TheVat

Officials at the World Health Organization said Wednesday that it strongly opposes booster shots for all adults in rich countries because the boosters will not help slow down the pandemic. By diverting doses away from unvaccinated people, booster shots will help drive the emergence of more dangerous mutants, say the WHO doctors. "I'm afraid that this [booster recommendation] will only lead to more variants.... And perhaps we're heading into an even more dire situation," says WHO chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaninathan. The problem with a call for boosters, she says, is that the virus is primarily circulating in unvaccinated people — not in the fully vaccinated. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/18/1028941909/why-a-push-for-boosters-could-make-the-pandemic-even-worse I imagine if I was in that tiny percentage of the populace that is most vulnerable and would benefit from the booster, I might not want a third shot at the cost of dire global consequences. In any case, I'm skeptical of Biden's assertion that the US can do this without diverting doses away from the unvaxxed. Report to moderator http://forums.escapefromelba.com/Themes/core/images/ip.gif 75.76.164.18

Some Afghans were always going to welcome the Taliban back, because they saw them (in spite of the oppression) as inherently less corrupt than any civil government. Taliban is the Pashto word for "students, " and refers to them all being raised in the madrassa system and its very disciplined (ascetic, really, to a western eye) approach to life. For Pashtuns generally, who are about fifty percent of Afghans, Taliban rule means more Pashtun power. For many men, I suspect the conservative (Wahhabi) ideology is sold in terms of better job prospects emerging when all women are forced from their present jobs (as has already begun, per the NYT, in major cities) and vacancies need filling. Basically, most ordinary people there aren't concerned with big-picture stuff, like how great western secular government might maybe possibly someday be. Poor nations are full of poor people who have poor people priorities. And there may also be a bit of that Trumpian effect, where someone publicly deplores a regressive policy but has privately been thinking that way. Just as Trump openly promised to take us back to 1953, and expressed white nationalist sentiments that had secretly been held by many, so perhaps the Taliban also resonate with many Muslim citizens who have publicly professed moderate and progressive leanings without, erm, total sincerity. Some are genuinely concerned about women's rights, including I'd imagine most women, which may explain why the Taliban spokesmen are telling happy stories about the New Improved Softer emirate they're bringing. It'll be interesting to see if any of that is real -- one could hope that students fresh from the madrassa in the 90s are now older and wiser. Sending women home suggests maybe not all that wise. Maybe not chopping off your hands for swiping an orange is the best that can be expected. (I copy/pasted this from myself, but for some reason the text editor here insists on altering the font and making it look sort of like a quote. Not sure what that's about. )

If you have a species with selective advantage in a large brain, then a lot of neural development has to happen in utero, in order to get a large brain. The brain has to be somewhat prepared for perception and learning when it emerges from the womb, for a variety of reasons you can probably figure out. One example is the bonding with the parents. Another issue is bipedalism. To achieve that, narrower hips are needed. If we had stayed quadrupeds, squeezing out those bigheaded babies would have been much easier. Also bear in mind neurons are extremely specialized cells that don't have time or resources to replicate themselves.

I'm having trouble following this (and wondering where the average human body weighs 60 kg... are you writing this from the Kalahari, or a fashion runway in Milan??). Are you suggesting that all people have the same sized joints? A slightly-built person carrying a heavy boulder is not analogous to, say, a heavily-built Swedish peasant just carrying himself, even if the knee loads are the same. Any load that you didn't grow into, and which is somewhat cantilevered out from your body's core, will obviously stress the knees more. We're descended from fairly lean hunter-gatherers, and our joints evolved to handle the loads imposed by our lean body mass reached around ages 15-20. And there's a little extra, for sudden acceleration and deceleration forces so we can jump around, run, and haul water and game, etc. But just carrying a 40 kg rock around for extended periods is likely something only a few outliers can achieve without joint stress. That's what motivated us to develop sleds, travoises, carry-poles, and many other methods to gain biomechanical advantage.

