A Sense of Doubt blog post #2320 - JIM CROW ROAD - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE FOR FRIDAY 2106.25
Weekly HODGE PODGE today, even though it's no longer "weekly," because tomorrow is my Dad's birthday.
Gen. Mark Milley responds to Rep. Matt Gaetz on Extremism & Critical Race Theory: "I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, non-commissioned officers of being 'woke' or something else." pic.twitter.com/P1x6vg9FUr
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 23, 2021
I feel that anyone who opposes the teaching of Critical Race Theory should first be required to pass the following test:
— James Gleick (@JamesGleick) June 11, 2021
What is Critical Race Theory? You have five minutes and 500 words. Go.
“Careful listening is more important than making sounds happen.”
~ Alvin Lucier
A band from GR, Michigan a student told me about:
A GOOD PAGE TO LOOK AT:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/101584/poems-of-anxiety-and-uncertainty
(Rachel Woolf for The Post)
2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades. So far, 2021 is worse.
Experts say the “perfect storm” of the coronavirus pandemic, increased inequality and protests against police brutality is to blame for the surge in shootings.
(Mason Trinca for The Post)
‘The mansion on Emerson Street’
Like many cities across the United States, the homeless population in Portland, Ore., has increased because of the pandemic, leading the overwhelmed city to start issuing ultimatums to people to clear out.
New emails detail Trump’s efforts to have Justice Department take up his false election-fraud claims |
NIH study suggests coronavirus may have been in U.S. as early as December 2019 |
How Republicans could actually improve Biden’s infrastructure proposal |
US Warns EU Against Anti-American Tech Policy
Biden Tells Putin Certain Cyber-Attacks Should Be 'Off-Limits'
Apple CEO Criticizes European Law That Would Break App Store Hold
Apple Pre-Installed Apps Would Be Banned Under Antitrust Package
Payments Giant Stripe Saw Major Uptake of Staff Offer To Move With 10% Pay Cut
El Salvador Seeks World Bank Help For Bitcoin Implementation
Amazon Appears To Have Removed RavPower, a Popular Phone Battery and Charger Brand
Amazon Blames Social Media for Struggle With Fake Reviews
Facebook Will Start Putting Ads in Oculus Quest Apps
What Lies Beneath Jupiter's Pretty Clouds
 |
| https://www.equalitynv.org/2019/10/09/why-trans-pride-is-important-this-weekend/ |
Happy Pride Month from the Department of Education, where Betsy DeVos is out, and common fucking decency is in.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (PBUH) announced today that the DOE is reversing Trump-era guidance that would withhold funding from schools that allowed trans students to participate on the appropriate athletic teams on the theory that Title IX's prohibition on gender discrimination did not apply to them.
"We just want to double down on our expectations," the secretary told the New York Times. "Students cannot be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity."
Intent on delivering one last kick to trans kids on her way out the door, DeVos dropped her trans-bashing memo on January 8, 2021 — the same day she resigned in disgust over the Capitol Riot. It attempted to reconcile the Department's stance with the Supreme Court holding in Bostock v. Clayton County that gay and trans people are protected under Title VII's ban on discrimination "because of sex." It was totes fine to make trans girls use the boys bathroom, the DOE reasoned, because, ummm, clearly the drafters of the law meant "biological sex" — i.e., chromosomes — when they drafted the law.
Yes, really.
But Title IX text is very different from Title VII text in many important respects. Title IX, for example, contains numerous exceptions authorizing or allowing sex-separate activities and intimate facilities to be provided separately on the basis of biological sex or for members of each biological sex. Compare 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e-1, 2000e-2 with 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681(a), 1686. However, Title VII and Title IX both use the term "sex", and it is here Bostock may have salience. Bostock compels us to interpret a statute in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment. Bostock, 140 S. Ct. at 1738 (citations omitted). And as explained below, specifically in the answer to Question 2, the Department's longstanding construction of the term "sex" in Title IX to mean biological sex, male or female, is the only construction consistent with the ordinary public meaning of "sex" at the time of Title IX's enactment.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but no and also go fuck yourself. If Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch say that a trans woman can't be fired for failing to conform to her employer's gender stereotypes, then a trans girl can't be discriminated against for failing to be the kind of girl school administrators want her to be. (Although, let's not lay any money on Roberts and Gorsuch maintaining any ideological consistency when this case inevitably comes before them.)
The new guidance rejects the circular reasoning employed by DeVos and her flying monkeys, noting that "courts rely on interpretations of Title VII to inform interpretations of Title IX" and there's no substantive difference between barring a trans man from the locker room down at the plant and keeping his younger trans brother off the boys soccer team.
So now the DOE is promising to go to bat for gay and trans kids who are discriminated against by their schools.
Where a complaint meets applicable requirements and standards as just described, OCR [Office for Civil Rights] will open an investigation of allegations that an individual has been discriminated against because of their sexual orientation or gender identity in education programs or activities. This includes allegations of individuals being harassed, disciplined in a discriminatory manner, excluded from, denied equal access to, or subjected to sex stereotyping in academic or extracurricular opportunities and other education programs or activities, denied the benefits of such programs or activities, or otherwise treated differently because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Which puts the Biden administration on a direct collision course with the eleventy red states rushing to make it illegal for trans kids to go to gym class. But that is a fight for another day. Today we will just enjoy the fact that the federal government is finally sticking up for these kids — OUR KIDS, all of them, who deserve our love and protection — who are being used as a human shield by a pack of demons looking for the next wedge political issue.
"The Supreme Court has upheld the right for LGBTQ+ people to live and work without fear of harassment, exclusion, and discrimination – and our LGBTQ+ students have the same rights and deserve the same protections. I'm proud to have directed the Office for Civil Rights to enforce Title IX to protect all students from all forms of sex discrimination," said Cardona. "Today, the Department makes clear that all students — including LGBTQ+ students — deserve the opportunity to learn and thrive in schools that are free from discrimination."
God bless. It really does get better.
[NYT]
Follow Liz Dye on Twitter!
 |
| https://nbc16.com/news/local/black-trans-pride-parade |
 |
| Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) at a gun violence memorial on the National Mall on April 14, 2021.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images |
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/06/nothing-proves-the-end-of-bipartisanship-like-gun-control/
Nothing Proves the End of Bipartisanship Like Gun Control
Activists have conceded plenty to earn GOP support. The Senate stands in the way.
To hear Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tell it, the hopes for Congress to pass meaningful gun legislation have simply been diminished, but are not altogether dashed. “There’s plenty of proof points to show how this issue has changed,” insists the Senate’s leading champion in the Senate for new gun measures. Democrats, once terrified to touch the subject, have wholly embraced stricter gun laws. A few Republican senators have accepted Murphy’s invitation to discuss a potential deal to expand background checks. The Connecticut senator even clings to the idea that former President Donald Trump would have reached a compromise on the issue in 2019 if his first impeachment trial had not frayed whatever meager threads tethered him to bipartisanship.
But for all that purported shift, Murphy and his colleagues in the Senate have nothing to show. Since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that forged Murphy into the Senate’s leading gun control advocate, polls consistently find that a majority of Americans support background checks for every gun sale. Activists have conceded that they’d accept nearly any deal that Republicans would agree to. Yet Congress has not passed a single meaningful gun law over the past decade.
