Playing devil's advocate: why assume Iraq would (attempt to) store VX in the same way? It actually has a thin ring of plausibility around it in the same the way you sometimes hear stories that Kim Jong Il would watch American movies and demand "I want us to build that".
Good question. One point is that the chemistry is well known by the right kinds of chemists in every country and... doesn't look like that (just as a for instance, a gel that aerosolizes in the ways you'd want for a chemical weapon would be roughly Nobel Prize quality work). Another is that actually quite a bit was known about the Iraqi chemical weapons programs, and published in the UNSCOM Reports, and the level of research to achieve something like that would show up in other places, other sites, other locations, and other people.
Recall that Iraq was well known to have used significant quantities of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War (against Iranian and Iraqi civilians): it was only after UN Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687- ending the Gulf War with the liberation of Kuwait- that Iraqi lost the ability to have Weapons of Mass Destruction. And so UNSCOM tracked down a lot of leads and visited a bunch of places inside Iraq for several years, looking for evidence of these, and the idea that Iraq hid the massive programs necessary to develop state-of-the-art technologies like that, and produce them in significant quantities, while remaining totally covert seems unlikely.
Back in 2002 I was an intern at a non-proliferation group in Washington DC, and spent some time talking to a (now sadly deceased) MITRE expert on chemical weapons about all of this, but I didn't take more than 1 year of college chemistry so I'm not an expert on the chemistry myself.
Interestingly, it might be true that Saddam Hussein did pivot to fake ones. After the complete destruction of his conventional military in 1991, it seems he decided that the only way to keep Iran or some other unfriendly neighbor from invading him (1) was to convince everyone that he had chemical weapons. This might have applied even to his own generals. I have heard that when US forces were interrogating Iraqi generals after the fall of Baghdad International Airport, they would ask them where were the chemical weapons and General A said that he didn't have any of them, but he was told that General B had them, and General B was sure that General C had them because he knew that he didn't, and General C thought that General A had them. At least, this was a story I heard verbally from someone involved, I've never tracked down the documentation to see if that was real (I was an intern working on non-proliferation before the invasion of Iraq, so I so I knew some people in that world, but pursued a different path and don't know how true this story is).
1: In roughly the same way that he had invaded Iran in 1980 when that country was in disarray after the fall of the Shah. Note that he doesn't seem to have noticed that his invasion was a huge disaster for Iraq, killing huge numbers of people, destroying massive quantities of stuff, going deeply into debt- so much debt that he decided to try and seize Kuwait, bringing the wrath of the United Nations down upon him- and gaining him exactly nothing. The idea that other leaders might be smart enough NOT to do that never seems to have crossed his mind.
Re your last point, there have been many deaths in war caused by overestimating the enemy's intelligence. Or misunderstanding their perspectives and red lines.
"Circumstantial" evidence is often stronger than "direct" evidence. e.g. DNA is almost always "circumstantial", yet more modernly maligned eye witness evidence is "direct".
And please, just don't use * imports. It really doesn't save you much time at the cost of implicit untraceable behavior. If you don't worry about * imports, you don't need to add the __all__ boilerplate to every module.
This article is more about advertising a package called tach, that I suppose tries to add "true" private classes to Python.
But it doesn't actually enforce anything, because you still need to run their tool that checks anything. You could just easily configure your standard linter to enforce this type of thing rather than use a super specialized tool.
A direct benefit of using `__all__` at module A is better intellisense while editing files that imports A, if A has a small intended public API and many internal usage symbols.
I just tried it and at least the autocomplete in IPython appears to ignore __all__ when suggesting possible imports. I haven't tried any other tools' autocompletes.
If module A has a small intended public API, you can structure it no matter how you want to achieve that. You can put those internal symbols behind their own object/class/module if you prefer.
Using `__all__` has one functional consequence, which is `from A import *`. Again, I would avoid * imports entirely, but if you want to try to curb possible downstream problems from users who do indeed use * imports, I would also prefer not defining `__all__` because it's extra boilerplate you have to maintain and can very easily be missed on future updates.
Before I studied math, I always slightly resented imaginary numbers as being "math wankery" and just defined because mathematicians had a compulsion to generalize and define new nonsense because they could, and not because it made any sense to.
On the way to changing my mind, I learned that the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra only works for complex numbers (and not "real" numbers), the beauty and simplicity of rotations in the complex plane, but maybe most convincing to me was a history lesson about quaternions.
Quaternions are an extension of the complex numbers, but they're not typically taught in higher math education these days, which contradicted my resentment that mathematicians were just obsessed with getting more and more abstract and general for the sake of it. Of course, they were in vogue in the 19th century (Maxwell's equations were originally written down using them), but mathematicians soon realized they just weren't as useful or as "nice" philosophically as complex numbers and just about anything you can accomplish with quaternions were better accomplished with vectors of complex numbers.
That story played a big part in persuading me that there really is something special about complex numbers -- that maybe they're the most "natural" or "real" numbers of them all.