I think the point was well made that we already have electrical grids, and lines already run to fueling stations, so it seems like the best infrastructure path for now. Also, fueling stations can be easily coupled (in my windswept hinterland) to windmills onsite, with even greater efficiency in terms of no line losses. Switching to heat pumps makes sense, as @exchemist pointed out, when electricity is cheap enough that your cost/btu isn't way more than with NG. If you want to make the switch simply because the objective is to phase out fossil fuel, then it would help to have governments subsidize green electricity and also home energy conservation, like better insulation, windows, etc. My back-of-envelope calculation is that, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, switching to heat pump would raise our heat bill only about 20-30%. The benefits, both environmental and domestic (electrons don't leak out from pipes and stoves and then explode your house or asphyxiate you while you sleep), make that seem like a worthwhile cost increase.

Doesn't H ignite more easily than petrol? (and its tiny atoms slip around seals more easily)

You did have me wondering why we were feeding swill to Afghan troops. The fact that I could briefly think this was possible, and not a typo, says something about our country's woeful experience with private contractors...

I think car-sharing of any kind will still be difficult for young families, where you have babies and small children that tend to be accompanied by large amounts of equipment and paraphernalia, often the sort of stuff that families just keep handy in their personal vehicles. The 18 year old who's happy with ordering a ride like a pizza, may be less happy as a 30 year old with a baby and a dog and a seven year old with a cello. And blankets, chew toy for the dog, snacks, soccer ball (for the park, after the music lesson), milk bottle, emergency shirts (when the baby vomits on you), and ten other things I haven't thought of. So it's possible that there will still be phases of life when your own dirty cluttered car may be desirable. (or people will adopt a culture where less equipage is deemed necessary and cello-like sounds come from instruments that fold neatly into a small backpacks...) Don't get me wrong, I would love an affordable form of Uber (which Uber in the USA has ceased to be in the past year), at this point in my life (now much simpler than the scenario I conjured) where I walk and bike enough that the car sits idle in the driveway most of the week.

Yes, my post was rushed and I should have made clear I was quite aware of the vastly greater efficiency of an electric motor, no matter how it's coupling to the wheels. I'm likely to have my next car be an EV especially given that my state's grid is presently 70% clean energy, one of the best in the nation in that respect. Ground-effect I only mention whimsically, given it's likely cost for personal vehicles. (the savings in road repair, and therefore in fresh asphalt, might be something, though...)

The old-school EVs, that were conversions, still retained the inefficiencies of the traditional drive train where a single electric motor was coupled to two wheels. The later ones, with separate motors on each drive wheel (and the differential done electronically), reached those 75-80% numbers. I don't know if those numbers could (in terms of economical feasibility) be bumped up farther.... maybe more aerodynamic "teardrop" shapes, and some sort of ground-effect. Biofuels always seemed like a scam, something for cornbelt politicians to pitch to farming communities and Big Ag. When you factored in all the fossil fuel burned in the raising of the crop, transporting and processing and cooking it to make the fuel, plus the algal blooms and other riparian and marine water problems from the fertilizer runoff, it wasn't very "green. " I think algae, as @Peterkin mentioned, grown basically from solar power, is a bit better, but still works off the ICE model.

Negative mass has always sounded like one of those examples of how you can string words together and feign meaning where there is none. "Square circles" and all that. Wouldn't negative energy be a more coherent concept? As in vacuum energy?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-hubris-afghanistan-humiliation/2021/08/14/47fb025a-fc67-11eb-9c0e-97e29906a970_story.html My take: A lot of ink has been spilled here in the States on all the wasted time and money and lives -- a hundred billion for ineffective training and tech support, more billions for infrastructure that got siphoned off by a corrupt government -- but what to me was as bad was the waste of history, the ignoring of Russian and British misadventures in Afghanistan that so clearly spelled out the folly of trying to force a particular western model of government by outsiders. And how could we, with our own failures in SE Asia, be so blind and stupid? If we wanted to really help the people of Afghanistan, we might have tried a "soft power" gambit. Offer microeconomics type assists to Afghan farmers, for example - instead of coming in and destroying their poppy fields, which were the only thing standing between them and dire poverty (and recruitment to radical Islam, in some cases). Maybe developing contracts for them with legit pharma companies, instead of offering smug moral judgement from the barrel of a flamethrower? If we hadn't made ourselves into another satanic western enemy, the Taliban might have had far less traction, and a more moderate Islamic State might have evolved.

Hilarious. It's unlikely that people actually struggling with mental illness find their conditions useful. But that notion is sometimes used in a novel, or movie, and has been a fashionable literary conceit for many years.