Murphy’s discussions with Republicans have taken on Sisyphean predictability. He approaches his GOP colleagues who claim to be open to compromise—“I’m not going to let perfect be the enemy of the good,” he tells me—and the ensuing weeks or months of good faith talks result in a dramatic collapse with zero action. His latest effort came to an end last Thursday when he and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) parted ways after two months of negotiations. “We’ve hit a bit of a dead end,” Murphy said. “Maybe it’s permanent, maybe it’s not.”
Some activists privately expressed relief at the latest setback. Murphy’s latest plan aimed to modestly broaden who is required to conduct a background check before selling a weapon, a far cry from the universal background checks activists have long sought. It wasn’t even close to the compromise Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) brokered in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook—a measure that had four GOP votes but couldn’t overcome a Republican filibuster. “The only room in America where you couldn’t find 60 percent of support for that legislation was the Senate floor,” says Christian Heyne, a gun violence survivor and the vice president for policy at gun control group Brady.
The endless cycle of hope followed by inaction has some gun rights groups at their wit’s end. “Something we’ve been talking about for a long time—that has consistent, high levels of support in polls—keeps getting stuck like this,” says Chelsea Parsons, the vice president of gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
There have been nearly 300 mass shootings since Democrats took control of Congress earlier this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The pandemic raged alongside an alarming spike of shooting deaths across communities devastated by everyday gun violence. For the better part of a decade, the gun violence prevention movement has done everything it can to encourage both parties to support their issue. They’ve swayed public opinion, flipped Congress and the White House with the promise of reforms, and even endorsed GOP candidates who supported gun laws when their party would not. They’ve given up dream legislation for the reality of whatever might pass. Yet the intransigence of Republicans persists. And increasingly, the blame is falling on the Senate rules, in which any attempts to pass a gun control bill run roughshod into the filibuster.
I’ve logged hours speaking with Murphy about guns ever since the February 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida that fed the fury of grassroots activists as the midterm elections approached. Murphy laid out his predictions for the post-Parkland era on a steamy New England afternoon in July of that year, as we walked together alongside a busy road in a Connecticut suburb. “If Republicans get wiped out in 2018, guns have got to be part of their post-mortem,” Murphy told me. “They will look at the swing districts they lost and see their fealty to the NRA as a major liability.” Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Murphy assured me, was “going to have to do an assessment of the politics on this issue.”
McConnell, of course, did not. He refused to bring the universal background check bill to a vote in the Senate after it passed the House in 2019, taking only a fleeting interest in bipartisan legislation after a spree of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio that August. Murphy, meanwhile, began negotiating yet another ill-fated background checks proposal with the Trump White House, which would have expanded background checks to gun shows and internet sales without centralizing the records of said checks.
“Having Sen. Murphy reach out and work for bipartisan solutions is ultimately a good thing,” Brady’s Heyne tells me. He points to the fact that the universal background checks bill that passed the House earlier this year, just like the one that passed two years before it, earned a handful of Republican votes. “We’ll always fight for incremental progress. What’s clear is the current way that our system works, the current way that the Senate functions, the filibuster is just making it impossible for the most basic of things through.”
Murphy thinks there are Republican votes in the Senate for a background checks bill, and he’s still in talks with other GOP senators, including Toomey and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), on a potential compromise deal. Ultimately, he’s on the side of changing the rules, calling it “ridiculous” that a bill with broad support from the voting public can’t become law. “That’s not a functioning democracy,” Murphy declares. “You’ve got to change the rules.”
Companies Push Employees To Prove They Are Vaccinated for Covid-19
Companies are stepping up the pressure on workers to get vaccinated -- not necessarily with mandates but with strong nudges. From a report: For months, many employers have attempted to coax workers into receiving a Covid-19 vaccine. Companies dangled ca...
Windows 11 Screenshots Leak, Show New Start Menu and More
Screenshots of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 11 operating system have appeared online today. Originally published at Chinese site Baidu, the screenshots show off the new Windows 11 user interface and Start menu. The UI changes look very similar to what was ...
Plexiglass Is Everywhere, With No Proof It Keeps Covid at Bay
Sales of plexiglass tripled to roughly $750 million in the U.S. after the pandemic hit, as offices, schools, restaurants and retail stores sought protection from the droplets that health authorities suspected were spreading the coronavirus. There was just ...
Irreversible Warming Tipping Point May Have Been Triggered: Arctic Mission Chief
The tipping point for irreversible global warming may have already been triggered, the scientist who led the biggest expedition to the Arctic warned Tuesday. AFP: "The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this ...
Irish Police To Be Given Powers Over Passwords
Irish police will have the power to compel people to provide passwords for electronic devices when carrying out a search warrant under new legislation. From a report: The change is part of the Garda Siochana Bill published by Irish Justice Minister Heat...
Senate Confirms Progressive Tech Critic Lina Khan To Become an FTC Commissioner
The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden's nominee to the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, the young progressive who helped launch a reckoning amongst antitrust scholars and enforcers, in a 69-28 vote. From a report: At 32, Khan will become the youn...
Apple-Google Mobile 'Duopoly' Faces UK Antitrust Scrutiny
Google and Apple face a sweeping probe into the "duopoly" power of their mobile ecosystems, in the U.K. antitrust watchdog's latest attack on Silicon Valley. From a report: The increasingly tech-focused Competition and Markets Authority opened a 12-mont...
Microsoft's Smith Says Secret Subpoenas Hurt US Tech Companies
Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith criticized secret data subpoenas sent by the government to cloud providers like his company and Apple, saying gag orders on requests for personal information undermine freedoms and are hurting U.S. tec...
Web Inventor Berners-Lee To Auction Original Code as NFT
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is auctioning his original source code for the web in the form of a "non-fungible token," as digital collectibles continue to fetch millions of dollars despite the recent sell-off in cryptocurrencies. From a report: The auction at So...
The Android Messages App Now Offers End-To-End Encryption
Along with a string of new features across several areas of Android, Google is at last turning on end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for everyone in the Messages app. Beta testers have been able to use E2EE messaging since November. From a report: E2EE in Mes...
Wave of Resignations Predicted As Pandemic Lockdown Ends
'Dozens' of Companies are Now Trying to Build Flying Cars
Ransomware Attack Targeted Teamsters Union in 2019. But They Just Refused to Pay
French Companies Admit Problems at Nuclear Plant in China
G7 Nations Promise Decarbonization, 870 Million Covid-19 Vaccines
Why Quantum Computers Won't End Up Cracking Bitcoin Wallets
NSA Leaker Reality Winner Released Early for Good Behavior
G7 Calls on Russia To Crack Down on Ransomware Gangs
Google, Facebook, Amazon and Others Urge SEC To Mandate Regular Climate Reports
Glacier Blood? Watermelon Snow? Whatever It's Called, Snow Shouldn't Be So Red.
New Study: Only 33% Would Opt For Immortality
Are Transcontinental, Submarine Supergrids the Future of Energy?
Is Bitcoin More Traceable Than Cash?
