"but as long as we all believe it has value, it does".
Would one argue that an airplane is a _story_ ? If no one believed in the technology and lost faith in all pilots no one would fly. But that doesn't change the reality of the technology and competence of the pilots.
I get the sentiment, but I am not sure _story_ is the right word.
Well no, an airplane is a tangible thing that can fly, and as long as the safety culture of the people responsible for flying airplanes is strong enough, so crashes are very rare, people will fly with it.
Currency OTOH is basically a (forgery-proof) piece of paper with a number written on it, or even just a number in a database on some (hopefully well-protected) server. So it can only be used to buy stuff as long as we all agree that it's worth something. Of course, it helps if a government and/or a central bank is behind it, but even without a functioning government, a currency can limp on for decades, such as in Somalia, where the last banknotes were printed in 1991, but people still used them as the lowest "rung" of a three-tier system consisting of the Somali shilling, the US dollar and mobile phone payments, until recently when businesses sort of agreed to not accept them anymore (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/11/poorest-somali...).
No, an airplane is a physical thing we interact with which has intrinsic value, physical transportation. This is a perfect example of what money is not.
Money is not the token (the coin or paper bill), but the component of the ledger the token represents. Sometimes there is no physical token, only an entry in a ledger (eg. digital transfers after fractional reserve banking). The intrinsic value of the metals in the dime are (usually) worth less than the face value of the denomination, hence the discussion that the _story_ is more important than the physical _token_.
The author of Sapiens is a very famous speaker on many topics HNers like. He’s worth a listen.
From personal observation, many Christians see oil as a unlimited natural gift from God and view alternative energy sources with disdain. Not sure if that was a deliberate strategy on Big Oil's part but it effectively solidifies massive political support.
By similarity if Thiel can equate AI regulation or restricting government AI funding with the Antichrist he could guarantee political support for decades.
I don't recall Thiel ever lecturing about religion or the Antichrist prior to his involvement with government contracts. It's hard to believe any of this is sincere.
Agreed that initially referring to it as "brain tumor" would have been fine.
Thanks for sharing your story too, perhaps this condition isn't rare. Coincidentally I once went into bar and vaguely recognized a roommate I hadn't seen in years. His appearance had changed and he now had remarkable Hulk like features. I restrained myself from asking but I honestly thought he looked great.
We chatted and he shared that he had "brain surgery" 2 weeks(?) prior to remove a tumor on his pituitary gland. He just woke up one day and his vision was distorted. The next day he woke up blind which lead to him getting a diagnosis and surgery. The tumor had also caused pituitary disfunction which induced giantism.
If I recall, the surgery was performed going behind his nose through an incision in his mouth above the posterior of his upper lip which differs slightly from the approach in the OP. It's amazingly fortunate that this is an option given it looks inoperable from the MRI.
I'll also share that towards the end of our conversation he thanked me for not commenting on his appearance and that he was self-conscious. It's compelling, especially when someone looks good, to mention it, but there's no need to lead with it.
For the increasing number of people who have cataract surgery, the eye’s lenses have ben replaced with plastic, which usually have a fixed focus. (Artificial lenses that can be focused are under development.)
My dad recently had cataract surgery and I just assumed he was getting would be a deformable lens that would give him the ability to focus again. Does anyone know why it is so hard to develop such a lens ? As far as medical breakthroughs it seems like low hanging fruit and most people over the age of 45 could benefit from such a surgery since that is the age at which our lenses begin to harden and can no longer be shaped by our ciliary muscles.
The lens is suspended by a ring of fibres about 1-2μm thick from the ciliar muscle. Getting accommodation to work with a synthetic lens would require a substitute suspension mechanism to attach the lens to the muscle. And it would probably be useful if it could be implanted without temporarily removing the front or the eye including the iris.
Compare that to a small cut to the side of the eye to extract the old lens and inject a new one that is held in place mechanically.
One of the very real dangers is that all of the satellite constellations come one line at the same time, and none of them get to critical mass before they all go bankrupt.
Mass adoption is the key to reasonable per-user costs here.
Amazon, and possibly SpaceX are at an advantage here, since they have other revenue streams, so they might be able to wait out the rest of the field and grab customers from failed networks.
Amazon and SpaceX are nowhere near equivalent. SpaceX is relying on starlink to be a major portion of their revenue by 2025, far outweighing launch. That's all they have.
Amazon has retail and aws, and satellites will be nowhere near a majority.
In addition to those consultants, Cynthia Stine of egrowthpartners.com was recently interviewed in The Week's Jan 25, 2019 "The Last Word" column and her firm helps Amazon Sellers with Marketplace challenges.
Also, Amazon's Selling Partner Summit is taking place next week at Amazon HQ. It is currently sold out but maybe there is a waiting list ? I'll be attending primarily to make internal contacts should I ever encounter a problem with my account but I can't say for certain if that conference will be helpful in that regard. Sorry for this situation and good luck!
This article implies that if you can't change your diet then you could achieve similar results with chewing exercises. The comments below mention mewing, but I suspect greater force would be better. Googling "chew toys for adults" gave interesting results but they are mainly used for anxiety and ADHD. Curious if anyone knows of a chew appliance for children or adults that would address the issues mentioned in the article.
A bit of a tangent, but does anyone know if a "paper PhD" is still and option ? The first and only time I ever heard of it was during a lecture by Nobel laureate Dr. Shuji Nakamura[1].
IIRC, the University of Florida offered PhD's if you published 5 papers which he did in one year.
It’s called a “sandwich thesis” and it’s quite common in some countries, mostly in Europe. Put together a few papers published in peer reviewed journals, write a introduction, and submit it for defense.
It's fairly common at my university. You publish 3 papers surrounding a singular theme or topic and you use that for your PhD. You still need to write an intro and have some boilerplate stuff, but it's not uncommon at all.
Although the number is shrinking, it's still a thing in Japan (so-called "ronpaku"). It is generally said that the thesis by a paper PhD must be better than those regular PhDs who completed courseworks, but it's much more efficient. If your thesis is already complete, you can get a degree in less than a year.
some programs are happy to just have you tack a bunch of papers together into a dissertation. they usually still require you to write the actual document, though, re-explaining the work in each paper.
Perhaps skin samples from different parts of the body would yield different age predictions. The actual study makes no mention which seems like a significant omission if someone were to try to reproduce this experiment.
Unless they’re dense they used the inside of the upper arm to avoid sun damage.
The bigger issue is that Steve Horvath calibrated and has successfully marketed a DNA methylation based “epigenetic clock” accurate to within a couple of years, from blood, with hundreds of not thousands of citations and successful replications since 2013. DNA is more stable than RNA, and blood is easier to come by than fibroblasts (skin punches), so this seems like a nonstarter to me.
Horvath’s clock works in arbitrary other tissues; we’ve applied it to pediatric and adult tumors, adjacent normal, and blood samples at diagnosis, remission, and relapse, and it works quite well (unlike the knockoffs that followed). I don’t see the point of a less reliable, less proven clock on less stable molecules (RNA), when I can use a handful of targeted amplicons to run Horvath’s for $30/sample on blood DNA (even dried blood) or other tissues.
Would one argue that an airplane is a _story_ ? If no one believed in the technology and lost faith in all pilots no one would fly. But that doesn't change the reality of the technology and competence of the pilots.
I get the sentiment, but I am not sure _story_ is the right word.
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