And you can't fully trust meta-analyses either, but I can't even find a meta-analysis of ivermectin as used for cancer, so.

(It's pretty safe to say that it's not an amazing cancer drug much better than all existing ones (like some people seem to think) - both on priors, and because if that was the case it'd be extremely obvious from all of the studies already made.)

^1^ I don't mean fraud, I mean that if a hundred teams over the globe try a study of something that doesn't work, five of them will find p<0.05 results by pure chance and quite possibly only those teams will publish it - so until several good replications come along, it'll look like there's a real and well-supported effect. And there can be much subtler problems than this - see, say, how well the studies of psychic powers go.

 
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