ScienceNostalgia101

13 hours ago, iNow said:

Unless the defecating animal is sick, then their feces is unlikely to harm the person ingesting it. It’s mostly water, harmless bacteria, undigested food, and some dead cells. 
 

 

Ah. So there's a chance that the bacteria inhaled are harmless? So the characters could've gotten sick if the dog were an asymptomatic carrier to a dangerous pathogen, but it also makes sense that if the dog were healthy enough, the bacteria involved were harmless enough for the characters involved not to gave gotten sick?

Am I to assume then that the issue of hydrogen sulfide/methane inhalation issue is a negligible one?

(Again, I want to be as clear as possible that I do not intend to try this kind of "mixed joint" either way.)

13 hours ago, dimreepr said:

That's just as wrong as the OP, and please explain the best and worst aspects of the USA?

Best: Freedom of speech. I know Europe doesn't hold it as absolutely as the USA does, but it still treats it as an overall guideline. Europe wouldn't coerce retractions from doctors who warned colleagues about new pandemics like China would, or torture someone over "blasphemy" like Saudi Arabia would. By comparison, before Europe adopted American ideals like freedom of speech, it had its own cases of torture over blasphemy.

Worst: The fanatical worship of the free market. America knows it could alleviate a lot of poverty if it embraced Scandinavia-esque unionization policies to protect the working class, and give people something to lose by resorting to welfare or turning to crime; and then they could afford to treat prisoners and welfare recipients better without risking outflow to both crime and the welfare rolls. They just refuse to, because as far as they're concerned, that strategy is somehow more morally reprehensible than causing massive poverty from stubborn refusal to embrace it.

13 hours ago, dimreepr said:

What's traject is, what you said; our best chance is a coordinated global response.

What's funny is, xenophobia is a self imposed siege.

Co-ordination between countries =/= co-ordination among ALL countries. The greater the influence of countries not even accountable to their own citizens, the more tainted is the overall response.

If SARS were a one-off, I could see the merit of continued faith in the W.H.O. But the similarities in failings (at best) between that pandemic out of China and this one suggest the whole thing needs to be replaced with something accountable to, and only influenced by, countries with some modicum of transparency. Cooperation between countries shouldn't require a middleman like the W.H.O. Individual countries make trade deals with other countries. They can make medical co-ordination deals as well.

In 2016, many Americans promised that they would move to Canada if Donald Trump won.

Very few of them followed through on that promise.

Among the ones who didn't, a popular claim was the notion that "Canada's too cold;" a phrase that came to mind this week because Lytton, British Columbia, recently surpassed Las Vegas, Nevada as far as record heat goes. I presume, if people believed Las Vegas wasn't hot enough for them, it wouldn't be profitable to air condition those casinos?

Or was the idea less that the maximum temperatures aren't hot enough, and more that the minimum temperatures are too cold? If so, what of the fact that Vancouver, also in British Columbia, is above freezing even for most of the winter, which is more than can be said for much of the U.S. midwest?

Do people actually have this caricatured version of Canada being incredibly cold, all the time, or is this just fallen back on as an excuse for making promises on which one didn't have a plan to follow through?

I see in police funding an issue analogous to locks on a canal. The raising and lower of the water levels; the opening and closing of the gates; there is a specific order these things have to be done in, in order for the boat to pass safely.

However, in this case we don't know what that order is.

We know Scandinavia achieves better results against crime by tackling its root causes than the US does by resorting to overpolicing. We don't know how the US is going to get there. If we started by raising the minimum wage, there would be pushback from moneyed interests. If we tried to cut police budgets to force those moneyed interest to accept the necessity of raising the minimum wage, crime might increase in the meantime and those moneyed interests might use it as an excuse to raise police budgets even higher than they were before, giving them and others less incentive to care whether or not the poor are turning to crime out of desperation.

. . .

Is there any method to force the issue that WON'T backfire?

On 4/17/2021 at 10:45 AM, swansont said:

So list what, exactly, they got wrong.

And explain why knowing the specifics of how the virus got out would have made an impact on how the world responded to it; please stop dodging this question.

Forgot about this thread until very recently.