Empleat, do you work in a movie theater? You appear to be very skilled at projection.

Indeed. I trust it will be understood my list was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and that I would not squander the Holy Hand Grenade of "FM" on mere fools.

I think you've nailed it, so far as UK and USA are concerned. The privatization mantra that got such momentum in the Reagan/Thatcher era has proven to not work with penal systems. In America, especially, law and order has been too much equated with "defense of property and goods" and less with people, especially the most vulnerable who are most in need of protection and help.

Just a quick thanks to Charon for so clearly explaining RO and herd immunity... and to INow for revealing to me that one can write "fucking moron" at this website. That's definitely going to free me up a bit when discussing anti-vax, social media, political factions, theocrats, "scientists" at the Heartland Institute, climate denial, Q-Anon, the MyPillow man, and all who misuse the word "literally. " Cheers.

Originally, there was only one wavelength, a boring shade of green that everyone got tired of. So a team at MIT found a way for things to emit different wavelengths and reduce what had become near-suicidal levels of boredom. Many wept when orange was first unveiled, anticipating how it would be abused in carpet coloring. Seriously, it relates to energy. Some of the energy in the emitter is converted from, say, the kinetic energy of its atoms, to light. An electron "orbiting" one of the atoms at a high energy level plummets to a much lower energy state and a photon of light is emitted. Due to the big drop in the electron's energy state, that photon carries off a lot of energy, which is expressed as a higher frequency and a shorter wavelength. If the electron had only been a little bit excited, and then had a lesser drop in energy state, then the resulting photon would be less energetic, and you'd have lower frequency and longer wavelength. One way to think of it is as jiggling a length of rope. Vigorous jiggling (high energy) gives you lots of waves closely spaced, while listless shaking might just give a couple waves along a given length.

Hehe. The only natural UV readily available would be found by hanging your laundry on a clothesline outside (this works better where I live, in the semi-arid American West, than, say, Inverness, Scotland). As others have pointed out, sterilizing things is not a good idea unless you happen to be performing surgery. There is, in fact, mounting evidence that shielding young developing immune systems by well-meaning "helicopter parents" can contribute to lifelong health problems from a poorly-developed immune system. My childhood, back in the sixties, was a bacterial festival of unwashed hands, eating stuff you'd dropped on the ground, picking up pebbles and sucking on them, kissing dogs (cats aren't into that quite so much), drinking unpasteurized milk at cousin's farm, drinking unprocessed well water, flinging rabbit "pellets" and other scat at one's playmates.....I could go on, but somewhere medical workers are swooning, so I'll stop. Did I mention cat poop and toxoplasmosis spores? I'll leave that for another day.... Anyway, the upshot is that I get slightly sick about once a decade, if that. Filth is good for you. (in moderation, of course)

https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/nea_resource.html I think the market speculations about metals, and "asteroid trillionaires" are all pretty questionable, given what happens when something rare suddenly becomes plentiful. More rare earths would sure be handy, though. If we're going to build lots of wind turbines in a shift to renewables, a neodymium rich asteroid would be saving us from a supply bottleneck.

IIRC, the gas giants are metal-poor, anyway. The rocky planets, and asteroids, are better sources of metal. Asteroids are ideal, with plenty of metal, and low-impulse required for hoisting out of their microgravity. For a beginner to the topic, I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson has an intro to asteroid mining somewhere in his blogs that's clearly written.

This is how I've experienced meditation, too. Thoughts, feelings, rise up like bubbles from deeper in the mind. You become more observant of where they're rising from. Good point about not fighting thoughts. For some, that takes a kind of courage, especially if they've developed a sense of identity that depends on "mastering" thoughts judged to be bad.

It's time to sue your school district.

A more humane Mikado never Did in Japan exist, To nobody second, I'm certainly reckoned A true philanthropist. It is my very humane endeavour To make, to some extent, Each evil liver A running river Of harmless merriment. My object all sublime I shall achieve in time — To let the punishment fit the crime — The punishment fit the crime; And make each prisoner pent Unwillingly represent A source of innocent merriment! Of innocent merriment!

I hope this is taken as constructive criticism: this bold, unsupported and implausible assertion caused me to stop reading your posts. At a science forum, this kind of assertion undercuts any credibility one might be trying to establish.