Apple Repair Tech Posted Woman's Explicit iPhone Photos to Facebook
Capcom Sued By Photographer Claiming They Used 80 of Her Photos Without Licensing
4+ Years in Prison for Home Security Worker Who Accessed Security Cameras to Spy on Women
NASA Finally Shows Off Assembled 'Space Launch System' Megarocket
Pakistan Province May Block SIM Cards of Citizens Who Didn't Get Covid-19 Vaccines
Seat On Jeff Bezos' Space Trip Sells For $28 Million
Also Leaving Freenode: FSF, GNU, plus Linux and Python support channels
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/texas-republican-governor-abbott-wall-gravy-train.html
Texas’ Republican Governor Tries to Keep “the Wall” Political Gravy Train Going
JUNE 17, 20219:42 AM
The “wall” as metaphor continues even after Donald Trump’s presidency. The border wall has always been a proxy, a political tool, a symbol of something, rather than a policy solution to anything. That’s why, rest assured, Mexico was going to pay for it; because it wasn’t ever real, even for those who believed in it, those who chanted for its construction. But the symbolism of doing something is an easier sell than the complicated reality of doing something useful. So here we are again six years after Trump injected the concept of a holy wall in his supporters veins, with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, surrounded by his fellow Republicans Wednesday, promising more of the same—more wall.
As we all now know, walls to nowhere don’t come cheap. Realistic estimates of walling off Texas’ 1,200-mile border with Mexico could reach as high as $120 billion. That’s why Abbott wants believers to help pay for it and has opened an online portal to accept donations to do just that. The last time Republican wallers tried the GoFundMe route to border fencing it ended in federal indictments. Abbott says, yes of course, his state will chip in too to the tune of $250 million for the state-led border wall construction promising “hundreds of miles” of wall. Wall as far as the eye can see. A strong wall. Walls are strong after all, as is Texas’ governor. And most importantly you can see walls, a visual marker of tangible symbolic progress in the Trump GOP’s unending commitment to not dealing with the problem.
It will not surprise you that Abbott is currently revving up to run for a third term as Texas governor in 2022 and might just have eyes on a national run. “The Biden Administration won’t secure our border, so Texas will,” Abbott said in a statement. A 10-word homage to Trumpian magical thinking that was likely the point of this revival charade the whole time. Not to be outdone, cue Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—another hopeful Trump successor—committing to digging a moat around his state. But a moat? It doesn’t matter. Build that moat! Build that moat!
https://www.wonkette.com/federalist-guy-weeps-for-his-boner-as-victorias-secret-ditches-angels
Victoria's Secret is trying to change. They're getting rid of the very outdated-seeming Angels (which only even became a thing in the late '90s) and replacing them with the more modern VS Collective — featuring soccer star Megan Rapinoe, actress Priyanka Chopra, South Sudanese-Australian runway model Adut Akech, Amanda de Cadenet of The Conversation, skier Eileen Gu, plus size model Paloma Elsesser, and trans model Valentina Sampaio.
Victoria's Secret collective
It's unlikely that they have suddenly decided to become not-terrible out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather because no one wants to buy anything from them anymore and they can't sell anything to save their lives. There are many, many reasons for this! For one, while there was a time when Victoria's Secret was the only actual bra store many women could even go to, there are tons of options now — brick and mortar and online. They're better and they come in more than four sizes, making the appeal of sobbing in a Victoria's Secret dressing room while an attendant assures you that you must be a 36C is even lower than it once was. But the fact that they have notoriously gross labor practices, a history of making comments about how they'd never have trans or "plus size" (meaning a size 10) models in their runway shows, and generally seeming like a throwback to a more embarrassing time for women probably didn't help them much either. So they're trying to get with the times a little.
Naturally, a whole bunch of rightwing cisgender men are outraged, as they are pretty sure that the models for a brand meant to target women should give them boners.
One of those men is Tristan Justice of The Federalist — whom we last met when he was crying about the NFL and various corporations taking away Georgia's "freedom" to enact racist voting laws. In an article titled "Victoria's Secret Gives Up Sexy. America Needs The Coors Twins," Justice tries to explain the importance of ... honestly I don't really know? Basically he's mad because he thinks progressives are saying he can't be attracted to "busty blondes" anymore and forcing corporations to go along with that, and tries to make some point about how conservatives didn't like the Coors Twins but are now the ones valiantly defending his boner.
The clothing line's campaign marks the latest episode of corporate America capitalizing on cultural shifts compelled by progressives to transform the public's timeless concept of beauty, and the major change speaks to how far the culture has indeed shifted.
It was less than 20 years ago that a series of beer commercials featured two busty blonde sisters, Diane and Elaine Klimaszewski. The two were branded as the "Coors Light Twins" and became controversial in the 2004 Colorado Senate Republican campaign of Pete Coors, then the chairman of the brewing company. [...]
At the time, it was a scandal for a conservative politician to endorse the ads in what used to be a red state. Now, it's conservatives mocking Victoria's Secret's abandonment of the busty blonde stereotype as a perfectly legitimate source of sexual attraction as the progressive movement seeks to eliminate gender differences altogether.
I'm sorry, is Tristan Justice looking to buy a bra? The fact that the people who buy bras are people who have breasts appears to be lost on him. Is he perhaps not aware of the fact that a bra is meant to be a functional garment and not merely decorative? For some of us, they serve an actual purpose (though to be fair, we don't really shop at Victoria's Secret). Would he like it if ads for men's products were specifically meant to appeal to women instead of men? I feel like he probably would not.
Lots of people think Megan Rapinoe is super hot and would love to look like her. Everyone doesn't have the same idea of "sexy" that Tristan Justice does, or that anyone does. Hotness is totally relative. I can say that personally, Tristan Justice himself really does not do it for me, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some woman somewhere that would not go for the "kid in class who reminds the teacher she forgot to assign homework" lewk he's cultivating here.
The roles now appear reversed. It's liberals who seem to be repulsed by the unapologetic sex appeal of twin blondes at a football game sponsored by a patriotic American beer company. After all, the "Washington Football Team" (formerly the Washington Redskins) eliminated its cheerleading squad for the next season. The progressive fantasy would prefer they be transgender, minority, and overweight, as a righteous rejection of basic beauty standards demanding viewers reject their primal inhibitions.
This article is not to say the new models promoted by Victoria's Secret aren't beautiful, but it's an instinctual lie to pretend unconventional standards must be promoted above sexual attraction, and it's even at times dangerous doing so.
Conservatives aren't being sex-positive here. They are, as usual, trying to make everything stay the exact same forever and ideally make things as crappy as possible for women while they're doing so. Clearly, Justice and others believe that Victoria's Secret was doing an important public service by setting unrealistic beauty standards for women.
There is nothing wrong with sexual attraction, but the idea that everyone is attracted to the exact same thing is obvious bullshit. The idea that media-promoted beauty standards don't change over time is equally absurd. The trajectory from lusting after Rita Hayworth to lusting after Kate Moss was not a natural progression that people attracted to women just sort of went with on their own. Sure, some people are conveniently attracted to whatever style and body type was promoted by the media at any given time, but many are not.
Beauty standards for women have never been entirely about men's boners, either. They've also been about controlling women. There was a very sharp difference in beauty standards for women from the 1940s to the 1950s. In the '40s, during the war, when the country needed women to go to work, the attractive women of the day were sort of strong, husky-voiced and somewhat more athletic-looking. Shoulder pads were big. Then the 1950s came along, the country wanted women back at home and Marilyn Monroe became the ideal — a figure achieved primarily with waist whittling sidebends. This is why it's actually easier for women today to fit into clothing from the 1940s than to fit into clothing from the 1950s.
