. . . if the ticket was purchased in the UK, perhaps cheaper. If purchased in Taiwan, unfortunately not so much.
Guy
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Iâve never had an issue with US border agents in airports. Theyâve all been friendly and quick.
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Whatâs wrong with Gattaca?
Itâs been a long time since I seen the movie but I think itâs basically discrimination based on your genes. I think your job is assigned based on what your genetic property is.
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Yeah, thatâs the scenario right now for EVA flights between Taiwan and Canada. Starting a flight in Canada is a lot cheaper than starting a flight in Taiwan - YVR-TPE-YVR is a little more than 50% the cost of TPE-YVR-TPE. (Pre-COVID thatâs usually what I got - a return starting in Vancouver in August, and flying back the following July.)
No idea if itâs COVID related, but those EVA flights also no longer have premium economy - just business class and regular economy. This may mean I fly China Airlines for the first time in a couple of decades.
Oops, I guess this should all be moved to ⌠I dunno ⌠travel during COVID, I guess?
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Completely out of topic: they have already built a functional tricorder.
Carry on COVID
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What does it mean? I guess itâs just some geeky cosplay thing with a working screen?
I havenât watched Star Trek in years, but my recollection is that the tricorder is something you can, say, point at a rock and declare that itâs 33% dilithium or whatever, or determine the composition, properties, etc. of some arbitrary material.
Thatâs waaay away from whatâs currently technologically possible, outside of some really specific applications (testing for drug/explosive residues at airports, for instance).
I think sheâs referring to that little medical gadget that Dr McCoy waves over people to diagnose whatâs wrong with them, and occasionally to fix them up too. I donât recall that it ever had a name.
You probably could make an actual âtricorderâ, as long as you didnât mind it being the size of a wheelbarrow. There are quite clever portable instruments that use IR spectrometry to analyse the reflectance from things that you point at, and of course you could add different analysis modules all operating in parallel - I used to work for a company that made compact mass spectrometers - to widen the range of possible stuff it could do. Maybe the word âtricorderâ was supposed to refer to a instrument that analyses things with three different physical measurements.
Weâre really getting a bit off-topic now. 
But according to Wikipedia the âtri-â refers to âthe three functions of sensing, recording, and computingâ.
Apparently this is a âmedical tricorderâ because it has âa detachable hand-held high-resolution scanner stored in a compartment of the tricorder when not in useâ. Thatâs definitely a long way off⌠(âDonât worry, itâs just trapped wind. But the radiation from the tricorder has probably given you cancer, so Iâd watch out for that.â)
I know you can do clever stuff for really specific applications, say, using various hyphenated mass spectrometry techniques coupled with some automated peak assignment software. I assume itâs also possible to do similar things using other spectroscopic techniques - pointing different types of electromagnetic radiation at stuff and measuring what comes back, then automating the analysis to some extent (I guess instruments like that are used in astronomy/space exploration).
But AFAIK all of this relies on knowing roughly what youâre looking at and choosing the appropriate thing(s) to measure. As I remember, the tricorder was something you could just point at pretty much anything and get an instant, automatically generated answer about what it was and its molecular composition or whatever. Thatâs the thing Iâm saying is way off. Not to mention the size, as you said.
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Well, I dunno. Even all those years ago (90s) I proposed to the management that we could build neural networks into our products to perform various kinds of classification on peak data (they werenât interested - itâs commonplace these days). Computing power and memory is just ludicrously cheap these days, so although there are a lot of physical subtleties, particularly with IR, you could probably cover enough common scenarios to get fairly close to the Star Trek ideal. Itâd certainly be fun to try.
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Cowards.
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Itâs pointless discussing it. They will maintain nonsensical measures for any nonsensical reason for as long as they see fit. Possible forever.
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other countries such as South Korea waited until cases were much lower before they relaxed their quarantine rules.
From the article
Always following. Weak.
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Subvariants are here for ever.
Chuang replied by pointing out that Taiwan is still adding over 30,000 cases per day, while other countries such as South Korea waited until cases were much lower before they relaxed their quarantine rules.
Okay wait hang on. When we had almost no cases, the quarantine was strict because we didnât want to let it in. But now we canât further relax quarantine because we have too many cases? Surely that makes quarantine less important?
I feel like when cases get low enough, theyâll say âwe canât relax quarantine because the cases would go up againâ.
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Yup exactly. Pointless endless mulling and shifting goalposts, storyline and claiming special Taiwanese characteristics.
This mentality has tipped me towards looking to other places to move to now
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The medical tricorder has been in development for a few years now.
Of course we havenât yet gotten a tricorder as versatile as the show one but we are getting there. If you think that actually even transporter tech is in the works, we are not so far away. I read this a while back but Iâll try to get the link.
It is something Star Trek groups like to share: how real tech development is eventually catching up.
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I keep an eye out on cases abroad and currently the graphs are intersecting: Taiwanâs is going down, West up.
This summer travel will beâŚcomplicated.
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âWe have no idea what weâre doing and just making it up as we go alongâ.
If they had a roadmap and stuck to it, instead of making ad hoc decisions and then justifying them with spurious reasons they pulled out of the committeeâs rectum, theyâd actually make their own jobs a whole lot easier and less stressful - they wouldnât be sitting there paralyzed with fear (over their own jobs) and dreaming up silly excuses, because theyâd have a concrete plan for what action A ought to occur under circumstances B, and the public would be aware of that plan.
I hope the world learns one lesson from this: if you put epidemiologists in charge of running the planet, nothing gets addressed except epidemiology problems.
Taiwan almost certainly has its own local dominant variant, but they donât seem concerned about the possibility of exporting it elsewhere, and nobody else seems bothered about the possibility of importing it.
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Itâs only complicated because they make it complicated. Every other country except for China (who we definitely shouldnât be emulating) has opened up. âOh, cases are up? We have to stay closed so the health system doesnât get overloaded.â âOh, cases are down? We have to stay closed so this new sub-variant canât get in.â This is just another bullshit excuse.
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