Peter den Haan

AI | quantum | physics | theology | running | books.
Sometimes it's more important to love than to always get it right.
Follow ≠ endorsement. @drpdh.bsky.social

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@Elainebks @asda That's precisely the one thing I wanted. A thousand forms of beetroot I cannot use but simple raw, fresh beetroot is not available.

Just processed products.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

Couple of weeks ago I bought beetroot @asda. Today I wanted to do so again and found: beetroot in vinegar, sliced beetroot (with sweeteners!), chilli infused beetroot, cooked beetroot, salad with beetroot, beetroot juice, cakes...

But you no longer have actual simple beetroot?

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@MikeyCycling @VronP7 Anti-cycling sentiment is rife today.

If he'd stuck to to the middle of the road because of parked cars, motorists would be fuming that he was holding up traffic and should get out of the way.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@dracomalfoy2016 @MikeyCycling Dutch driving instructors teach you to always open your door with the opposite hand. This habit naturally causes you to turn your body, at which point you'll spot anything that's in the mirror's dead angle.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@dracomalfoy2016 @MikeyCycling I thought your response was satire.

I now worry that you are actually serious. Dude, if you fling a barrier into a traffic lane, it's your responsibility to check first that there's no traffic.

If your mirrors don't give you the view you need to do so safely, use your neck.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@archer_rs It's even more dangerous for motorcyclists. Being doored can completely destroy your leg.

I was taught to keep distance from parked cars for that reason. But cyclists, who motorists impatiently expect to "get out of the way", do not generally have that luxury.

[IntegralAnswers @IntegralAnswers]

HIV treatment has evolved from lifelong viral suppression to the first real proof that cure may be biologically possible.

Here’s the scientific path from the Berlin Patient to today’s gene-editing and CAR-T trials. 🧵

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@RinseHold @JimGray96309675 @AntonSpisak The name doesn't matter. The direction of travel of the EEC was already abundantly clear and a topic of lively debate in politics and media in the runup to the 1975 referendum. There is a wealth of contemporaneous evidence to back up that assertion, too.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@Eddystone506 @Trayset @AndyatAuto @DailyMail Physics PhD here.

I am also very curious, these novel phenomena may well be Nobel worthy if corroborated.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@veyron_fan @TheRealJamieKay Umm, the point is precisely that the law (the 1951 Convention and the subsequent jurisprudence) does NOT stipulate that.

Maybe it should, but that's a different discussion. Worth noting here that the overwhelming majority of refugees stay in neighbouring countries.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@MPBazzthethird @TheRealJamieKay It was a simple statement of objective fact. The fact that it is "silly" to you merely demonstrates how divorced you are from reality.

Dream on.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@MPBazzthethird @TheRealJamieKay We returned hundreds a year. A more reasonable critique would be that more were returned to us than the other way around.

France receives significantly more asylum claims per capita than the UK, so "none of them claimed asylum anywhere else" is completely divorced from reality.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@SwampWatch70364 @TheRealJamieKay Nonsense. There were hundreds of transfer per year; these numbers are a matter of public record. https://t.co/mlQUe8wf2N

It is also true that we left Dublin as part of Brexit. "Leftie" has nothing to do with it.

A substantive critique is that we received more than we returned.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@GaryWashbourne @TheRealJamieKay Much as it pains me to say it, this critique is justified.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@veyron_fan @TheRealJamieKay The French receive more asylum claims per capita than the UK does. So your statement lacks any basis in objective reality. Don't trust what the tabloids tell you.

[Peter den Haan @revpdh]

@gromit77 @TheRealJamieKay The asylum claims system exists to assess that. And according to that system, the significant majority of claims turns out to be genuine.

[Combat_Clips @Combat_Clipss]

German WWI veteran describes killing a French corporal during a bayonet charge and articulates his view on war as a whole

[BURKOV @burkov]

Today, neural network distillation is a technique that drives all commercially successful LLMs. Modern inference speed and low cost would be impossible without distillation.

Authored by Google's Geoffrey Hinton, Oriol Vinyals, and Jeff Dean, the paper was rejected by the reviewers at NIPS 2014 (now NeurIPS) as "unlikely to have a significant impact."

The paper was published on arXiv and has gotten more than 30,000 citations.

Learn from this foundational paper on ChapterPal: https://t.co/WGDibzk3xE

PDF: https://t.co/1SyoQiqeaJ

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Sex-specific gene expression of the human brain, for >3,000 genes (of our ~20,000 total)
@ScienceMagazine
https://t.co/jQUFgARmuA