But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.

https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm

I'm still looking for the very early Wired issue that has an ad that goes something like "they laughed at you when you were growing up because you were different. now they wear a uniform with their name on it. and you don't."

Or in the case of targets with no neighbors like missile bases, you know approximately how long it might take an attacker to succeed, then put big guys with guns within that distance measured by time.

Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."

Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"

And here's a truly excellent long form article on the crash by the always excellent Admiral Cloudberg: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...

What may be outdated here is our trust in humans to not destroy critical parts of our infrastructure.

I'm not sure I'd use it for written documents, although the monospace version is a very welcome replacement for courier.

There were lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to buy one of these behemoths at the time (cost, weight, heat) but maybe the most significant was how bad NTSC video looked when you spread it across a 40" screen. I recently pulled out an old laserdisc player and connected it to a 65" OLED set and it looks absolutely terrible.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/aduhelm-again

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/goodbye-aduhelm

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alzheimer-s-and-in...

Ok, maybe we’re just arguing different points here. I’ll grant that amyloids have something to do with all of this. I’m having a more difficult time understanding why one would suggest these drugs to a diagnosed Alzheimer’s patient at a point where it can no longer help.

Or is the long term thought that drugs like these will eventually be used a lot earlier as a prophylactic to those at high risk?

“Derek Lowe has worked on drug discovery for over three decades, including on candidate treatments for Alzheimer’s. He writes Science’s In The Pipeline blog covering the pharmaceutical industry.

“Amyloid is going to be — has to be — a part of the Alzheimer’s story, but it is not, cannot be a simple ‘Amyloid causes Alzheimer’s, stop the amyloid and stop the disease,'” he told Big Think.

“Although the effect of the drug will be described as being about a third, it consists, on average, of a difference of about 3 points on a 144-point combined scale of thinking and daily activities,” Professor Paresh Malhotra, Head of the Division of Neurology at Imperial College London, said of donanemab.

What’s more, lecanemab only improved scores by 0.45 points on an 18-point scale assessing patients’ abilities to think, remember, and perform daily tasks.

“That’s a minimal difference, and people are unlikely to perceive any real alteration in cognitive functioning,” Alberto Espay, a professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told KFF Health News.

At the same time, these potentially invisible benefits come with the risk of visible side effects. Both drugs caused users’ brains to shrink slightly. Moreover, as many as a quarter of participants suffered inflammation and brain bleeds, some severe. Three people in the donanemab trial actually died due to treatment-related side effects.”

https://bigthink.com/health/alzheimers-treatments-lecanemab-...

And here’s a Lowe follow-up on hard data released later:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lilly-s-alzheimer-...