Part of the heroin chic crap from the '90s was a direct reaction to riot grrrl and third wave feminism. It was, even if only on a subconscious level, a way of making women weaker and more fragile ... which is what happens when you don't eat.
Conservative cis men are not just afraid for their boners, they are scared that they are losing control. They want to say jump and for women to say "How high?" They want us crying over our lack of thigh gap and starving ourselves to fit into a size zero, they want us feeling like we will never be good enough. They want even the most "traditionally beautiful" women in the world to be photoshopped to the point of absurdity.
I have long despised Victoria's Secret on both a political and personal level. Politically, I hate them because they've used prison labor, they've used child labor, and historically they've been pretty darn crappy on the diversity front. On a personal level, I hate them for fucking up generations of women, myself included, with the wrong bra sizes because it was easier and cheaper for them to sell nothing but 34/36B and 34/36C bras, and thus being the cause of many tears, quadraboob and back/shoulder problems across the nation for decades. It hurts my very soul to have to side with them on any issue.
But in this case, they're doing the right thing (if only to save their own asses, financially) and it's making people at The Federalist upset, so that's nice.
PANDEMIC
THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT
If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.
I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
Deaths:
Recovered:
 |
 |
https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/06/18/212203/a-pill-to-treat-covid-19-the-us-is-betting-on-it
A Pill To Treat Covid-19? The US Is Betting on It
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. "I wake up in the morning, I don't feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat," Dr. Fauci said in an interview. "I call up my doctor and I say, 'I have Covid and I need a prescription.'" Dr. Fauci's support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., "protease inhibitors" that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime.
Alicia Livock
https://www.livescience.com/delta-variant-delta-plus-variant-covid.html
What is the Delta variant?
Officials first identified the delta variant, or B.1.617.2, in
India in October 2020, and the World Health organization (WHO)
designated it a "variant of concern" on May 11, 2021.
Delta is one of four
"variants of concern" listed by the WHO; the others are alpha (the
variant first discovered in the U.K.), beta (first discovered in South Africa)
and gamma (first discovered in Brazil).
But delta is "faster, it is fitter, it will pick off the
more vulnerable more efficiently than previous variants, and therefore if there
are people left without vaccination, they remain even at further risk,"
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies
Program, said at a news briefing on
Monday (June 21).
The delta variant carries 10 mutations that cause changes to the
virus' spike protein, which it uses to grab and invade human cells, according
to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC). Small changes like these in a virus's
genome may impact how the virus behaves, leading to changes in its
transmissibility and/or virulence.
Three of the delta
mutations — E484Q, L452R and P614R — allow the spike protein to attach more
easily to the ACE2 receptor on human cells, according to Quartz India.
Where is the delta variant spreading?
The variant has spread to at least 92 countries, including the
U.S., Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's COVID technical lead, said during the
briefing, according to CNBC.
In the U.K., delta now accounts for more than 90% of newly
diagnosed cases, according to Quartz India. The delta variant currently makes
up 20% of new cases in the U.S., Fauci told NBC's "TODAY" show on
Wednesday (June 23), CNBC reported.
The delta variant will likely replace the alpha variant as the
dominant variant in the U.S., CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said last week
in an interview with ABC News on
"Good Morning America."
That's because delta
is much more transmissible than the alpha variant, which became the dominant
variant in the U.S. within a matter of one or two months, Walensky told ABC
News.
Is the delta variant more transmissible?
The delta variant seems to be around 60% more transmissible than
the alpha variant, according to Nature news.
The alpha variant, which is currently the dominant variant in the U.S., is 50%
more transmissible than the original virus, according to the CDC.
Delta is spreading
faster in U.S. counties where less than 30% of residents have been fully
vaccinated than in those where more than 30% have been fully vaccinated,
according to Nature.
Is the delta variant more deadly?
Early data suggests
the delta variant "is associated with an increased disease severity as
reflected by hospitalization risk," Fauci said during the briefing. That
data, from England and Scotland, suggest that a person is twice as likely to be
hospitalized if infected with the delta variant compared with the alpha
variant, according to Nature.
Still, while it's
established that delta is more transmissible compared with other variants, not
much is known about whether it causes more severe disease.
Do vaccines work against the delta variant?
"I will say, as
worrisome as this delta strain is with regard to its hyper-transmissibility,
our vaccines work," Walensky told ABC News.
Both Walensky and
Fauci encouraged people in the U.S. to get vaccinated in order to be protected
against the delta variant. Walensky also noted that high vaccination rates will
reduce the chances that the variants have time to mutate and produce even more
transmissible or severe variants.
In a recent study, conducted by the Public Health England,
researchers found that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine was 88% effective against
symptomatic disease caused by the delta variant, compared with about 93% effective
against the alpha variant, according to a May 22 statement from
the website of the U.K. government. Similarly, AstraZeneca's vaccine was 60%
effective against the delta variant compared to 66% against the Alpha
variant.
Data isn't yet available on the effectiveness of many other
vaccines against delta. But Fauci told The Washington Post a
few weeks ago that Moderna's vaccine — which has a similar makeup to Pfizer's —
would likely have a similar efficacy against the delta variant. Still, no data
has been released on Moderna's or Johnson & Johnson's response against the
delta variant.
Advertisement
The makers of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine announced on Twitter on
June 15 that their vaccine was "more efficient against the Delta
variant" than any other vaccine and that they submitted their results to
an international peer-reviewed journal.
While COVID-19 case
counts have been declining across the U.S., there are still areas — primarily
those with low vaccination rates — that are at risk of "localized"
outbreaks, Fauci said. "There is a danger, a real danger, that if there is
a persistence of a recalcitrance to getting vaccinated that you could see
localized surges," he said. "All of that is totally and completely
avoidable by getting vaccinated."
Delta poses the
biggest threat to countries that have little access to vaccines, such as many
countries in Africa where less than 5% of the population is vaccinated, according
to Nature.
What is the 'delta plus' variant?
On Wednesday (June 23), India's health ministry announced around
40 cases of what the country calls the "delta plus" variant, a
sub-lineage of the delta variant with an extra mutation seen in another variant
of concern, according to Reuters. Delta plus,
or AY.1, was first reported in a Public Health England bulletin
on June 11.
Delta plus carries the
K417N mutation, also found in the beta variant, which seems to reduce the
effectiveness of a monoclonal antibody cocktail in treating the virus,
according to Reuters. "The mutation K417N has been of interest as it is
present in the beta variant (B.1.351 lineage), which was reported to have
immune evasion property," India's health ministry said in a statement.
Related: South African coronavirus
variant: All your questions answered
Where is 'delta plus' found?
Officials have
identified at least 197 cases of delta plus in 11 countries as of June 16,
including 83 in the U.S., according to Reuters.
Is 'delta plus' more dangerous?
India has identified delta plus as a "variant of
concern," citing that it is more transmissible than any known variants; it
binds more strongly to lung cell receptors compared with other variants; and it
might be less susceptible to treatment with a monoclonal antibody created
infected patients, according to a statement cited
by the BBC.
But experts say that
it's too soon to draw conclusions about this variant.
"I would keep calm. I don't think India or anyone else in the world has released or accumulated enough data to distinguish the risk from the so-called delta plus as being more dangerous or concerning than the original delta variant," Dr. Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, told the BBC.