Also, note the origin story of the complex numbers:
Contrary to legend, they weren't discovered out of a desire by mathematicians to have roots to all quadratics such as x^2 + 1 = 0. It's perfectly sensible for an equation like that to just lack a solution: this just means the standard parabola never drops below zero. Analogously, if we calculate a rocket's payload mass to Low Earth Orbit and the answer is negative, we don't feel a need to find some deep meaning behind negative mass: we just say the rocket can't get to orbit at all. Simple.
It's cubics for which complex numbers were introduced. Cubics (with real coefficients), unlike quadratics, always have real roots, since one arm goes to +∞ and the other to -∞, so it has to cross the x axis somewhere in between. But when the cubic formula was finally discovered, it had this strange property that you frequently had to take square roots of negative numbers, then add those weird square roots to "regular" numbers, and if you just shut up and calculated, the weird parts would always cancel out and you'd get a "regular" number that solved the original equation. That is, you had to pass through the complex numbers in order to find the real solutions.
While Maxwell's equations certainly can be written with quaternions, they were not originally written that way. Maxwell originally just "wrote them out", meaning component-by-component. He had 20 equations! That's why H is sometimes used for magnetic fields: the electric fields were E, F, and G.
Nowadays we usually write 4 vector equations, or 2 in the language of differential forms.
If you do any electronics or signal processing (digital or analog) at all[1], you stop believing that complex numbers are "math wankery" immediately and embrace them as the only thing that's, uh, real.
You mention the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, I would also add analytic signals. Those are complex by nature, and yet they make so much more sense than real signals ("real" in both senses: non-imaginary and "real world"). In fact, it turns out, real/real world signals are better represented as the sum of two analytic signals.
It's so weird how real numbers, the numbers we consider to be the normal ones, are the special case in a universe that seems to favor complex numbers for the most fundamental things.
[1] Of course also physics in general, but physics can be theoretical, while engineering is almost always rooted in practicality.
The octonions aren’t even associative, making them less “natural” and harder to work with.
But quaternions are quite useful for working with rotations in three dimensions. To be very technical, the unit imaginary quaternions form a double (universal) cover of the rotation group SO(3).
I didn't even know what "Quaternions" were until I started to get into 3D graphics and found that they're often used instead of degrees or radians to avoid camera "gimbal lock".
They held my number hostage for a while after I switched off iPhone. I think it took months for iPhone users to be able to message my number before it actually started reaching me again.
I think there's a lot of truth to the word "hijacking" here.
I don't remember. It was many years ago -- circa 2015. Nevertheless, I'm irritated by the implication that it's the user's responsibility to do this.
At least as recently as last year, I've discovered instances where iPhone users will not have received a message/image (both from me and others in group chat) seemingly randomly.
I really don't like that Apple has managed to sell a prevailing narrative that it's somehow the fault of users who don't buy their expensive hardware that is necessary to use their software that impinges on an open protocol.
> I'm irritated by the implication that it's the user's responsibility to do this
I don't think it's so irritating. When you set up your phone you are prompted to allow iMessage to use the number. If you allow it you'll have to remove it again after you decide to not use it again. Just like you have to cancel a subscription if you don't want to use it any more.
It’s because the server still think iMessage is active with that number, and default to it over SMS. It’s a glitch, but is entirely unrelated to any hijacking. It just comes from the fact that the identifier for iMessage and SMS are identical, and that in some cases the system does not realise iMessages does not work. It is not trying to route SMSes as iMessages or anything like that.
Yes I've seen a few people experience this hell as well. To just call it a UI abstraction is completely detached from reality and how it's implemented.
How long ago was that? There used to be a bug related to that, but disabling iMessage on your device before you switch off would resolve it. Not obvious, I know. I'm unsure if that's still a thing or if I'm even remembering it correctly.
That's definitely a problem. I wasn't claiming it wasn't an issue, I was curious how long ago it happened because I wanted to know if it was the same as the issue I experienced years ago.
I'm getting the impression that the new job I'm starting very soon uses something like this.
Any suggestions on most convenient way to cover up camera when not using it? I've looked at a few "webcam camera slide" products around, but I'm hearing a lot of reports of them cracking the screen of recent Macbook Pros.
AFAIK the only player to have tested positive for COVID in that outbreak is Gleyber Torres (the rest were support staff), who had an actual COVID infection before, which undermines your idea that getting COVID is somehow superior to getting vaccinated.
And as already mentioned, the Yankees received the J&J vaccine, which is not an MRNA vaccine.
Not the best example since there was a severe earthquake in Pompeii in 62 AD. They were still rebuilding in 79 AD when the town was destroyed by Vesuvius.
If they had taken the matter seriously, they'd not have rebuilt there. We know some Romans recognized the mountain as a volcano years before the eruption, but if there were any warnings associated with this recognition, they seem to have gone unheeded.
(Also, earth quakes are/were pretty common throughout Italy. This perhaps contributed to complacency.)