How people react isn't just based on perceived "expertise," but also on perceived intelligence and perceived honest. People consider pollsters experts on polling, but that doesn't mean they trust them, especially after multiple catastrophic failures reflected poorly on either their methodology or their sincerity in their interpretation of the results; it's unclear which.

A similar thing, if to a lesser extent, is now happening to the life sciences as to the social sciences. A decision not to blindly trust the "experts" but to examine which fields, and which groups of "experts" within these fields are to be trusted, with the perverse incentives taken into account, and the apparent effects thereof examined in light of the evidence by all of us, not just by other scientists who may have all sorts of untold unforeseen incentives to close ranks.

We see this with the World Health Organization. Instead of blindly accepting their "expertise" we see them making the same "mistakes" with this as they did with SARS and are not sure whether to question their judgment or their integrity, but know that it reflects poorly on any conclusion coming out of them in the future.

And in my opinion, it's about time.

Is this concept worth its own thread or no?

On 3/21/2020 at 1:05 AM, CharonY said:

I would exclude Japan from the list for now. They have a very low testing rate and it is unclear whether it is well contained or not. With regard to 5) a key element is that many (if not all) of these countries had a task force established in the wake of SARS. Those have become a central coordination centers for tracking, stockpiling of supplies and so on.

What really annoys me is the fact is that while the epidemic raged in China, folks just looked on. It appears that folks still do not understand the concept of globalization. Just because their country dodged the bullet so far, does not make them immune. There were three months during which preparations could have been done, but apparently folks just started to realize it could hit them after Italy. 

Millions of Americans voted for Trump because of his anti-globalization rhetoric. They simply could not have believed that his ability (and/or willingness) to turn back the tide of globalization fell THAT severely short of his promises. Especially when SARS' travel to the western world was comparatively limited in 2003; ironically, at a time when anti-globalization rhetoric didn't seem to be as quite as intense quite as often.

What's funny is, if no one ever left their home country, and/or if every other country cut off all trade and travel with China indefinitely (which they should have if only because of its human rights violations within its own borders) this disease would have been limited to China anyway, and millions of lives would have been saved. If the instant word of the pandemic broke all travellers who had been to China since December of 2019 were quarantined, the pandemic's spread would have at least slowed down, if not been contained. Globalization is one of the very few issues on which I (partly) agree with Trump supporters.

...whose idea was it to conduct ANY kind of medical research in the same country known for gutter oil and tainted baby formula?

Question: Does funding a regime that censors media outlets by bombing them constitute being a de facto accomplice in censorship? Is the USA violating its own laws in that sense?

It's going to be political anyway, no matter what we do. Private-sector science is subordinate to its funders. Public-sector science is subordinate to voters at best, politicians' campaign contributors at worst. No matter how you conduct it there will always be perverse incentives to come to whatever conclusion helps you keep your job, just like there is with every other walk of life.

What we really need to incentivize isn't "neutrality" (which it's doubtful is objectively definable anyway) so much as honesty. Honesty about ways in which you break free from the left-right false dichotomy is a good start. For instance, one can despise Trump and still support the lab leak hypothesis; Bill Maher is a prime example of this.

What bothers me especially is the World Health Organization. The more funding it relies upon from more countries, the more biases are blended together. Shouldn't science be more individualized and competitive than that, so that we can better distinguish the effects of one funder's biases from the effects of those of another?

I mean, many African countries that are predominantly Christian aren't as wealthy as, let's say, Qatar or the UAE. It's partly down to luck (Qatar and the UAE lucked into having a lot of oil revenue per citizen) and partly down to resource management (they didn't have their oil exploited by corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens to the same extent as, let's say, Nigeria) with the ill effects of religion (how many western lives could have been saved by embryonic stem cell research if Christianity didn't get in the way?) being only one of many factors.

Islam might be slightly worse than Christianity, in and of itself, but I think it's down to chance that the countries that sprung forth freedom and prosperity happened to have a lot of Christians. The founding fathers of the USA ranged from atheists to "secular first, Christian second" so whatever achievements in freedom and prosperity flowed back into Europe were in spite of their Christianity, not because of it.

