AK Renwick @Akrenwick@qoto.org

I appreciate your concern
but no
I do not plan
on wearing this mask
forever
though your naked sneer
sadly informs me
that I will need
to keep wearing it
for quite a while longer.

Y’all pediatricians are really not ok.

Please, for the love of oxygen delivery, do everything you can to slow the spread of illness.

This is not sustainable.

Moderna BA.5 bivalent booster results announced

—largest study to date of >500 adults, ages 19-89
—5-6 fold higher BA.5 neutralizing Abs vs original booster
—"robust" increased nAbs vs BQ.1.1
—Table below summarizes all 7 studies reported

If it’s not stated already, I’ll just put this out into the mastodon sphere -
➡️ we should care about long COVID and do more to investigate it
➡️ I support masking. Like. A lot. And vaccinations.
➡️ best way to protect yourself is not get infected in the first place
➡️ good public health puts equity as the core mission
➡️ COVID is serious and still ongoing

The daily pandemic briefing Ground Truths today is on 2 publications regarding Covid reinfections and #LongCovid https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-reinfections-and-long-covid

Nearly everyone on Berlin public transport wearing FFP2 facemasks & receiving regular reminders that FFP2s are mandatory. Feels so much #COVID safer. Such an easy thing to do & big gains re. reduction of transmission.

This has to be the steampunkiest astronomer photo ever.

#steampunk #astronomy

How do you make a thread on Mastodon?

Pretty much the same way as on Twitter, with one difference. You compose the first post, publish it, then reply to it, then reply to it again, and so on. But there's one difference. If the first post is Public, you can make all the others Unlisted. This way, people can follow the thread by clicking on the first post, but their timeline isn't clogged up with all of the other posts.

[A short thread]

#FediTip #help

Interesting fact of the day: The same effect that cuased light in a prism to split up into different colors is what ultimately caused the first transatlantic telegraphic wire in 1858 to fail.

Morse code is transmitted as on-off signals, effectively square waves. Square waves are in fact made up of many different frequencies. Like in a prism different frequencies move at different speeds through a wire. Therefore as the on-off pulses traveled through the transatlantic telegraph wire the signal spread out like it does in a prism and ultimately the pulses would overlap and be indistinguishable.

The effect was so extreme that it took a message of only 98 words (the first message sent) over 67 minutes to send one way and a whopping 16 hours to confirm the message.

Whitehouse, a doctor with little mathematical understanding, thought he could solve the problem by increasing voltage, which we now know was a futile effort. He increased the voltage to the point he managed to short out the cable entirely and made it useless. However Lord Kelvin had already warned of the problem as was ignored and he came up with the law of squares to describe the problem which later was refined to give us the telegraphers equation. The telegraphers equation is still used today to model feedlines in radio transmitters and receivers.

#Science #STEM #Physics #History @Science #QOTOJournal