COVID
- NASA’s first asteroid sample, from asteroid Bennu, safely landed and is now in a clean room awaiting analysis. That’ll take some time yet, but let’s just say that the journey was definitely the reward—the first of many rewards, I suspect.
- FEMA and the FCC are planning a test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and the Wirless Emergency Alerts (WEA) on Wednesday, October 4 of this year. The timing for the alert is 2:20 PM EST. The WEA portion of the test will be heard on cellphones. The EAS portion of the test will go out to broadcast radio and TV stations. The test broadcasts will announce themselves as test broadcasts and no action need be taken. As I read the release, the EAS portion will last for one minute and the WEA portion for half an hour. (H/t to Don Doerres.)
- Older adults who use the Internet regularly have only half the risk of dementia compared to those who use the net occasionally or not at all. I avoid social media fistfights and use the time I devote to the net to learning new things and promoting my books. Pace Woody Allen, my brain is my first favorite organ.
- The Raspberry Pi 5 has been announced, and the 4 GB version should be available in quantity to end-users by midlate October. (The 8 GB version may not ship until November or December.) Tom’s Hardware has a good long-form overview. The CPU is an A76 quad core with all cores running by default at 2.4 GHz. It overclocks well. Oh, and it has a power button!
- NOAA’s average temperature anomaly chart for the contiguous US shows no clear trend from 2005 to the present. The data come from USCRN, the United States Climate Reference Network, all sites of which are well away from any UHI.
- UHIs bias temperatures quite a bit. Here’s a new study from the peer-reviewed journal Climate that credits UHIs for most of recent recorded warming. As much as 40% of the warming measured since 1850 might be due to measurements made in cities rather than out in the natural environment.
- An NHS study shows that cannabis is a “hyperaccumulator” of heavy metals, especially lead and cadmium. Regular users show hazardous levels of those metals, and traces of several othes, in blood and urine.
- Cannabis isn’t the only hyperaccumulator of heavy metals. Brazil nuts contain 1,000 times the amount of radium found in typical foods. Barium too. I gave up Brazil nuts in my teens because it was just too damned much work to get them out of their shells. Right choice, wrong reason. But emphatically the right choice.
- Another NHS study shows that typical N95 masks emit hazardous levels of toxic organic compounds linked to seizures and cancer. So not only will N95 masks not protect you from COVID, over the long haul they could kill you.
- The penny jars are still coughing up old uncirculated pennies in considerable numbers. Over the past week or so I got brilliant uncirculated (BU) 1976-D and 1969-S pennies. Peculiarly (or maybe not) the uncirculated pennies I find before 2000 tend to be older than pre-2000 pennies showing signs of daily handling. I think this proves my theory that they’ve spent a long time in a jar in somebody’s closet.
- There is now reasonable evidence that night people are at greater risk for type II diabetes than morning people. The researchers seem puzzled by this, but I have a hypothesis based on a lecture I heard 25 years ago at the Mayo Clinic here in Scottsdale: Night people stay up late, but their work or school schedules begin at the same time as for morning people, so night people get less sleep overall. Mayo Climic researchers found that dogs deprived of sleep both gained weight and developed diabetes. There is a metabolic connection to sleep quantity and quality that we don’t fully understand yet, but the research is out there and we could use a lot more.
- A new baby giraffe was born back in July with no spots. Actually, no reticulation; her coat is uniformly the color of giraffe spots. She may be the only such giraffe in the world, and although she’s enjoying the spotlight now, I don’t think she’ll be quite as happy once she gets into giraffe middle school.
- A Tesla EV caught fire here in Scottsdale after it hit a building. (No explanation yet why it crashed.) The cops closed off half a mile of Scottsdale Road (the big street down the middle of the long, narrow city) for most of yesterday, essentially cutting the city in half. Later the same day, while a towing firm was towing what was left of the car away, it caught fire yet again. This is not a good look, and won’t help popularize EVs.
- Clarkesworld, a respected SFF magazine, closed for submissions after receiving a lot of crappy stories written by AIs like ChatGPT. Having messed a little with ChatGPT, I don’t blame them one iota.
- Venus and Jupiter will be only a full-Moon’s width apart just after sunset the night of March 1. Take it in if your skies are clear. This sort of thing doesn’t happn very often.