That and the slavery aspect too, but that alone is inadequate to explain western prosperity when Europe adopted the best aspects of the USA and rejected (most of) the worst ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuYeQi4wB_k#t=2m40s

So I was recently thinking about this Cheech and Chong scene in which the characters smoke a joint in which cannabis is mixed with dog feces, presumably because the screenwriters were going for cheap shock value. In real life, though, wouldn't this risk causing them to inhale aerosolized fecal matter, and in turn, causing them to inhale all the pathogens contained within it? Or would the heat from the flames kill the pathogens on their way into the individual's lungs? Even if this kills the pathogens, would this still risk causing inhalation of non-trivial amounts of hydrogen sulfide and/or methane? (Disclaimer: For the record, I do not intend to attempt this and I would not recommend anyone else attempt this, because eww, let alone possible safety concerns.)

And if so, would any telescope pointed at the moon be, in turn, de facto surveillance of any position on the face of the Earth? (For good or for ill; anyone looking to misuse this technology would probably come up with it independent of our discussion so best we discuss whether it'd work before we come to any conclusions on whether it'd be something that'd need to be stopped if useful.)

I ask this because I was recently thinking about this involving their counterpart in the form of concave mirrors:

Which while the image quality isn't ideal, one can still get a rough idea of what is going on in the reflected image.

I'm trying to picture how anyone looking to do this would achieve it on a larger scale. Melting moon rock until gravity forces it into a spherical shape? And if that isn't reflective enough on its own, shipping aluminum foil or some other reflective material into space until its trajectory lays it onto the surface of the moon? Would the kind of chemical reactions that deposit silver evenly work in an environment without oxygen? If so how many microns thick would the silver layer need to be in order to reflect light? Would this be too prohibitively expensive for any corporation and/or government to think worth it?

So one of my pet peeves back when I was into image editing is that in trying to stack images of different aspect ratios vertically such that they'd have the same width; or juxtapose them horizontally such that they'd have the same height; it was always a long, drawn-out game of guess and check to get it right, or at least close enough to right that I could crop it from there. (For the record, I'm referring to Cracked.com, where the combined width in question had to be equal to or fewer than 550 pixels, and the combined height equal to or fewer than 750, rather than outright shrinking one down to and only down to the width or height of the other. Cracked.com is no longer doing image editing contests, but now it's more a matter of curiosity.)

Speaking of guessing, I'm guessing there must be some mathematical formula that helps one figure this out more efficiently but I'm not even sure where to start on figuring out what that is. Does anyone have any ideas where to start on figuring this one out?

WARNING: Vulgar language in above video.

According to the (otherwise loosely) based on a true story movie Wolf Of Wall Street, quaaludes were invented as a sedative for housewives with sleep disorders. I don't doubt that there's a lot of work to being a house-spouse, but of all the things they had to worry about, I would think sleeping at the right time would be the least of their worries; people with scheduled jobs need to sleep certain hours so they can work other hours, but wouldn't a house-spouse's schedule be flexible enough that one wouldn't need to do as many tasks at specific times of day so long as they get done later in the day (or night if need be)?

I don't mean to be insensitive here; I'm guessing there are at least a few house-spouses out there who do have sleep disorders for reasons I've failed to account for; just a little curious why the one walk of life you'd think had among the fewest reasons for sleep disorders would be the one for whom a specific sedative would be invented.

The dishwasher, after it has ran, is a warm, humid environment.

The cupboard, or at least most cupboards most of the time, is comparatively cool and dry. Yet in my hometown I recall often taking glasses and coffee cups straight out of the dishwasher immediately after it has ran and placing them inverted in the cupboard, without ever noticing any dew forming inside of them. (Though since living on my own, I've given them some time to dry out before putting them away just in case.)

How does this happen? Does water vapour concentration between the surface of the glass or mug immediately decrease to approximately that of the surroundings within the seconds it takes to place it in the cupboard? If said surroundings were were humid than the cupboard, would dew THEN form in the class or mug? Would it form more quickly in some glass where infrared rays could pass through the glass, or would it form more quickly in some mug where the infrared output of the surface would be proportional to its internal temperature, and infrared transfer toward it that of the external?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JslxPjrMzqY#t=6m23s

This video makes a distinction between liquid CO2 vapour, and CO2 as a gas, in the context of describing both of them coexisting in the same location. Is there any meaningful distinction between the two, or did the video creator just misspeak?

