Best of Twitter - Week of October 4, 2021
There's a definition trick fusion advocates use, energy gain Q is calculated just for plasma itself. Q-plasma.
But the magnets to contain the plasma take enormous power, so the proper number to watch is Q-total.
backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-cl…
The nocebo effect and implications for modern psychiatry
You’re probably familiar with the placebo effect: taking a pill you think can ‘help’ often has a real physiological benefit, even if it’s fake
BUT the existence of such a mechanism implies the inverse should also exist...
It’s called ‘nocebo’: taking a pill you think will make you ‘sick’ can manifest in real, physiological response.
Medical journals cover many implications; how a doctor’s disposition can affect efficacy, or how the ‘nocebo’ effect can even be ’conditioned’ like Pavlov’s dogs:
^ thread
The surnames of 34,772 corporate board members of 4,005 publicly listed Indian firms (as of 2012) were analyzed in this paper. They found that 55% of all corporate board members were Brahmins, 35% were Vaishyas, 4% were Kshatriyas, 2% were OBCs/SCs/STs.
96% of corporate boards were dominated by one caste (defined in terms of varna category, not jati).
52% of all corporate boards were majority Brahmin, despite being ~4% of the Indian population.