- Swiss Scientists having been playing music in the rooms used for aging cheese, hoping to create interesting new flavors. Hip-hop, Mozart, and Led Zeppelin each had a cheese wheel. After aging, flavors were tested and the Mozart had a milder flavor than Led Zeppelin and Hip-hop. Good; now let’s see if this trick works for wine.
- NASA satellite data says that there’s been no global warming for eight years, five months. It’s been a chilly winter here, but back in the summer of 1990 we were in the pool in March, after a hot snap took the daytime temps up to 120F.
- This is disturbing: Dr. Fauci evidently knew all along that injected intramuscular vaccines would prevent neither infection nor transmission. He was co-author of a peer-reviewed paper in Cell, a respected journal. The paper explains why: COVID and other respiratory viruses enter through the mucosa, and do not infect the body systemically. Vaccines injected into muscle don’t get out to where the viruses replicate until the infection is well underway and contagious.
- This is the weirdest and (unintentionally) funniest article I’ve ever read in the Grauniad, er, Guardian. According to the author, owning quantities of books is a cultish thing, all very smug and (ewwww!) middle-class. I’m pretty sure a certain somebody is trying to write her way into the elites, and I’m even surer that pieces like this will not do the trick.
- A large-scale study published in the highly respected peer-reviewed Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews found that masks provide little or no protection against aerosol viruses. The study itself is here. It’s a serious slog to read, but several news sources are highlighting it, to the mask cult’s incandescent fury. Here’s something from Real Clear Science. Again, if high-quality masks are worn absolutely perfectly they may have…some…effect, but my own experiments with masks show that such perfection is impossible. Exhaling blew air jets around the edges of every mask I tried, not only releasing viruses, but sending them on a joyride that could have gone six or eight feet or more.
- Another new study published in Nature finds that cholesterol is not the killer we’ve been warned against all our lives. The results showed that cholesterol levels from 210-249 were not only harmless, but protective, in both men and women. The report is surprisingly readable as such things go, with good graphs.
- Pertinent to my last two entries here: City Journal proposes what I proposed two years ago: To reduce the toxicity of social media, slow it down. What they propose is not exponential delays of replies and retweets to replies and retweets until those delays extend fifteen minutes or more. Like a nuclear reactor control rod, that would slow the explosion down until the hotheads cooled off or got bored and went elsewhere. Instead, they suggest Twitter insist on a minimum of 280 characters to posts. That might help some, but if the clue is to slow down viral posts, eliminate the middleman and just slow down responses until “viral” becomes so slow that further response simply stops.
- A statistical study of mask use vs. COVID-19 outcomes found no correlation between mask use and better outcomes, but actually discovered some small correlation between mask use and worse outcomes. Tough read, but bull through it.
- While not as systematic as the above study, an article on City Journal drives another nail in the coffin of “masks as infection prevention.” Graph the infection rates in states with mask mandates and states with no mask mandates and they come out…almost exactly the same.
- Our Sun is getting rowdy, and getting rowdier earlier than expected. Cycle 25 is starting out with a bang. Recent cycles have been relatively peaceful, and nobody is suggesting that Cycle 25 will be anything close to the Cycle 19 peak (1957-58) which was the most active sunspot max in instrumental history. What Cycle 25 may turn out to be is average, which mean 20 meters may start to become a lot more fun than it has been in recent (slow) years.
- And this leads to another question I’ve seen little discussion on: To what extent are damaging solar storms correlated to sunspot peaks? The huge solar storm of 1921 took place closer to the sunspot minimum than the maximum. The legendary Carrington event of 1859 took place during the fairly weak Cycle 10. As best I can tell, it’s about individual sunspots, and not the general state of the Sun at any point in time.
- NASA’s Perseverence Mars rover caught a solar eclipse, when Phobos crossed the disk of the Sun as seen from Perseverence. The video of the eclipse was sped up, but it really is a startling image, especially if you know a little about Phobos, which is decidedly non-spherical.
- I found this very cool: An online, Web-based x86/x64 assembler/disassembler. Although intended for computer security pros, I found it a lot of fun and it may turn out to be useful here and there as I begin to revise my assembly book for the fourth time.
- Skipping sleep can lead to putting on belly fat, which is absolutely the worst place to have it. Get all the sleep you can, duh. Sleep is not optional.
- How many stars are there in the observable universe? It’s a far trickier and sublter calculation than you might think. But the final number looked familiar to me, and might look familiar to people who do low-level programming.
- Lazarus 2.2.0 is now available for download. It’s based on FreePascal 3.2.2. I’ve been playing with it now for a couple of weeks on both Win7 and Win10 and it’s terrific.