Originally published on Live
Science.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/06/23/2345228/scientist-finds-early-virus-sequences-that-had-been-mysteriously-deleted
Scientist Finds Early Virus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted
The genetic sequences of viral samples hold crucial clues about how SARS-CoV-2 shifted to our species from another animal, most likely a bat. Most precious of all are sequences from early in the pandemic, because they take scientists closer to the original spillover event. As [Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who wrote the new report] was reviewing what genetic data had been published by various research groups, he came across a March 2020 study with a spreadsheet that included information on 241 genetic sequences collected by scientists at Wuhan University. The spreadsheet indicated that the scientists had uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, managed by the U.S. government's National Library of Medicine. But when Dr. Bloom looked for the Wuhan sequences in the database earlier this month, his only result was "no item found." Puzzled, he went back to the spreadsheet for any further clues. It indicated that the 241 sequences had been collected by a scientist named Aisi Fu at Renmin Hospital in Wuhan. Searching medical literature, Dr. Bloom eventually found another study posted online in March 2020 by Dr. Fu and colleagues, describing a new experimental test for SARS-CoV-2. The Chinese scientists published it in a scientific journal three months later. In that study, the scientists wrote that they had looked at 45 samples from nasal swabs taken "from outpatients with suspected Covid-19 early in the epidemic." They then searched for a portion of SARS-CoV-2's genetic material in the swabs. The researchers did not publish the actual sequences of the genes they fished out of the samples. Instead, they only published some mutations in the viruses.
But a number of clues indicated to Dr. Bloom that the samples were the source of the 241 missing sequences. The papers included no explanation as to why the sequences had been uploaded to the Sequence Read Archive, only to disappear later. Perusing the archive, Dr. Bloom figured out that many of the sequences were stored as files on Google Cloud. Each sequence was contained in a file in the cloud, and the names of the files all shared the same basic format, he reported. Dr. Bloom swapped in the code for a missing sequence from Wuhan. Suddenly, he had the sequence. All told, he managed to recover 13 sequences from the cloud this way. With this new data, Dr. Bloom looked back once more at the early stages of the pandemic. He combined the 13 sequences with other published sequences of early coronaviruses, hoping to make progress on building the family tree of SARS-CoV-2. Working out all the steps by which SARS-CoV-2 evolved from a bat virus has been a challenge because scientists still have a limited number of samples to study. Some of the earliest samples come from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an outbreak occurred in December 2019. But those market viruses actually have three extra mutations that are missing from SARS-CoV-2 samples collected weeks later. In other words, those later viruses look more like coronaviruses found in bats, supporting the idea that there was some early lineage of the virus that did not pass through the seafood market. Dr. Bloom found that the deleted sequences he recovered from the cloud also lack those extra mutations. "They're three steps more similar to the bat coronaviruses than the viruses from the Huanan fish market," Dr. Bloom said. This suggests, he said, that by the time SARS-CoV-2 reached the market, it had been circulating for awhile in Wuhan or beyond. The market viruses, he argued, aren't representative of full diversity of coronaviruses already loose in late 2019.
 |
| What if 'Oumuamua was sent into our solar system to scan for signals at the behest of some alien civilization? Pretty far-fetched, but perhaps worth thinking about, says one astrophysicist. (Image credit: VICTOR HABBICK VISIONS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images) |
https://www.livescience.com/oumuamua-unidentified-aerial-phenomena.html
Could there be a link between interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua and unidentified aerial phenomena?
A colleague of mine once noted that every morning there is a long line of customers stretching out from a famous Parisian bakery into the street. "I wish someone would wait for my scientific papers with as much anticipation as Parisians eagerly stand by for their baguettes," he said.
There is one exception to this wish, however. It involves fresh scientific evidence that we are not be the only intelligent species in the cosmos.
Recently, there have been two sources for such evidence.
First, the interstellar object discovered in 2017, 'Oumuamua, was inferred to have a flat shape and seemed to be pushed away from the sun as if it were a lightsail. This "pancake" was tumbling once every eight hours and originated from the rare state of the local standard of rest—which averages over the motions of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun.
Second, the Pentagon is about to deliver a report to Congress stating that some unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are real but that their nature is unknown. If UAP originated from China or Russia and were a national security risk, their existence would have never been revealed to the public. Hence, it is reasonable to conclude that the U.S. government believes that some of these objects are not human in origin. This leaves two possibilities: either UAP are natural terrestrial phenomena or they are extraterrestrial in origin. Both possibilities imply something new and interesting that we did not know before. The study of UAP should therefore shift from occupying the talking points of national security administrators and politicians to the arena of science where it is studied by scientists rather than government officials.
Many or even most UAP might be natural phenomena. But even if one of them is extraterrestrial, might there be any possible link to 'Oumuamua?
The inferred abundance of 'Oumuamua-like objects is unreasonably large if they're of purely natural origin. With Amaya Moro-Martín and Ed Turner, I wrote a paper in 2009 calculating the number of interstellar rocks based on what is known about the solar system and assuming that these rocks were ejected from similar planetary systems orbiting other stars. The population of objects required to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua exceeds the expected number of interstellar rocks per unit volume by orders of magnitude. In fact, there should be a quadrillion 'Oumuamua-like objects within the solar system at any given time, if they are distributed on random trajectories with equal probability of moving in all directions.
But the number is reasonable if 'Oumuamua was an artificial object on a targeted mission towards the sun, aimed to collect data from the habitable region near Earth. One might even wonder whether 'Oumuamua might have been retrieving data from probes that were already sprinkled on Earth at an earlier time. In such a case, 'Oumuamua's thin, flat shape could have been that of a receiver. Hence, 'Oumuamua was pushed by sunlight not for the purpose of propulsion but as a byproduct of its thin flat shape. A similar push by reflection of sunlight without a cometary tail were the traits of an artificial rocket booster that was identified in 2020 by the same Pan-STARRS telescope that discovered 'Oumuamua. This artificial object named 2020 SO was not designed to be a solar sail but had thin walls with a large surface-to-mass ratio for a different purpose.
At this time, the possibility that any UAP are extraterrestrial is highly speculative. But if we entertain this possibility for fun, then the tumbling motion of 'Oumuamua could potentially have been meant to scan signals from all viewing directions. A predecessor to 'Oumuamua could have been a craft that deposited small probes into the Earth's atmosphere without being noticed, because it visited before Pan-STARRS started its operations. Along this imaginative line of reasoning, 'Oumuamua could have arranged to appear as coming from the neutral local standard of rest, which serves as the local "galactic parking lot," so that its origin would remain unknown.
But rather than simply wonder about possible scenarios, we should collect better scientific data and clarify the nature of UAP. This can be done by deploying state-of-the-art cameras on wide-field telescopes that monitor the sky. The sky is not classified; only government-owned sensors are. By searching for unusual phenomena in the same geographical locations from where the UAP reports came, scientists could clear up the mystery in a transparent analysis of open data.
As noted in my recent book Extraterrestrial, I do not enjoy science fiction stories because the story lines often violate the laws of physics. But we should be open-minded to the possibility that science will one day reveal a reality that was previously considered as fiction.
