On the subject in the title: Spreadsheets: an appreciation Working notes rather than a conclusion.
A methods question rather than a substantive one, about spreadsheets.
Everyone quotes the same figure and I cannot find anyone who says how it was arrived at. That is not an accusation; it usually means the derivation is somewhere obvious and I have missed it.
Lounge-level thought to close on: the measure of this place is that being wrong in public here is cheap. That is a design decision and it took work.
The arithmetic on spreadsheets is the easy part and it is where the errors are, which is an uncomfortable combination. Show your working and someone will catch it.
Second-hand on spreadsheets, so weight it accordingly — someone whose method I trust told me this and I have not verified it myself.
Mildly off-topic appreciation: whoever maintains the storage-conditions document has kept it current through three revisions without ever overstating what the underlying data supports. That is hard.
The strongest argument against my own position on spreadsheets, stated as well as I can state it, since nobody else has yet.
Distinguishing three things in the spreadsheets discussion that keep getting used interchangeably: the observation, the proposed mechanism, and the recommendation that gets attached to both.
Politics and public policy: healthcare policy that affects access to these compounds is relevant here. Partisan politics is not.
The rule of thumb is fine; the edge cases are where it earns its keep.
Spreadsheets sits at the boundary between what this community can usefully discuss and what it cannot, and I think it falls on the discussable side, narrowly.
I think the spreadsheets question is answerable and has not been answered, which is a more optimistic position than most of this thread.
Saving this. It is the version I will quote when the question comes round again.
Community norms: if you want to discuss how the community should work (not moderation decisions, which go in Meta) the Lounge is a place for that casual discussion.
I have said this before in a thread nobody could find, so it is worth repeating.
Small methodological point on spreadsheets: repeating a measurement is cheap and resolves most of what is being argued about here at no cost to anyone.
Two sentences on spreadsheets and then I will stop, because the rest is speculation and the thread is better without mine.
What is documented is narrow. What is inferred from it is broad. The gap between them is where every argument here lives.
Agreed, and the corollary is that a place with no visible corrections is not a place with fewer errors.
A qualification I should have led with rather than closed on.
Spreadsheets: I would want to see the raw numbers rather than the summary before agreeing. Summaries lose exactly the information that would settle this.
Mildly off-topic appreciation: whoever maintains the storage-conditions document has kept it current through three revisions without ever overstating what the underlying data supports. That is hard.
This is the version I would want a new member to read first.
An observation about spreadsheets that I cannot explain and am posting anyway, on the principle that unexplained observations are more useful public than private.
No disagreement from me. Posting only so the question does not look ignored.
Spreadsheets has a well-known answer and a correct answer, and the interesting work is establishing that they are the same. Nobody has done that here yet.