- I find this new Chrome technology pretty disturbing. It wasn’t exactly news to me. Now I only use Chrome when nothing else will work. Firefox and Brave have performed very well for me almost all of the time.
- I’m also using Duckduckgo as my main search engine. Heh. Google is on my…well, you know damned well which one of my lists Google is on.
- Brownstone has one of the best summaries of known-effective COVID treatments I’ve seen. It’s a long read with a lot of fine print, but it provides summaries of and links to a large number of papers and studies supporting the summaries. If you don’t have a bookmarks folder for COVID yet, create one–and this should be the first link in it.
- There is another telehealth provider willing to provide early treatment for COVID-19.
- Here’s yet another one that’s been around for awhile and has a good rep. I suspect there are others, and I’m watching for them.
- I’ve posted this before, but it’s been a few months. The FLCCC Alliance is the best site for information both on early treatments and how to find a physician willing to prescribe known-effective drugs for at-home COVID treatment.
- We now have new evidence that multiple sclerosis is caused by the common Epstein-Barr virus. The problem is that only one in 10,000 infected persons eventually develops MS. Something else is at work here, and we don’t know what it is yet.
- A Chicago woman redecorated her house to look ’70s. She did a reasonable job, considering she did it on the cheap. Most of what’s missing are deep shag carpeting (ideally green, like we had where I grew up) and harvest gold appliances. Oh, those colors…
- SSTO was a popular tech topic during the ’90s (remember the Hudson Roton?) but now we may be getting closer to the SSTO Holy Grail: A winged spaceplane that takes off from a runway, makes orbit, and then returns, landing on a runway. Radian Aerospace is still in early design stages, but they’re raising capital and who knows? I hope to live long enough to see that (or something like it) become real, and (better still) routine.
- Quit jumping those sharks. The sharks don’t like it.
- People told them that the relationship wouldn’t last…and now they’ve been married for 81 years. The longest-married couple in the UK got a personally signed anniversary card from Her Majesty the Queen. Ron and Joyce, you won and won big, and I salute you from the other side of the world!
- Here’s an excellent summary of studies of SARS-CoV-2 mask effectiveness from Swiss Policy Research. It’s not an article so much as a list of research studies and papers from mostly European sources, all with links. A number of very clear graphs indicate how infections have mapped to mask mandates. The news is all bad for mask fetishists: Masks do not appear to have any significant effect on the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Be sure to watch the video, which supports my long-term contention that masks propel aerosol viruses via jets around their edges. Given how far air from those jets travels, I’d guess that being next to a person jetting around a mask is more dangerous than standing the same distance from somone not wearing a mask at all.
- Here’s another solid item from Swiss Policy Research on COVID-19 treatment protocols. The US seems peculiarly reluctant to actively treat the disease with known protocols like zinc plus an ionophore or (for no reason I can discover) ivermectin. Yes, ivermectin does work. There is some recent research suggesting that HCQ + zinc will not work, but against that is a fair amount of research, some pioneered by Dr. Zev Zelenko in New York. Here’s the study to which Dr. Zelenko contributed.
- If masks don’t work, what’s the best thing to do? Our doc suggested taking quercetin plus 50mg zinc gluconate every morning as a preventive. Quercetin is a strong ionophore that escorts zinc into cells where it can stop viral replication. Note that not all zinc is created equal. The bioavailability of zinc oxide is essentially zero. Stick with sulfate or gluconate. Quercetin is OTC; we use the NOW formulation that includes bromelain. Whether quercetin is as strong an ionophore as HCQ is something I’ve researched and found nothing useful. I find it interesting that quercetin is used in Erope to treat existing infections, and not merely as a preventive.
- Nitay Arbel posted a link to a study suggesting that the Moderna vaccine’s protective effect is longer-lasting the the Pfizer vaccine’s. If you’re interested in pandemic science at all (as opposed to pandemic politics) bookmark his site and check it regularly.
- Here’s a paper that discusses the differences between ivermectin and HCQ against COVID-19. The TLDR summary is that ivermectin acts against both early cases and more advanced cases, while HCQ+zinc work far better in early cases than advanced cases. HCQ alone doesn’t work at all. I’d suggest bookmarking the page because it contains a huge number of links to pertinent research of all kinds.
- If you’ve never supplemented zinc before and are confused by all the options, this page will lay it all out. It’s a subtler business than I originally thought.