This article was first published at ScientificAmerican.com. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A YEAR AGO → The most clicked article in issue No.130 was The Long Shadow Of The Future by Steven Weber and Nils Gilman.
◼
Something a bit different in this issue. I had to spend the week out of town and mostly offline so I didn’t have time to read as much as usual, much less write a full newsletter. Luckily, over the last few months I’ve been deconstructing each past issue into its constituant parts for my Grant For The Web project (coming soon) and marking some of the featured articles for a revisit.
So today, the first article and the Asides are all new, while the three other articles are from that “revisit pile,” and all more than a year old, when over half of you weren’t around. I think it’s a good one, despite the restraints.
This is a free issue of the weekly Sentiers newsletter. If you enjoyed it, forwarding to friends and colleagues is a great help. If it was forwarded to you, subscribe here.
Ferry Corsten | Blue Print, by Oska
Theses on techno-optimism
This one, at LibrarianShipwreck, is one of those articles I’ll be coming back to for sure. Techno-optimism is something I’ve both suffered from and railed against, as well as sharing a number of articles addressing the issue. In this piece, it’s a deeper look into that vision of technological progress not only in it’s common portrayal having to do with big tech but in the much longer-term and stronger undercurrent that “is the basic stance of a society in which people enjoy the fruits of high-technology.”
The article does suffer (although it’s also a great trick to make these big ideas more parsable) from something I’ve mentioned often: presenting a decentralized alignement of incentives as if it’s an organized campaign, not arguing for, but certainly readable as a great conspiracy. Regardless of that aspect in form, everything else is strongly presented and should now take place in the back of your mind: when you encounter big-tech-optimism and techno-chauvinism, remember that they are a kind of smoke and mirrors, obscuring the underlying deep waters of techno-optimism.
When big tech-optimism takes a beating it is for failing to live up to the hopes of the techno-optimism that undergirds it. And when big tech companies are held up for scorn, it is done so that people’s ire can be directed at a specific manifestation of techno-optimism, as opposed to calling into question the underlying ideology. […]
By consistently presenting an exaggerated version of techno-optimism, the more egregious forms of adoration and fealty open up spaces of critique, but in doing so ensure that those critiques get directed at the exaggerations as opposed to at the baseline beliefs that make those exaggerations possible. […]
Techno-optimism serves to demobilize pushes for change by shifting the onus off of people organizing and by putting that power in the hands of technology. […]
[T]echno-optimism can claim a sort of rebellious almost countercultural sheen, even as it remains the viewpoint coursing through pretty much every major corporation, tech publication, elected official’s office, and most works of mass culture. […]
Faced with serious challenges that our politics seem incapable of addressing, and which technological change have so far been able to miraculously solve, techno-optimism keeps the focus centered on the idea of an eventual technological solution.
Minimal maintenance
The essay version of a talk by Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Really excellent read which ties together maintenance, degrowth, libraries, museums, environmental justice, and architecture. I encourage you to read the whole thing, one of the points which resonated with me is the very first quote below, which frames degrowth not as blanket anti-growth but as a critique of growth as an end in itself. To my mind, this parallels Vaclav Smil in this interview where he talks about not viewing degrowth as something done identically globally but as varying according to each country’s needs. Then, like Smil who says there is “slack” in the system, Mattern cites “many feminist economists” who believe that “degrowth need not entail universal downsizing. Instead, a reduction of those things that are ‘destructive to humans and the ecological foundations of human life’.”
The contemporary “degrowth” movement … isn’t against growth, per se; it calls, instead, for a critique of growth as an end in itself, for the “decolonization of public debate from the idiom of economism and for the abolishment of economic growth as a social objective.” […]
The Maintainers have emerged in response to these technological and political-economic concerns, many of which overlap with those of the Degrowthers: the waste of planned obsolescence, the environmental effects of unsustainable supply chains, the devaluation of care work, the underfunding of maintenance, and so forth. […]
[A]rtist Teresa Dillon cited environmental humanist Eileen Crist’s call for “pulling back and scaling down,” “welcoming limitations of our numbers, economies and habitats for the sake of a higher, more inclusive freedom and quality of life.” […]
[T]he potential activation of a new post-growth urban “commons”—resources and practices that resist commodification and privatisation, and that prioritise collective creation and public use. […]
Yet the threats imposed by tech’s unlimited growth are both individual and collective: they compromise our personal privacy and mental health, as well as our networked utilities, our geopolitical dynamics, and our global ecologies. […]
Ecological crises and equitable futures
Excellent piece offering “a diagnosis of dominant narratives of possible ecological futures and what they mean for us.” Namely; extinction (as in XR), ecological apocalypse (Malthus), technological solutionism (Musk), and degrowth (Raworth). The author is definitely on the degrowth side and some points can be made against a few of his criticisms of the other futures but overall a great overview and valid critique of some, and strong case for the other. Also of interest because it’s from a “sectoral left think tank in Aotearoa New Zealand” so, although it’s valid for everyone, it’s written from and for Kiwis, which is a less common angle.
TL;DR: the degrowth vision is the only truly wholistic vision aiming for the wellbeing of people around the globe, not one subset or the other.
This approach, which envisages ecological crises as a business opportunity rather than as a fundamental crisis of capitalist socio-economic organisation is largely wishful thinking. Even when technological solutionism is posited on the anti-capitalist left, it tends towards utopian thinking which fails to meaningfully engage with the material reality of ecological crises. […]
If the discourse of the Anthropocene problematically homogenises humans in order to distribute blame equally for ecological crises which are overwhelmingly the result of activities by certain groups of economically privileged humans, discourses surrounding overpopulation predominantly criticise those who contribute the least to these crises. […]
[T]he ideology of technological solutionism remains a prominent fantasy that purportedly fixes Anthropocenic ecological crises. Such claims rely upon the aberrant associations that digital technologies are green, smart or immaterial. […]
While capitalism has historically relied upon the enclosure of commons and the artificial production of scarcity, the degrowth model seeks to promote commons and public ownership in order to manage resources in an ecologically responsible manner whilst also promoting more equal societies. […]
Degrowth, however, should not be understood as a contraction of the existing economic system, but as a transition to an altogether different, post-capitalist economy where ‘wealth’ is understood differently to current measures of GDP or GDP per capita.
Racial capitalism, The Stack and the Green New Deal
Fantastic essay by Damian White, copiously linked to many many external references, it’s one of those “I’ll have to come back to this” pieces. White looks at what design used to be able to do (be more systemic), how the pandemic has affected people unequally along race and age, at ecologies and agriculture, and at the management of space through architecture. He also analyzes three imaginaries: “Design and planning for a Green New Deal,” “The Stack, terraforming and digital design,” and “Decolonial and design justice.” Very interesting and if you only read one thing this week that should be the one, my main takeaway is when White contrasts the three and shows that the decolonial and design justice imaginary “force[s] us to acknowledge that the Green New Deal and the Stack are projects that emanate out of the Global North.” Which means the third, decolonization, is pretty much essential to the other two.
All three imaginaries connect and weave together with many of the articles I’ve shared over the last couple of months, this piece is of course not written for that purpose, but ends up being a good synthesis of those preceding articles.
