The normal curve in the image is there for operators to visually check if the machine results are normal distributed or not. It's a "stencil", not data.
The software actually does a Lilliefors normality test which returns a big No on this data.
My family runs a blood analysis lab in Belgium for which I wrote some of the statistics gathering software.
The thresholds for 25-OH vitamin D: <20 ng/mL → deficient, 20–30 ng/mL → insufficient.
When I looked at all 1738 blood samples that had their Vitamin D tested between Feb 1, 2020 and Mar 13, 2020 (We were looking into the link between Vitamin D and COVID-19): The median (P50) was 20.1 ng/mL and the average was 22.4 ng/mL. Standard deviation: 11.24 ng/mL Half the samples were deficient, and the next 20% was insufficient.
Coming out of winter in Europe in a country with limited sunshine: most of the population is deficient in Vitamin D.
The colonization of Congo was indeed horrible. Inconsequential clarification: Congo wasn't actually a Belgian colony, it was Leopold's personal colony.
I grew up and lived mostly in Belgium. Only a year in the US and a few years in South Africa.
Belgium gets a lot of criticism for moving slowing, but it also rarely breaks crucial things. The system of >10 political parties has its flaws, but it's a lot less divisive than a 2 party system. It means compromise needs to be found, and that no 1 party has full control (slows things down but reduces corruption and critical errors imo). Purposely dumbing down the population or firing 10% of government employees in order to hide malicious acts (or make corruption easier) just aren't conceivable in Belgium.
> Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary?
_Most_ developed countries do invest in the education and teaching of critical thinking. It's not even that expensive.
In most countries, if a political party prefers an uneducated voter base, they don't win elections. Or if they do, there are enough working checks and balances (and parties in the opposition) to prevent serious harm.
I don't even think such a scale works for the kind of brilliant solutions Bellard (not Bertrand) creates.
I don't think 100 1x programmers can create these solutions. So much gets lost having to communicate and coordinate people. And they would just accumulate cruft (and DX tarpits like other mention).
Space-grade photovoltaics are >10x more expensive than ground based panels. Add some (Tesla) utility scale batteries and it can run 24/7. No need for expensive radiators or rocket launches. And personnel can upgrade the hardware every time there's a new generation of GPU's.
Putting datacenters in deserts around the equator is a much better idea than in Space. If you're really optimizing for cost that is. If you're optimizing for SpaceX meme-stock valuation the former wins
I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
Exactly the TAM for rockets just isn't there, and probably never will be.
That's why SpaceX is "betting" so hard on datacenters in space (just build them on earth with solar and batteries), and AI.
I think they know they are pumping the stock and that's a pity because I do think Tesla and SpaceX are really good at scaling industrial production (car factories, rocket factories) and I think they could be really good (the best) at building earth-based datacenters at scale. But it's probably hard to value that at $1.7T
The administration has given their orders to the regulators, whether explicit or implicit, and this is playing out exactly as they want it to. This is not "by accident" or "by negligence". This is by design.
On a personal level: I used to struggle with "winter dip". Taking Vitamin D supplements, as well as moving to South Africa, has both improved it a lot