Via [0], "Well, there are about 2 million researchers in the US. There are about 25 deaths per million people per day in the US, that’s 50 scientists dying each day, or 73,000 scientists over a four year period. Finding 11 that have some vague connection does not seem unusual to me."
"I should point out I am using numbers for the general population, which may not match the rate for scientists. [...] I also looked at CDC data – about 800,000 people in the US between 25 and 65 die each year [...] About 6% of the population work in the science field, which would be 192,000, or half that if you use a narrow definition of 3%, so close to the 73,000 figure I calculated the other way."
He also looks at how that compares with the individual institutions.
But then if we're doing age ranges, the 10 people "tied to sensitive research" who have disappeared or died are 59, 61, 60, 68, 53, 60, 78, 47, 67, 39 (with the two youngest identified as homicide and suicide). How does a cohort with an average age in their 60s compare with the age range of actively practising researchers?
Also the friction of uploading a photo from iOS was (and pretty much still is, despite Instagram's best efforts to enshittify their app) much, much lower for Instagram.
If the Flickr app had had a "quick upload" flow like Instagram, they might have had a chance but (like almost everything Yahoo! did) they fumbled badly and wasted any potential they had.
I'm guessing the writing is AI-assisted (there's no fluidity and it has some weirdly placed phrases) but I see they're in Poland and likely not English-language first?
> Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things
The caveat is that more zeros do nothing for our comprehension of the scale. That's the problem because most people can't comprehend how evolution is even possible. We just don't have a mental model for a trillion, it's all the same to us after a certain threshold.
Is that true for evolution? If that math works, it seems that any one bacterium's mutation must become universal across the globe? Evolution works but not for every instance of a beneficial mutation. I wonder what the odds are for bacteria.
I'm not sure why you think "any one bacterium's mutation must become universal across the globe". That's a pretty strange takeaway in the presence of a mutation that is so advantageous it lets you become a predator and hunt other bacteria or run away from predators and gain a painfully obvious survivability benefit.
The takeaway should be "mutations that confer massive benefits can become universal across the globe even if they only happen once, no matter how unlikely they are", which is obvious and intuitive.
It's more the probabilities, I think[1] - even in one generation, (say) 26 trillion[0] bacterium are going to experience a lot of mutations.
[0] Which is an extremely low ball number for worldwide bacterium, even billions of years ago, I think, given your average human has around 30 trillion inside them.
[1] Like "anomalies in Minecraft" series - given how many seeds there are, how many people play it, and how big the worlds are, eventually even the rarest things generate naturally.
> The frequency of fireballs in our planet’s skies seemed to grow in recent months.
It feels reductive to point out that this has coincided with a massive increase in the number of small satellites with limited lifespans up there.
(And yes, you'd expect NASA and the AMS to have thought of that but I honestly wouldn't put it past them to be deliberately ignoring Starlink satellites given Musk's political power and petulance to people who cross him.)
Steven Novella did one[0] - "Well, there are about 2 million researchers in the US. There are about 25 deaths per million people per day in the US, that’s 50 scientists dying each day, or 73,000 scientists over a four year period. Finding 11 that have some vague connection does not seem unusual to me."
He goes into greater detail further down to assuage the "BUT BUT that's genpop not JPL!" whatabouters and does some "how TF are these people connected?" musing.
(there's more detail at the link, obvs.)
[0] https://www.stevennovella.com/neurologicablog/whats-with-the...
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