I actually started to use the free api user and I was able to get access to: 1. real-time, 2. hourly 3. nowcast, 4. daily and replace completely my DarkSky subscription.
All four endpoints are available on the free plan
According to Wikipedia [0], there have been 183 magnetic reversals the past 83 million years (and many more throughout the history of the Earth, including the reign of the dinosaurs). The weakening of the Earth's magnetic shielding is no laughing matter, but the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid was certainly far greater.
I know almost nothing about this but I'd say this is unlikely. The dinosaur era spanned millions of years and the poles flip several times per million years. So they survived through dozens of flips.
There was a 2013 paper titled "Mass Extinction and the Structure of the Milky Way" that you might find interesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4838 - I don't know if there have been any significant follow ups since it published.
Basically our galaxy is a spiral galaxy with four arms, and it's rotating. The center moves slower than the outside, and our sun's orbit is near the inner rim of the Orion arm. We orbit the galaxy roughly every 240 million years and in that time we cross the dense galactic arms every so often (arms aren't symmetrical).
The paper: "A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events."
>Zapf’s collaborator Donald Knuth, in his talk, expressed the wish that ‘letter designers team up with computer scientists the way they used to collaborate with punchcutters’.
>In 1904, someone aboard the SS Penguin tried to shoot Pelorus Jack with a rifle. Despite the attempt on his life, Pelorus Jack continued to help ships. According to folklore, however, he no longer helped the Penguin, which shipwrecked in Cook Strait in 1909.
If this is true, it's the most amazing thing. Imagine a dolphin having a grudge with a ship
And seaguls also. I'm convinced that the seagul that attacked me with an um air-dropped er weapon was the same one that I shooed away from my window on the same day one springtime.
It makes me wonder. What if the U.S government had information about a terror attack that will happen in few months and thousands coud die from it, how will they act?
Probably in a lot more serious way than how they act towards this virus.
The world will become a safer place if we spend more on science and less on buying weapons
I don't want to minimise the pandemic- I don't think there is any other way to manage it than the one every sensible government is taking. But- a but was coming- the count of the deaths is a really rough way to estimate its damage. A better one would be the total number of years of life expectancy lost. This epidemic is very dangerous for everyone but it's mostly killing people who were towards the end of their life. It is still tragic but it's different from deaths of random people in every age bracket.
I'm not sure we can actually calculate that - especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors.
If you survive covid at 20 and die at 50 of complications, do we count this as -30 years life expectancy, or disregard it from your numbers completely?
Deaths is a very rough metric, and we're struggling to get even that right. I've no problems coming up with any other metric you prefer, as long as we can make it more accurate, not less.
> especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors
I don't think this is fearmongering per se, but I'm a bit fed up with this line of thinking.
We're playing with fire by surmising there's hidden harms (who's quantifying? is there even evidence this is happening to many survivors? I don't care if there's evidence it's happened to one person, we need demonstrable proof of very widespread damage, but I just don't see that being passed around as a possibility) and outright ruining people's livelihoods.
I honestly don’t think we know yet. I think most resources are being pumped into things that are actionable.
I’m not trying to fear-monger. But if people want to come up with “alternative” statistics, I think they need to be justifiable. There’s been a lot of debate around cases vs deaths, and our margin of error on each.
IMHO unless they can make “potential years lost” at least as accurate as any of our working figures, all they’re presenting is “it doesn’t matter, they’re just old people” masquerading as intelligence.
That we can’t properly quantify this is precisely my problem.
(To be clear, I don’t think any of these metrics should be linked to lockdown. Personally, my entirely uneducated, armchair opinion is that the primary metric for this should be the percentage capacity of medical facilities. All I ask is that we figure out how best to make solid numbers actionable, rather than how to reinvent the numbers to suit our cause.)
One of the main problems with project that launch their marketing campaign is their attempt to create an image of something they are not yet to become.
I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience, telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick. That's when your company becomes a brand, and people can recognize with it
>One of the main problems with project that launch their marketing campaign is their attempt to create an image of something they are not yet to become.
This is more about perception and something to aim at. It's extremely difficult to develop a brand if you don't have anything to aim at, because from the moment you have an hook, you can anchor pretty much everything based on that and this allows you to do something that's extremely important in branding: consistency and congruency.
Your brand, communication, product, should all be in line with what they might not be yet, but are aiming at.
>I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience, telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick.
Being transparent when necessary, yes. If you have something that's harmless and innocuous, it brings no value to anyone to flag it.
Telling about progress works with a small minority, like a dev log works mainly for that audience. Stripe, Facebook, Google, have a lot of this in place to try to lure in talent, or more of that than to make people use their product - so in a sense, this is a "marketing trick".
Most people want something that works, either from a tangible point of view like a flash light that turns on, or intangible, like a piece of clothing that makes them feel they belong to something that others will recognize.