Wallace argues such forms of animal husbandry and land use change, coming together with the land grabs, expulsions, the ongoing dispossession of peasant and indigenous people and the undercutting of rural smallholder production is bringing together animal agriculture and wildlife in novel and dangerous ways. […]
We have seen a resurgence of interest in mutual aid, neighborhood support, talk of the virtues of victory gardens, WWI style and the like. If this contributes to a broader sense of communal possibility, it could be beneficial. If it merely re-enforces the default of the last few decades into more localist, small is beautiful, anarcho-radical interventions though, an opportunity will be lost. […]
[I]n order for designs for post carbon energy transition to obtain any kind of public support, they need to be linked to broader hopes and aspirations for better jobs, affordable healthcare, sustainable urban worlds, viable and regenerative rural worlds. […]
The Green New Deal and the need to build effective systems of governance, coordination and transparency around the rise of planetary scale computing clearly is going to require a revalidation of planning, of competent and trustworthy public expertise, and the need for public agencies that actually function in the public interest and which are staffed by civil servants who can do their job. […]
The more thoughtful iterations of a design politics for the Green New Deal are important for their attempt to re-ground the state as a terrain of popular struggle and their desire to assert public power through a renewal and reconstruction of public agencies that can be in genuine dialogue with popular pressure from below.
To help the weekly newsletter thrive while remaining free for everyone, get monthly single-topic Dispatches, and make quarterly projects* possible. Please support these explorations in tech, signals of change, & futures.
* So far in 2021: The upcoming library/archive and the Getting Tech Right podcast.
Asides
- 🤩
Terraforming 2021. “Featuring new design and policy projects by The Terraforming 2021 researchers on rethinking populations, mobility and borders; positive biopolitics and ecological engineering & enforcement, hemispherical stacks and alternative notions of ‘technocracy,’ the future of space law and astronomic & political modes of ‘planetarity.’”
🇬🇧 A stranger than fiction Roman ring mystery thread: this enigmatic Roman gold ring was found in a ploughed field near Silchester in 1785. The square bezel has a portrait of the pagan goddess Venus, inscribed backwards SUNEV for use as a signet ring by the owner. Curiously…
- 🦜 An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media. “This field guide looks at social media that works on different “logics” than do Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. It features communities that have tried consciously to use different models than surveillance capitalism and includes the work of collaborators in other countries and subcultures.”
🏼
🇬🇧 Royal family urged to lead rewilding efforts and transform estates. “The letter, addressed to the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge, urges them to prioritise biodiversity in their land management and allow for the restoration of ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, heathlands, swamps and rivers – both as vital wildlife habitats and important carbon sinks.”
- ⭕️ The Circles of Friendship. “The 15 layer includes the previous five, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. They also provide the main circle for exchange of child care. We trust them enough to leave our children with them. The next layer up, at 50, is your big-weekend-barbecue people. And the 150 layer is your weddings and funerals group who would come to your once-in-a-lifetime event.”
🇺🇸 NASA Selects 2 Missions to Study ‘Lost Habitable’ World of Venus. “These investigations are the final selections from four mission concepts NASA picked in February 2020 as part of the agency’s Discovery 2019 competition. Following a competitive, peer-review process, the two missions were chosen based on their potential scientific value and the feasibility of their development plans. The project teams will now work to finalize their requirements, designs, and development plans.”
A Hospital Algorithm Designed To Predict a Deadly Condition Misses Most Cases
The study examined data from nearly 40,000 hospitalizations at Michigan Medicine in 2018 and 2019. Patients developed sepsis in 2,552 of those hospitalizations. Epic's sepsis tool missed 1,709 of those cases, around two-thirds of which were still identified and treated quickly. It only identified 7 percent of sepsis cases that were missed by a physician. The analysis also found a high rate of false positives: when an alert went off for a patient, there was only a 12 percent chance that the patient actually would develop sepsis. Part of the problem, Singh told Stat News, seemed to be in the way the Epic algorithm was developed. It defined sepsis based on when a doctor would submit a bill for treatment, not necessarily when a patient first developed symptoms. That means it's catching cases where the doctor already thinks there's an issue. "It's essentially trying to predict what physicians are already doing," Singh said. It's also not the measure of sepsis that researchers would ordinarily use.
Growing Food With Air and Solar Power Is More Efficient Than Planting Crops (phys.org)
They compared the efficiency of the system with a 10-square-kilometer soybean field. Their analysis showed that growing food from air was 10 times as efficient as growing soybeans in the ground. Put another way, they suggested that a 10-square-kilometer piece of land in the Amazon used to grow soybeans could be converted to a one-square-kilometer piece of land for growing food from the air, with the other nine square kilometers turned back to wild forest growth. They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.
Physicists Induce Motionless Quantum State In Largest Object Yet (newatlas.com)
Most of the time, these experiments are done with clouds of millions of atoms, but the new test was performed on a 10-kg (22-lb) object that contains almost an octillion atoms. Strangely enough, that "object" isn't just one thing itself but the combined motion of four different objects, with a mass of 40 kg (88 lb) each. The researchers conducted the experiment at LIGO, a huge facility famous for detecting gravitational waves as they wash over Earth. It does this by beaming lasers down two 4-km (2.5-mile) tunnels, and bouncing them back with mirrors -- and those mirrors were the objects that the new study cooled to a motional ground state. The photons of light in LIGO's lasers exert tiny bumps on the mirrors as they bounce off, and these disturbances can be measured in later photons. Since the beams are constant, the scientists have plenty of data about the motions of the atoms in the mirrors -- meaning they can then design the perfect counteracting forces. To do so, the researchers attached electromagnets to the back of each mirror, which reduced their collective motion almost to the motional ground state. The mirrors moved less than one-thousandth the width of a proton, essentially cooling down to a crisp 77 nanokelvins -- a hair above absolute zero. The team says that this breakthrough could enable new quantum experiments on the macro scale.
WEEKLY HIGHLIGHTS
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
QUICK READS
BASED ON YOUR READING HISTORY
BEST IN CULTURE
Great head is selfish. It happens when you shed all of your politeness and notions about how a lady or man should act in normal society and tune in to the animal within you, the primal self that only knows how to take what it wants (as long as it knows the other animal wants it to.)
A Drone And A Drum: Lisa Gerrard's Favourite Music
Lottie Brazier , June 23rd, 2021 08:57
From falling into the ‘massive abyss’ of Alfred Schnittke, to the ‘silly and lovely’ Electric Light Orchestra, Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance delivers Lottie Brazier a guide to her thirteen favourite pieces of music
You’ve probably heard Lisa Gerrard’s voice without realising it; as a sample, it introduces the first hazy bars of The Future Sound Of London’s one-of-a-kind rave anthem ‘Papua New Guinea’. Signed to 4AD alongside Cocteau Twins, Gerrard’s own group Dead Can Dance sound more earthy than their labelmates; listening to Cocteau Twins, for her, is more like flying or floating instead. Gerrard herself is a fan of the Cocteau Twins, but stresses that they were in no way trying to emulate them. Dead Can Dance’s self-titled debut was most evocative of their namesake, a palette cemented in a murky guitar sound, distant-sounding drum machines and grainy samples.
Although this most certainly earned them a place on the 4AD roster, their sound became more spacious and dramatic over time, growing as if perceiving their setup more like an orchestra than a band. Gerrard describes how Dead Can Dance toured all over Europe, listening to cassettes, absorbing folk and classical traditions. Their song structures eventually become unrecognisable compared to their early work; The Serpent’s Egg has a kind of regal melancholy and a choral focus, and Aion a medieval-sounding range.
