tingilinde

and the stars came out

The all-sky camera at the Gemini South telescope in Chile during Sunday's lunar eclipse.  Note how the stars come out when the moon darkens.

 

the most christo-racist state

A half dozen are fighting it out for the title, but Idaho may be the furthest along. 

 

 

fox news and the republican party

Basically the same thing.  Matt Gertz (not the pediophile Republican from Florida) makes the case. (longish)

 

 

spillovers

An important part of preventing future epidemics and pandemics. 

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Spillover events, in which a pathogen that originates in animals jumps into people, have probably triggered every viral pandemic that’s occurred since the start of the twentieth century1. What’s more, an August 2021 analysis of disease outbreaks over the past four centuries indicates that the yearly probability of pandemics could increase several-fold in the coming decades, largely because of human-induced environmental changes2.

Fortunately, for around US$20 billion per year, the likelihood of spillover could be greatly reduced3. This is the amount needed to halve global deforestation in hotspots for emerging infectious diseases; drastically curtail and regulate trade in wildlife; and greatly improve the ability to detect and control infectious diseases in farmed animals.

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happy syttende mai

The 17th of May - Happy Syttende Mai to Norwegian friends!

 

a covid-19 exit strategy

Eric Topel's op-ed

Good luck funding that, given the division and lack of trust in the country

 

 

if china lifted their zero covid policy

It wouldn't be good considering how few of the elderly are vaccinated.  An article in Nature.

It's a Chinese paper and seems to be biding for time while mitigation efforts can be put in place.  That seems to be a stretch considering the lack of an effective Chinese Omicron vaccine and antivirals. 

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Having adopted a dynamic zero-COVID strategy to respond to SARS-CoV-2 variants with higher transmissibility since August 2021, China is now considering whether and for how long this policy can remain in place. The debate has thus shifted towards the identification of mitigation strategies for minimizing disruption to the healthcare system in the case of a nationwide epidemic. To this aim, we developed an age-structured stochastic compartmental susceptible-latent-infectious-removed-susceptible (SLIRS) model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission calibrated on the initial growth phase for the 2022 Omicron outbreak in Shanghai, to project COVID-19 burden (i.e., number of cases, patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care, and deaths) under hypothetical mitigation scenarios. The model also considers age-specific vaccine coverage data, vaccine efficacy against different clinical endpoints, waning of immunity, different antiviral therapies, and non-pharmaceutical interventions. We find that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6-times the existing capacity and causing approximately 1.55 million deaths. However, we also estimate that protecting vulnerable individuals by ensuring accessibility to vaccines and antiviral therapies, and maintaining implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions could be sufficient to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system, suggesting that these factors should be points of emphasis in future mitigation policies.

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31°C

The maximum wet-bulb temperature to which humans can adapt is much lower than thought.  And this is for healthy young people.

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Wet-bulb temperature is read by a thermometer with a wet wick over its bulb and is affected by humidity and air movement. It represents a humid temperature at which the air is saturated and holds as much moisture as it can in the form of water vapor; a person’s sweat will not evaporate at that skin temperature.

But in their new study, the researchers found that the actual maximum wet-bulb temperature is lower — about 31°C wet-bulb or 87°F at 100% humidity — even for young, healthy subjects. The temperature for older populations, who are more vulnerable to heat, is likely even lower.

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on mass shootings

White supremacy and the "great replacement" explained by  Kathleen Below of the U of Chicago

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It can be Muslims in France, and it can be Mexican Americans in the United States, or African Americans. Can you talk a little bit about that?

It allows an opportunism in selecting enemies so that you can tack to the scapegoat of a particular time and place, but it also follows the central motivating logic, which is to protect the thing on the inside, regardless of the enemy on the outside. It’s about the fundamental importance of the preservation and birth rate of the white race. So the elements that are consistent across time are the idea that the white race can be threatened by intermixing and the idea that there is some kind of evil, élite force interested in eradicating it.

It’s not just about passive demographic change, and the news stories we see pretty often about when a county or a city or the nation will no longer be majority white. It’s about an apocalyptic threat perpetrated by what these conspiracists think of as a cabal. They see, for instance, abortion as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see residential integration as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see feminism as a scheme to keep white women out of the home and lower the white birth rate.

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Here's Heather Cox Richardson's look at the American history of replacement.

Snip

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With the federal government holding them to account for their racist attacks on Black Americans, southern white supremacists began to argue that their objections to Black equality were actually about voting. By 1871, they argued that Black men voted for leaders who promised roads and hospitals and schools. Those social investments would require tax levies, and since the Black population was poor almost by definition after enslavement, those taxes would fall almost entirely on the white men who owned property. In this telling, Black voting was essentially a redistribution of wealth from those with money to those without, from white men to Black men. It was socialism.

White supremacists began to say that they objected to Black voting and to the governments Black people elected not on racial grounds, but on economic ones. They promised to “redeem” the South from the profligate state governments that they said were bleeding tax dollars out of white landowners to provide services for the poor, generally characterized as Black, although there was no racial monopoly on poverty in the post–Civil War South.

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rotterdam to amsterdam

capitulation

Eric Topol on where we are with Covid.

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the CDC propagates delusional thinking that community levels are very low (as my friend Peter Hotez called the “field of greens”) while the real and important data convey that transmission is very high throughout most of the country. Not only does this further beget cases by instilling false confidence, but it is conveniently feeding the myth that the pandemic is over—precisely what everyone wants to believe.

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don't be a sucker

I"ve posted this several times..  it's even more relevant now than it was in 1947 .. or even a few years ago

a mathematician's cancer

Hannah Fry has made a video on dealing with her cancer.  It's going to be shown in the UK shown and the claim is it's unique and terrific.  (she's a great math communicator)  Here's a piece on it. (I don't subscribe and was kept out by a paywall on my desktop, but it worked on my phone..  your mileage may vary)

 

ah baseball

Always something controversial - this time it's the ball's grip.

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Generations of big leaguers have played with baseballs that are sewn by hand with leather that is a product of its own distinct environment. The baseballs have never been identical. But thanks to the widespread availability of spin rate, exit velocity and ball flight data, this generation of big leaguers knows exactly how much those inconsistencies impact performance.

If the seams are lower than usual and a pitcher snaps off a curveball with a slightly lower spin rate than average and that curveball gets hit, was it the pitcher? Or was it the ball? How much should a pitcher be expected to adapt to the ball versus working around it?

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the private putin

The wall around something he's focused on protecting is beginning to crumble.

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Mr. Putin is more than just a protective father who, as he has said, wanted to give his daughters a normal life and considered their safety a matter of national security. A former K.G.B. operative steeped in the agency’s ways of subterfuge, disinformation and the Janus-like ability to present different selves depending on the situation, he has shrouded his personal life in secrecy and wrapped it in rumor.

He has two officially recognized daughters from his first marriage, but according to independent Russian news outlets and unverified international news reports, he may have four more children with two other women. Yet even his acknowledged daughters, now approaching middle age, are so hidden as to be unrecognizable on a Moscow street. His former wife, whom some biographers believe he married to improve his chances of entering the bachelor-resistant K.G.B., essentially vanished from view even before they divorced.

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