Posts by MacDBB

Intel losses hit $16.6B in Q3 and Wall Street is … loving it?

"Jam tomorrow" ... the markets love this kind of stuff.

Chinese space company accidentally launches rocket in test gone wrong

Trajectory optional

Well, they do appear to be following the same trajectory as the early SpaceX launches, so if they 'acquired' their specifications, then they're definitely sticking closely to the original script.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

This could have been projected on the movie screen everyone was watching in the famous 1984 Superbowl commercial ... and would not have seemed out of place.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Although Excel is clearly the wrong tool here, VLOOKUP is one of the more potentially problematic functions within Excel. Most obviously you'd want to fix your cell range with $ before copying and pasting a formula down a column. But beyond that there's the final optional parameter which indicates whether the function should perform a range-lookup - if this isn't set to false it defaults to true. A value of true in the range lookup will mean that if nothing matches, then the next closest approximate value will be returned. This can have fairly disastrous consequences if there are typos in fields such as names.

Uncle Sam sounds like it may actually do something about rampant visa H-1B fraud

Dual intent

One of the reasons why H1-B is so popular is that its a dual intent visa. So you can enter the US declaring that you will stay only for the brief duration of your visa, but during that term you can legally change your mind and apply for a more permanent status. Most other visa types don't allow you to switch intentions while in the US - you have to return to a permanent home-country and apply for another visa from there.

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

Bait-and-switch

This seemed like a trivial enhancement at first. But selling the sizzle that you will enjoy arcsecond resolution with the camera by showing enhanced pictures of really only one of a few objects that will benefit from the algorithm seems on reflection like a con (but I comment as someone who has never owned any kind of mobile phone, so I'm probably wrong (but at least unbiased)).

FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab

I think the problem with the "mysterious insertion" conjecture is that this insertion was out of phase. During gene transcription the coding part of the genome is read in blocks of 3 nuleotide bases that are converted as a triplet into an amino acid, and many of these amino acids make a protein. So if you want to sensibly insert something new into a genome sequence you would insert the new bases in multiples of three between two blocks of 3. This would be an in-phase insertion. But the insertion that is being discussed was out of phase - so it would generally just muck up the coding around the insertion site and create nonsense - not something you would ever do intentionally. The random horizontal transfer of blocks of genetic material between organisms (that frequently occurs in viruses) would on the other hand not differentiate between an in-phase and an out-of-phase insertion, and in contrast to a local duplication, would likely appear as a block of multiple bases rather than a short or single base. So this looks maybe more natural than artificial.

There's an alternative perspective here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214427119