The European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) operates facilities in Chile because it offers good weather, good seeing, and it is in the Southern Hemisphere.
None of the ESO’s instruments are in Europe. They’re all in Chile. It would make no sense to place an instrument for Southern Hemisphere observation in Europe.
However, administration is out of Germany, and the captured data is processed by researchers mostly in Europe.
There are also many amateur remote hosting facilities for telescopes in Chile. It really has great atmospheric conditions. If my telescope is in one of these facilities, is it no longer my telescope?
Wait, so you are saying that because 200 years ago Chile was a colony of Spain, the modern Chilean government is not allowed to enter into a mutually beneficial partnership with anyone in Europe lest they be accused of "colonialism"?
And are you also saying that a European University that spends a billion or two euros designing, building, and operating the thing can't call it a European telescope because it is located in Chile? That must be the world's stupidest problem. People sell the naming rights to things all of the time.
Plus, you state that "Europe can take all of the benefits", which is simply untrue. Observatories are funded by selling observation time to scientists. Any astronomer anywhere in the world will be able to buy time on the telescope. Their discoveries benefit everyone in the world. Meanwhile Chile gets a slice of that money, plus a constant stream of astronomers visiting the country to use the thing. And all it cost them was some land that is literally useless for any other purpose. Seems like a great deal for Chile.
Please share, what is the conspiracy theory you reference?
Did you know the term "conspiracy theory" was literally invented by the CIA to smear anyone who dared to question the official narrative about the JFK assassination?
There is ample evidence in recently released documents on the JFK assassination that Lee Harvey Oswald was working with the CIA before the assassination. [1][2]
Does anyone honestly believe that Oswald acted alone? Do you still believe that we invaded Iraq because they had WMD?
> The earliest known usage was by the American author Charles Astor Bristed, in a letter to the editor published in The New York Times on January 11, 1863. He used it to refer to claims that British aristocrats were intentionally weakening the United States during the American Civil War in order to advance their financial interests.
I stand corrected on the origin of the term but I stand by the claim that it was weaponized by the CIA to counter those who questioned the official JFK assassination narrative.
Here is the 1967 CIA dispatch on the Warren Commission with details:
I’m sure the Yuan will increase somewhat as a reserve currency, but I’m skeptical it will become dominant. China has systemic issues at the moment, with a working-age population that peaked some time ago and a property market that is perpetually on the verge of implosion.
There are mounting pressures in domestic consumers, and an increasing move towards “dual circulation” (with a focus on the domestic part of that duality). Then there’s the risk of a miscalculation in the East China or South China seas.
Given that CNY trades in a tight, centrally-managed range against the USD (it’s almost always between 6-7 CNY to the dollar, and only briefly traded outside that during the pandemic), I’m not sure there’s a big incentive to use CNY as a hedge against USD.
It’s the same in China. My wife’s family is from there, and they hand out antibiotics for everything. Everyone seems to have a stash of them as well.
When my in-laws were visiting Australia for a couple of months and my wife’s mother got a minor cold, she started demanding we get her some antibiotics. We tried to explain that there’s no way a doctor would prescribe them for a minor sniffle, and she totally went if the deep end, acting as if she was going to die if she didn’t get them. But in the end, she survived.
Same. Every doc relative would have some, despite their current crackdown on antibiotics prescribing online (not sales -- you can still fudge some paper and get it done).
The most striking thing about antibiotics use is not human use, however. Colistin, mentioned in the article, became the last line of defense against resistant bacteria while China was still liberally giving it to livestock. Thankfully use of this one is going to end…
I’m not sure if this is the previous poster’s reason, but (given the implication that the poster is a vegetarian) it my simply be that many vegetarians are put off by the taste and texture of meat, whether it be real, cultured or fake (via textured proteins, etc.).
But I think it’s pretty silly to think that vegetarians are the target market for fake or cultured meat. Surely not.
If you’ve been vegetarian for a long time (life-long or for decades), then the distinctive texture of many meat products can be very off-putting. It’s not like anything you find in vegetable dishes (which is why fake and cultured meat products exist!), and if you’re not used to it, it can trigger you to gag as your brain sends signals that “this isn’t food as I know it”.
This isn’t usually a problem. If you’re a vegetarian, you don’t have any requirement to eat meat. Except some restaurants are now excitedly adopting fake (vegetable protein-based) meats as a “vegetarian” option. It must be convenient as they don’t have to invent new vegetable-centric dishes, but many vegetarians just can’t manage to eat them even if they try. I’ve been to a couple of work dinners lately where the vegetarian option was a fake (TVP-based) meat, and had to just eat the side salad because the main dish triggered my gag reflex.
I’m a life-long vegetarian and kind of wish I could eat meat, it would make life simpler. But I just can’t bring myself to chew or swallow it without plenty of water to wash it down. That said, I’m all for cultured meats as an option for meat-eaters. Go for it.
> I’m a life-long vegetarian and kind of wish I could eat meat, it would make life simpler. But I just can’t bring myself to chew or swallow it without plenty of water to wash it down.
If you really want to, and I'm not sure if you do, you probably need to add meat slowly. It would work best if you often eat with someone who eats meat, but add a pea sized bit of meat to one meal a day for a week, then two pea sized bits, then four, etc. Kind of hard to do if it's only you / only vegetarians eating, because meat doesn't tend to come in appropriate sizes to do that with. Prefer tiny pieces mixed into dishes where you take larger bites of many things --- a burrito is a great place hide things.
A few guys in my PhD office 15 years ago used to have a hobby of doing something similar.
They’d invent a “fact”, spin up a webpage with that fact, add the fact to Wikipedia and cite the webpage to add plausibility.
Then one of them would occasionally Google to see if any “reputable” sources were repeating that “fact” (after reading it on Wikipedia) and add/swap their references in to strengthen the Wikipedia text.
As long as the “facts” were trivial enough, it worked.
Previously generated words are added to the input token window.
At the point it’s generating the next word, it knows what its preceding words were. With a conceptual representation of various rhyme schemes, subsequent words will (probably) fit that form.
So once it's done one line, when it's writing the next line, it will be stuck with being force to rhyme with whatever it came up with on the first line? Curious what happens when the first line ends in the word 'orange' (or maybe it tries to pick end-of-line-words based on rhyme-ability?)
If certain words (like “orange”) are statistically unlikely to be used in that context in that rhyme scheme, then they’re unlikely to be picked to begin with.
You can specifically ask it to end the first line in "orange" or whatever.
In my experience, when it can't come up with a good rhyme, it tends to fib it. But also keep in mind that, as it operates on token representation of words internally, its notion of what rhymes and what does not is far from perfect. This is more noticeable in languages other than English.
I’m eagerly anticipating our company moving to Teams.
Right now, the only approved chat solution is Skype for Business (with only plaintext messaging - rich text, files and images have been disabled for security reasons).
Other chat and social media sites are blocked at a firewall level (including Slack, Discord, Facebook, etc.).
I’ve heard bad things about Teams, but it’s surely better than the current solution we use with its lack of persistence and plain text limitation.
None of the ESO’s instruments are in Europe. They’re all in Chile. It would make no sense to place an instrument for Southern Hemisphere observation in Europe.
However, administration is out of Germany, and the captured data is processed by researchers mostly in Europe.
There are also many amateur remote hosting facilities for telescopes in Chile. It really has great atmospheric conditions. If my telescope is in one of these facilities, is it no longer my telescope?