Definitely agree that the vaccine development has been a huge success. Just wondering about (what appears to me to be) slack in the process that could be removed. Another commenter suggests that the drug companies and the FDA are already in close communication including trial data.
I guess I'm left wondering why you wrote a whole post of your own to ask questions that you could have answered by searching for the large amount of information that is already out there about this process, possibly the most-closely-tracked vaccine development process in history. But hey, it's a free internet, more or less.
Trial design and trial data are shared with the FDA underway during an ordinary drug or device trial. But applications subject to FDA Fast-Track authorization processes also undergo "rolling review" where portions of the new drug application are reviewed as they are partially complete. This has narrowed the set of action items that remain.
I'm sure a lot of people are staying up late as the EUA applications come in, and skimming the documents and working to identify remaining weaknesses that can be proactively addressed. But sometime in this, they need to get a good night's sleep, and begin meticulously going through the document and make sure the remaining, necessary (i.e. not waived) conditions for emergency use approval are met.
There's more information on the process with Europe's regulator, because they're a bit less tight-lipped than the FDA. But data sharing (particularly on adverse events) has been continually happening throughout many jurisdictions and we should see approvals in a similar timeframe between Europe and the US.
I'm seeing that Pfizer and Moderna are participating in a rolling review in Europe, but I haven't yet found anything about that in the US. Is it automatically part of the Fast Track program?
Sure, the application is an "atomic event" in both Europe and the US, even if data has been previously shared and technical assistance from the regulator has been previously offered.
In the end, regulators need to give an emergency authorization or not, based on information at a certain point in time, which is also an atomic event.
I couldn't figure this out at the time, but a potential explanation seems obvious to me now.
I think this may have been because the wheel starts accelerating from a particular point. To optimize distance traveled, it's better to have more acceleration up front. Shorter spokes means more acceleration. For the overall wheel, the spoke length is normalized, but it makes sense that the optimization would set the starting spoke shorter.
I should randomize the starting angle of the wheel and see if that fixes it.
I'm surprised to see that I didn't discuss this in the blog post. You're right, I should have.
It doesn't take the vertical movement of the car into account directly, but that cosine term in the force does mean that having to raise the car (or lower the car) saps it of effective torque.
Also, the wheel spoke lengths are normalized, so the wheel can't grow or shrink overall.
I intended to extend this to non-flat surfaces, but never got around to it. Wanted to input that rolling-square cycloidish shape and see if I find a square wheel as optimal. I should give it a go.
