macarthur_park

“Thank you for your answer to my first question. Could you please also address questions 2 and 3?”

At least by numbering the questions you make it easier to re-ask them.

my attempt is to balance the perspective of what has become polemic, faith-based scientific dogma completely divorced from fact with some kind of reality-based reasoning and investigation.

I believe this reveals a real lack of understanding of how modern science is done. I’ve heard similar complaints about scientists being blinded by orthodoxy from anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and from people promoting their alternate models of physics (e.g. “everything is made of photons”). In every case the complaint is based on their own ideological blindness, misunderstanding of the science, or both.

The idea that scientists are unwilling to interrogate modern theories or entertain alternatives is ridiculous. The most interesting results aren’t those that reaffirm the standard model or expectations, it’s those that are in conflict with our best understanding of reality. These are the observations and theories that reveal new physics. This is the stuff of Nobel prizes.

Searches for physics beyond the standard model are commonplace; physics conferences generally have at least a few sections devoted to them. There are large collaborations doing experiments that search for physics that’s inconsistent with the standard model, for example searches for neutrinoless double beta decay or the neutron electric dipole moment.

Even experiments that ultimately reaffirm the standard model began as attempts to interrogate it and discover things that challenge it. At the LHC, Atlas and CMS both observed the Higgs boson and found its properties were consistent with the standard model. If you talk with any of the physicists involved, they were actually disappointed that no new physics was observed. This was the most boring possible result.

Alright I’ll bite. I don’t think this is AI drivel, I do think this article comes from a place of a serious lack of understanding of the standard model and quantum mechanics.

Yes, prior to the discovery of quantum mechanics some physicists realized that if they made certain assumptions, the math “just worked out”. They did not understand why this was the case, and being good scientists they sought to. They were also clear about their lack of a model to justify this math.

The development of quantum mechanics not only solved all these problems, but also predicted additional physics that has since been verified (solid state mechanics for example is just applied quantum mechanics, and predicted and described the transistor).

The reason quantum mechanics and the standard model of particle physics are treated as the best description of reality we currently have is because they are in fact. Attempts to describe cosmology and observational physics based in alternative models all do a worse job, either failing to account for observations or making unphysical predictions.

A quote from the article:

While MOND successfully predicts many galactic phenomena, often with greater simplicity than dark matter models, it faces its own challenges, particularly in galaxy clusters, and has often been dismissed by the mainstream physics community, sometimes explicitly because it is perceived to “lack mathematical elegance” or deviates too far from the established framework of General Relativity, suggesting theoretical preference can overshadow empirical parsimony.

This is incorrect. MOND is generally dismissed because as the article admits, it fails to account for all observed behavior. If you have to pick a model that describes more observed phenomena, which do you choose: the model that matches nearly all empirical data, or the one that only matches a subset but maybe could do better if someone could come up with the right formalism? If one insists that MOND is the path forward, then it is they who are dogmatically blinded by their choice of model.

Definitely an accurate prediction for Collins - she already called in sick so she didn’t have to attend the hearings.

Opening a new line of credit is only a temporary hit to your score. Multiple cards in a short time will be a bigger hit, but it’ll eventually pass.

Most if not all of those cards offer a free credit report that could tell you how much of an impact this had on your score and how quickly it improves. If you have another existing card (don’t sign up for another one) you may be able to see the change to your score once these hard credit pulls hit your credit report.

If not, wait a month or so and use one of your free annual credit reports. You get one report per year from each agency for free, with no consequence to your credit score. There’s 3 credit agencies, so in principle you can check your credit every 4 months for no cost.

Candyland.

Link to the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/

What you learned is incomplete: the coverage gap only exists in states that chose not to expand Medicaid coverage, aka those with republican legislatures. As written, the ACA would subsidize an increasing fraction of health insurance cost until someone’s income was a certain level above the poverty line. If their income fell below this level, they would get coverage through Medicaid instead.

Medicaid historically didn’t cover people with incomes this high, so the ACA expanded coverage to higher income residents. The federal government covered 100% of the cost of Medicaid expansion for the first ~decade, and then 90% after that. Several states sued and the supreme court struck down part of the law that required states to go along with this. So they had to opt in to Medicaid expansion. The ones that didn’t (republican state govts) now have a coverage gap.

Its unfortunate because it harms those who needed help the most, but its a consequence of republicans at the state level for refusing expansion, and at republicans at the federal level for refusing to allow any changes to the ACA that would fix the issue.

They only had a filibuster-proof senate counting the independent Joe Lieberman who caucused with democrats. Lieberman (and a few other dems tbh) wouldn’t support a single payer system, so the ACA was the best they could do.

“Undeserving” covers that, unfortunately.

You need to have a clearance to communicate classified information. Asking her a question about something classified would likely reveal information that can’t be transmitted to an uncleared person. As an uncleared person, she can’t say anything classified even to someone who has a current clearance.

Alphabetically, of course.