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Pre 18th Century, Sailing was a risky business, with only being able to determine one's position by Dead Reckoning and Latitude. While Latitude could be readily calculated, longitude was unknown with no means to determine, once out of Land sight. Sailors pre 18th century would follow known Latitudes until reaching a familiar land form. This was called "westing" or "easting" depending on the direction sailing, and would have been the method I presume that Columbus made, when reaching the Americas. The latest time machines of the day, pendulum clocks, were obviously useless at sea, due to the instability. This problem was seen so urgent to overcome that in the early 1700's, Britain established "The board of Longitude" and offered a grand prize to anyone that could solve this vexing problem. Then along came a self taught Carpenter, named John Harrison, with an Interest in time and time keeping devices. His story and perseverence in finally creating a marine chronometer over 40 years of efforts, is told here.....https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison I have raised this because he is mostly unknown, and while marine chronometers are now outdated with radio and GPS, the importance of his invention for that time period cannot be underestimated. Captain James Cook used his final chronometer on his Pacific expedition in 1770 to study a solar eclipse in Tahiti, later of course sailing on to map and record the Islands of New Zealand and Australia's east coast. I also personally used a ship's chronometer on a barquentine sailing from Panama to Sydney in 1974 and learning navigation via a sextant, by the Sun, Moon, and prominent planets and stars. Later I also read a great little book, entitled "Longitude" The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. By an American woman named Dava Sobel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book) A truly great notable human being, generally not given the praize he deserves. Hope others find his story interesting.

Not a single useful rule to be applied empirically have I found there. Nor a single useful rule to be applied in an explanatory way. Many pompous words, that's all. You should have to find an expert in cosmogony, the mind, matter, ethology, and what not, to be 100% sure whether he's making any sense at all. For the time being, I will stick with other's opinions that it's mostly word salad. Just to clarify, I'm not a professional theoretical physicist, although I've had all the training, and keep up-to-date reasonably well. But my approach is very much on the mathematical/conceptual side. But don't go just by me, or any other theoretically-minded person. Science is heavily constrained by experiment. No matter how deep and far-reaching your theoretical analysis may appear, if you can't make a prediction or retrodiction (explanation of what's already known) pretty quickly, you're probably just playing freely with words or concepts. That's a good test.

Actually they are just starting this type of trial in the UK. direct infection of selected volunteers. This was announced a few days ago on the BBC. Sorry I don't have more details at the moment. Since about the first 2 months the UK government has been announcing (daily and cumulative) totals of all those who 1) Had a positive covid test within 28 days before death 2) Has covid specifically stated on the death certificate. The government announces confirmed cases only in the totals. London University has carried out mass testing within the general population (my family has participated in this) over a 3 month period to assess these figures. This was done by distributing home self test kits and collecting the results. Those who were revealed to be asymptomatic on thesewere sent for further tests /advised to self isolate. Further data is being gathered on so callled excess deaths. This is the increased number of deaths experienced over the long term average for the time of year. This is larger than just the covid deaths since other increases have also occurred and attempts have been made to allow for this.

I think some folks, including many students, are under the assumption that as long someone cites something, it somehow becomes more credible. That of course is not true. Assuming the citation was done correctly, it only points out to a fact or observation made by some other group. It does not mean that it follows the argument that one wants to make. I can, for example, correctly cite a paper that shows similarities of SARS-CoV-2 to existing bat coronaviruses, but if the main thrust of my paper is about how lizardmen have released the virus in order to overthrow their pangolin overlords, it does not actually add credibility. It is more that if no citations (or mainly self-citations) are given, that one should be even more skeptical.

To implement MMU you need knowledge how to program MMU. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_unit To implement FPU you need knowledge how to program FPU. And how to store IEEE 754 in memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754

If you're making up terminology in a paper, the whole paper is a mistake. You can't claim "spin conjugate dynamics" is a real thing just because it's in a paper, so you also can't claim there are no mistakes in the paper just because the things it mentions can't be found elsewhere. "Not even wrong" refers to being completely off-base in your conclusions because you've misunderstood the criteria presented so badly. Like trying to define the physical behavior of an American football without taking it's shape into consideration, and instead use menial temperature, co-joined acceleration parameters, and prevailing chemical perspicacity as key factors. If I told you a football bounced the way it did because of those things, would you claim you couldn't find any mistakes with my explanation?

The issue is if you make things up, there is no reference point to assess whether something is correct. At best one can check for internal consistency. However, if the made-up concept is not well described either (especially if deliberately so), then even that can be challenging or impossible.

Efron is in the foreground, DeNiro a pace back, so the perspective makes him seem taller. Also, look at DeNiro's shoulders (uneven) and his tie (also uneven) which suggest he's slumping a bit to the side, probably because he has his left arm up around Pesci's shoulders. Want more? Efron's suit lines are showing a single color, which makes you look taller, and it's white as well so it stands out. DeNiro is breaking up his tailoring lines with an open coat and a lighter shirt, so his height looks broken up as well. And it's obvious that Efron's got about an inch and a half taller hair than DiNiro. Why, did you think there's a height conspiracy going on in Hollywood?

"Technology" today is an outgrowth of things seen in lab experiments. The Greeks had no experiments so any technology more complex than the observation that water runs downhill was unlikely for them. If you want to find ancient science you need to look for the source of ancient technology. Unfortunately all your sources appear to be corruptions of original writing so the science would be very difficult to see here. Any science you find will necessarily correspond to ancient technology and ancient knowledge, not to modern experimental science.

There was a BBC Horizon programme about this story in 1998 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/241228.stm

Very interesting, @beecee. Funny that this man probably saved millions of lives and yet nobody calls him "saviour".

Along with Faraday and our own Markus Hanke, Harrison presents yes a lesson to all that self education works and class distinction is bad. +1

Absolutely. In hopes of reciprocating a bit, you might enjoy this brief video overview of the history and topic you brought forth here:

I read that book a couple of months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. One solution to longitude I found interesting was I believe proposed by Newton, and involved accurately mapping the Moon's distance from Earth and its irregular motions to allow measurement of background stars relative to the moon to be used for determining longitude.

A) there is no immunity for COVID-19. For Influenza we have endemic immunity plus vaccinations. Still thousands die each year from influenza, more have died from COVID-19. If we let it fully sweep through the population, far more will die. B) Many of the infections you mention are chronic infections. I.e. many live for years with the disease and the deaths in any year are often the cumulation of many years of infections. The death of COVID-19 is the consequence of infections in a single year. C) Specific to lower respiratory tract infections, they are also often connected to things like allergies, air pollution and a whole range of different diseases. If COVID-19 would be added we would see about a 50% increase from a single virus. This is enormous.