On 4/13/2021 at 7:13 PM, John Cuthber said:

So, we dismiss Trump out of hand - because he was so wrong about lots of things.
And, on that basis- we know that his views are often wrong.

So, for example, since he didn't like the WHO, we can reasonably deduce the the WHO is probably a good thing.

A stopped clock can be right twice a day; I wouldn't expect a ball to fall upwards just because Trump said it would fall down.

With the World Health Organization, people seem to be expecting more than a stopped clock of it. People turn to it for international cooperation on medical issues, even though individual countries can form a variety of alliances, issue by issue, without having tor rely on an institution that made a very similar set of mistakes (at best) twice in a row for two new diseases coming out of China decades apart.

Fair enough, then, I wasn't expecting them to charge differently for the same products.

But even by swansont's own ratio, that still makes the case for at least $13/hr, which is significantly more than the $7.25 the US currently federally has.

Of course, Biden campaigned on more than that. Either there is a net economic benefit to raising it further than that, or there is a net political detriment to opposing that, even when corporate donors to political campaigns have a vested interest in paying their employees less.

8 minutes ago, swansont said:

I’m sure that’s an answer to a question, but it’s not an answer to my question.

Yes, it is. It really is. If the World Health Organization keeps making the same mistakes (at best) over and over again, that reflects poorly on their credibility, while reflecting relatively better on those with the more accurate predictions early on about what the World Health Organization was getting right or wrong.

Quote

I made this analogy in the above thread, but I feel it hasn't adequately been addressed. I have since invoked the things social sciences have gotten wrong as a case against them, but such points have been dismissed out of hand.

Quite frankly, I feel like it's a valid analogy. I'd like to add... if an undergraduate degree in sociology doesn't make you as employable as an undergraduate degree in engineering, doesn't that reflect poorly on either the service sociology is willing to offer, or on the customers' willingness to pay for "expert" opinions on it?

1 hour ago, swansont said:

I fail to see how this informs a pandemic strategy. Is the strategy different in the three cases? (leak, natural, don’t know) What do you do differently?

You listen to the people who have a pattern of being right, and dismiss out of hand the people who have a pattern of being wrong.

But the point wasn't about how high fast food wages "needed" to be, it was about how high they "could" be. If fast food companies, after all their other expenditures, can still afford to pay $15/hr and still turn a profit in Sweden, they can do so in the USA. Being on the other side of the Atlantic doesn't change the way the same fast food company's food is made.

4 hours ago, swansont said:

To what end? What changes if we determine an outcome like natural outbreak or accidental release from a lab studying the virus?

We will have a clearer picture of who tends to be right and who tends to be wrong.

This doesn't tell us whether the latter was due to incompetence or malice, of course, but putting aside what they have different, what they have in common is that we know there's more where that came from and can extrapolate it into how they'll handle other matters.

Also, sending in spies might buy us more time to determine where the next pandemic will come from so we'll have more time to implement our pandemic strategies next time. We did this for Iraq, least we could do is do the same for a country that has already gotten more people killed through this pandemic than Iraq did during the first Gulf War.

3 hours ago, swansont said:

It would depend on the cost of living, wouldn’t it? It’s more expensive to live in Denmark; you might conclude that wages would be necessarily be higher there for similar jobs

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Denmark/United-States/Cost-of-living

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. I thought your only qualm was with me generalizing about Scandinavia or extrapolating union pressure results to regulation. At least now we have something that could theoretically apply just as much to regulation as to unions.

Anyway, if it raises the cost of living, so be it. I get paid more to sit on my ass at my job than these people are paid to cook on their feet. I'm not entitled to a lower cost of living at the expense of putting people who work harder than I do into poverty.

But even if that is what this is about, the people objecting to a $15/hr minimum wage should just say so outright, instead of pretending a wage hike would get these workers fired.