Aside from smattering of impressive performances with Dead Can Dance in recent years, Gerrard has become increasingly more focused on her own solo output. In 2020 she released an album with The Genesis Orchestra, conducted by Yordan Kamdzhalov; a challenge for her to sing in Polish. This May, she released the album Burn, composed with Jules Maxwell, and produced by James Chapman of Maps. It is also to be released as a NFT on the eco-friendly platform Hic Et Nunc.
Listening to Lisa Gerrard talk about her Baker’s Dozen choices, and her musical roots in piano accordion, it’s easy to see how the Dead Can Dance sound is so engulfed in the traditions that inspired them. However, among these are a few surprises, showing a much lighter, humorous side to a singer who just commands so much seriousness in her voice.
Lisa Gerrard's new album 'Burn' with Jules Maxwell is out now.
Netflix has struck a deal with Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin Partners, and while that’s a big move for the platform, it comes with a history that is less than stellar. The negative side of it is all because of Spielberg’s past comments about streaming platforms and his dedication to removing them from Oscar eligibility.
Steven Spielberg has a history with Netflix. Not a great one! In the past, he diminished movies released on the platform, labeling them as “TV movies” and saying that they should qualify for “Emmy awards” but not the Academy Awards. His reasoning was that the “quality” of the film adjusts to fit a television format, something that is not true, as many Netflix movies are actually also released to movie theaters. But his comments and then dedication to changing the rules of the Academy Awards to combat streaming platform submissions marked a complicated relationship between Spielberg and platforms like Netflix.
I have to hand it to the governor. “Anti-voting rights, pro-animal cruelty” is a bold re-election message. pic.twitter.com/bw6JoqC1U2
— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) June 22, 2021
Let’s dive into those claims for a minute, shall we? All the bill says about collars is that they must be “properly fitted” and made of “nylon, leather, or a similar material.” Essentially, it just means people can’t wrap chains tightly around their dogs’ necks. That doesn’t sound like “micro-managing,” does it?
As for the length of a dog’s tether, all the bill requires is that it be “five times the length of the dog, as measured from the tip of the dog’s nose to the base of the dog’s tail or 10 feet“–emphasis mine because it seems perfectly reasonable to not require the same length of tether for a chihuahua that one would for a German shepherd and if that’s too much work, it’s really not that hard to just measure ten feet of rope.
 |
| https://dazeinfo.com/2014/08/18/facebook-inc-fb-fake-fraudulent-news-flashes-frivoled-away-firm/ |
 |
| https://www.statista.com/chart/20685/duplicate-and-false-facebook-accounts/ from 2020 |
The question I posed is no longer so hypothetical. Last month, William M. Arkin broke a massive story for Newsweek, reporting that the Pentagon is administering a 60,000-person “secret army” that conducts “signature reduction.” This is a newish discipline, similar to operational security, that focuses on helping keep clandestine operations hidden.
Sometimes, Arkin writes, this means taking both digital and physical steps—like helping send out bills, tax documents, manufactured IDs, and driver’s licenses—to help operatives maintain covers. “Fake birthplaces and home addresses have to be carefully researched, fake email lives and social media accounts have to be created,” he writes. “And those existences need to have corresponding ‘friends.'” As that would indicate, the work can include manufacturing fake social media networks to create a believable online person—a “trail of fake existence.” In some instances, Arkin reports, the Pentagon’s signature reduction efforts involve “the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”
Most major geological events in Earth's recent history have clustered in 27.5-million-year intervals — a pattern that scientists are now calling the "pulse of the Earth," according to a new study.
Over the past 260 million years, dozens of major geological events, from sea level changes to volcanic eruptions, seem to follow this rhythmic pattern.
"For quite a long time, some geologists have wondered whether there's a cycle of around 30 million years in the geologic record," said lead author Michael Rampino, a professor in the departments of biology and environmental studies at New York University. But until recently, poor dating of such events made the phenomenon difficult to study quantitatively.
 |
| Artist’s illustration of a galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole located in the center of a galaxy. The intense energy emanating from the black hole creates a huge flow of gas that blows away the interstellar matter that is the material for forming stars. (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)) |
Scientists spot earliest-known supermassive black hole 'storm'
A massive maelstrom that raged in the universe's youth could help scientists better understand how galaxies and their central black holes interact.
Most, if not all, galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole at their core. Our own Milky Way has one, for example — a behemoth known as Sagittarius A*, which is about as massive as 4.3 million suns.
Galaxies and their supermassive black holes have a tight relationship. The objects seem to evolve together, perhaps through the action of "winds" that the central black holes generate as they gobble up dust and gas. The black holes' gravity accelerates this infalling stuff to incredibly high speeds, causing it to release energy that can blow other material outward.
"The question is, when did galactic winds come into existence in the universe?" Takuma Izumi, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), said in a statement. "This is an important question, because it is related to an important problem in astronomy: How did galaxies and supermassive black holes co-evolve?"
Takumi led a team of researchers that dug into these questions. Using the NAOJ's Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, the scientists found more than 100 galaxy-supermassive black hole duos that lie at least 13 billion light-years from Earth, meaning they existed more than 13 billion years ago. (It's taken that long for their light to reach Earth.) The universe was young then, relatively speaking; the Big Bang occurred about 13.82 billion years ago.
Next, the team studied the motion of gas within these galaxies using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a network of powerful radio telescopes in Chile. The ALMA data revealed that a galaxy called HSC J124353.93+010038.5 features a galactic wind traveling at about 1.1 million mph (1.8 kph) — fast enough to propel lots of material outward and hinder star-formation activity.
The new results, which were published online in The Astrophysical Journal on June 14, shed further light on the very tight, and very old, bond between galaxies and their central black holes.
"Our observations support recent high-precision computer simulations which have predicted that coevolutionary relationships were in place even at about 13 billion years ago," Izumi said. "We are planning to observe a large number of such objects in the future, and hope to clarify whether or not the primordial coevolution seen in this object is an accurate picture of the general universe at that time."
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
One of the big manufactured panics of 2021 is the fight to keep transgender girls and young women from playing on sports teams corresponding to their gender identity. These bills claim to be in the interest of “protecting” cisgender women and girls from transgender athletes with a “biological advantage” over them.
Yet as Edwards notes, not even the author of his state’s bill could provide an example of a cis female athlete facing this issue. In fact, practically none of the lawmakers or conservative organizations behind these sorts of bills have been able to provide real-life examples from their states when asked.
These sorts of bills are about much more than sports. They’re about denying transgender people their basic right to exist while also having a hefty side order of sexist and racist implications. They do, however, have a huge negative impact on the sports industrial complex, since they tend to focus on denying federal funding to schools that allow trans girls and women to play on girls’ and women’s teams. That then affects those schools’ eligibility to host NCAA tournaments, which are a major source of income for them. Thankfully, that’s been enough to keep some governors from signing their states’ bills into law.
Gov. Edwards' statement on his veto of Senate Bill 156, which sought to prevent transgender girls and women from participating on athletic teams or in sporting events designated for girls or women at elementary, secondary and postsecondary schools. #lagov #lalege pic.twitter.com/i8UPo5sko4
— John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) June 22, 2021
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2106.25 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2184 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment