A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
This is my younger boy to a T. I'm so glad it's working out for you.
Pre-K and K were pretty tough for my little guy in school. He did well, but the teachers were always waiting for me at pickup to tell me all about how disruptive he was for not sitting still. He got to know the assistant principal pretty well...
1st grade was, actually, great, academically, when he had a teacher who removed the chair from his desk and let him stand and wiggle around all day. She got it. Funny thing is, she left the traditional classroom in 2020, too, and teaches virtual school now.
The rainbows...well...he had a couple bullies who tried to bully him out of loving the color pink, but he's far too stubborn to give into that. Now he rocks rainbow clothing whenever he wants.
Virtual school has really been the best thing possible for him. We didn't always see it back in 2019, but we understand it now and wouldn't ever go back. He thrives in the chaos of constant movement and sound and is academically exceeding anything he could have ever accomplished in a traditional classroom.
I don't talk a lot about local politics, or how crazy things are in rural Florida these days. I want to share a local story, that's been brewing for a long time, today.
I'm pretty sure most of us have at least heard of book bans in Florida schools. What, I think, goes underreported and under discussed is just how terrifying that is for teachers. You'll find some debate about it, DeSantis says it's not true, but, as Florida schools go back into session this week a lot of the teachers my wife and I know are afraid of accidentally committing a 3rd degree felony. How? By having someone find the "wrong" book in their classroom. They've all emptied the shelves of all books, period, but there's still fear.
So, how is this playing out in my local school district? I'm not naming names because I think these poor people need a break.
Ever since a Moms 4 Liberty member got elected to our school board last year, it's been wild. Every school board meeting is jam packed with right wingers cursing and often threatening the other board members. There is one board member, in particular, who is often the focus of their scorn. She also happens to be a former principal and the woman who hired my wife for her first teaching job and a former mentor.
Last year someone was waiting by her car after a meeting with a hatchet and threatened to kill her and her family, if you want to imagine the environment here. For a while she quit going to meetings in person, and was allowed to attend virtually, for her own safety, but because of right wing pressure she's not allowed to do so this year.
This background all brings me to something I learned this morning. Back when my kids were in the local school district(we pulled our kids out and my wife left to teach elsewhere in 2021) there was this super sweet, older lady who was the librarian at their elementary school. She really liked our older boy, in particular, who is a voracious reader, and over the years she would tell his teachers just to send him to the library when he was done with his work. He would read, help shelve books, and even sit at the help desk to help other kids. She went so far above and beyond for the school. She organized plays, she bought books out of her own money...she was the glue that held that school together.
A couple years back she took a well deserved promotion to Head Media Specialist for the entire district. As such, when DeSantis began his book banning crusade she was made the head of a group of 7 people who decide, for the entire district, what books need to be pulled from libraries. Because book banning isn't happening fast enough for the Moms 4 Liberty crowd, she was outed at a school board meeting over the summer as the head of this group. No one else was named.
Since then she's endured non-stop threats. It only took me a few minutes to find her social media this morning and it's disgusting and has been, non-stop, for months.
As I was reading it I couldn't help but think of a very brief interaction I had with @StillIRise1963 yesterday. This is just one example of what's happening with the Dems down here, sadly.
Both are kind of right from my understanding. It's semantics.
Energy put into the lasers > Energy output of the fusion reaction
Energy delivered to the reaction from the lasers < Energy output of the fusion reaction
So the energy from the reaction itself only counting the input and output was a net positive, but the energy used in the experiment as a whole was a net negative.
It really is wild to get out there and realize what most people think. If they know anything about the pandemic at all, their knowledge of how COVID works often stops around March of 2020. I'll never look at public health the same way again...
I've been on this crusade for years now. I believe "rebreathed air" or "air straight from someone else's lungs" needs to be something we talk more about.
Here's a link to a spreadsheet that I've been sending to people recently from @DavidElfstrom:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AjFzhqM_NILYvZjgE8n0CvGZzYh04JpF_DO0phrOcFw/edit#gid=0
@yappari @StillIRise1963 @ehren
Not family, but a friend. Closest thing I had to a brother as a kid. Just a kind human being. Loved everyone. Bit of a hippie, and his dad was always a hard core conservative, but in a militia-type way. After high school we chose to go to the local college together with another couple of friends.
Long story as short as I can make it(I'm bad at short). At 17 years old he got caught smoking pot in his dorm room. His dad saw that as his last opportunity to "save" him and had him sent to military school. He came out of that seemingly OK, went back to college, but he signed up to have the military pay for his college in return for years of service after he graduated.
His wife said that's where it fell apart for him. The constant drip of Fox News changed something in him. He'd come home and talk about something that outraged the Fox News talking heads that day. You have to understand at this point he'd not only voted for, but did some work for the Obama campaign. His wife was getting alarmed, but it was manageable, I guess? It was still the Obama years and no one saw Trump coming.
Trump broke him. He became a full on raging MAGAt. He started going to church with military buddies after a lifetime of atheism.
We tried to talk to him, reason with him, and he'd say things like "You're probably right" but then later he'd text some article from the NY Post or whatnot and say we were wrong. We got him off of Facebook, he realized that social media was bad for him, but he was always getting that Fox News disinformation at the base.
Eventually he split from his wife. He's raising their son to be a right winger, and she's raising their daughter in a liberal environment.
There was a moment, just days after January 6th, where he called me late one night. He was clearly scared of what the MAGA movement had done.
Unfortunately, COVID sent him back. He decided that the vaccines were some liberal plot and lockdowns were "proof" that liberals wanted to take over the country and control everyone. He got into anti-vaxx conspiracies and there was no pulling him back out.
We rarely hear from him anymore, but whenever we do it's always about how liberals are going to institute new vaccine mandates or lab leaks or whatever other COVID-related plot he's wrapped up in at the moment.
Sadly, out of all of the scientists I know about 90% of them just regurgitate old or outright wrong information about COVID when asked, too. I went through something similar with a friend last year. He has an advanced microbiology degree and runs a pretty large company on the west coast. He originally set up COVID precautions for everyone in 2020, but dropped them at the beginning this year(over my vehement protests and I don't even work there!). If you ask him now he'll say he was wrong to ever implement any precautions and COVID was never anything to worry about. He rails on about school closings and whatnot regularly now.
I'm afraid it's really too late in the game to change minds at this point. The idea that COVID was either nothing to begin with, or has been defeated, is pervasive across society irregardless of whether they "should know better" or not.
Hopefully your supervisor takes the time to read and think it all through!
Kids go back to brick and mortar schools, locally, tomorrow morning. My wife and I have already heard from 3 families that they all have "the summer sniffles" or their "allergies are really acting up" after back to school shopping earlier in the week.
Each of these families have previously been warned about SARS-CoV-2 by myself from a scientific standpoint, and my wife from the standpoint of a teacher who now works virtually with kids who need to drop out of brick and mortar schools and make up their high school credits online. Not one has changed anything in their lives to deal with the situation.
I've been told "it's over" and "it's mutated to be non-lethal" and "we got shots a couple of years ago" this past week alone, and all I can do is sit, watch, and hope that all of the kids come out fine in the end.
My wife just told me that one parent of one of her high school kids told her that they went shopping for armored backpacks this week, but not masks. It's pretty dystopian, honestly. Good luck out there kids.
If I'm reading this correctly it's a study of health records, so we don't know for certain what testing was done to confirm the rebound? It also could have been different at different locations. Not to say that there's not something to be learned here.
However, if we know that people can test positive via saliva for COVID RNA after they stop testing positive via the nasopharynx, with the potential of propagating virus after a negative nasopharynx test(https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0282708) then I wonder if we're actually getting the whole picture here.
I feel like a whole lot of the assumptions we're making revolve around the idea that you've cleared the virus just because you got a negative nasal swab.
"Proving" that the system doesn't work has long been one of the goals. It's why Democrats shaming them on the House floor for hurting America and whatnot doesn't even register with them. They don't care. They're not there to make it work. They're there to prove that it doesn't.
There's some info here that I read this morning:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-superconductor-new-developments
I don't know if your intent was to minimize the seriousness of the article, just because most people are only sharing the headline or not, but, it's not really all about natural adaptation, either.
For example:
"There are heat and humidity levels that people cannot physiologically adapt to even if they're healthy, said Kenney, who has studied those limits. His peer-reviewed research findings suggest that the limit for young healthy people is around a wet bulb temperature of 88 degrees Fahrenheit, or 88 degrees at 100 percent relative humidity."
I worked with my kids on a coding challenge for them this summer where they used the official wet bulb calculation(https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/50/11/jamc-d-11-0143.1.xml), took the input from our shaded, patio weather station, calculated the wet bulb temperature and had it sent to our devices 5 times a day along with steps to take at each temperature.
It was over the level "that people cannot physiologically adapt to" most days in July at 12PM and 2PM.
Also from the article:
"Remember your body needs time to recover from heat stress, ideally by sleeping in a cool environment, Stearns said. Without these recovery periods, your body can become less resilient to heat during later exposures and you could be increasing your risk of heat illness, she said.
Air conditioning is your friend, even if you're trying to get your body used to the heat."
It's a pretty big assumption that everyone has unfettered access to AC or "cool environments" to sleep in. Even in my privileged bubble our power goes out for short periods of time almost every day from summer storms, and happened to have been out for most of the afternoon yesterday. Having to rely on an increasingly unreliable grid in order to survive doesn't sound like a great long term solution to climate change.
Not going to lie, I woke up still mad at Jha today. I honestly don't know him and his story well enough to figure out if he just lives in a bubble or if he's just straight up dishonest. Yesterday I already got a "the President and the COVID czar said it's over. What more could you possibly want?"
Yes, all of the things he talked about that schools supposedly had previously were true for HIS kids, but definitely not for mine. So is his latest op-ed all true in his world?
For all of the absurdity he did slip in "For now, there is no foolproof way of avoiding long COVID short of avoiding infections altogether" to his op-ed, which I've been pointing out to anyone who read the headline and tried to tell me it's more "proof" that it's over.
It's a really weird story, for sure. I first heard about it from a fellow scientist in kind of an off hand "Hey, did you hear about this place that shut down, but some scientist kept running their experiments out of a warehouse?" way. I didn't really even read the articles until it kept coming up.
I read today in an article that it was linked to a Las Vegas "office" so I looked up the Nevada listing for the company and found this:
https://www.bizapedia.com/nv/prestige-biotech-inc.html
Seems to be a two person operation running it in Zhaolin Wang and Xiuqin Yao. In 2019 paperwork they're both listed as President, Director, Treasurer, Secretary and Other, so I doubt the paperwork was filed properly.
What I found most interesting was that while Xiuqin Yao didn't come up with any other company hits, the name Zhaolin Wang was connected to multiple companies going back to 2007 and multiple of them seem to be the same type of company.
https://www.bizapedia.com/people/zhaolin-wang.html
His LinkedIn says he graduated from Harvard, is a "Medicinal Chemist" and he does appear to have published while at Harvard in 2000:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi991856n
I throw all this out there because I've read a few pretty far out there theories, almost all of which involve him sneaking into the country from China(I'll let you use your imagination from there), which doesn't appear to be the case at all.
All that said, let's not normalize running a bio lab out of a sketchy, unlicensed warehouse, even if you're from Harvard!
Yes, exactly this. Even my scientist friends largely won't even consider the idea of wearing masks everywhere. The repercussions of that decision are very noticeably piling up on them and their families and they, somehow, don't see the link when I tell them that myself, wife and kids haven't had so much as a runny nose in years. They just kind of chuckle and move on.
I hear you and I don't know either. The climate is pretty complex. I just wanted to add some info into the discussion!
I've never seen that before, so thanks for sharing. I noticed it says "NASA’s Dr Gavin Schmidt tells Carbon Brief that this wording does not reflect more recent research and an update is in the works" and NASA did update it to say:
"However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries. There is a time lag between what we do and when we feel it, but that lag is less than a decade."
In 2022 NOAA stated:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/can-we-slow-or-even-reverse-global-warming
"If all human emissions of heat-trapping gases were to stop today, Earth’s temperature would continue to rise for a few decades as ocean currents bring excess heat stored in the deep ocean back to the surface. Once this excess heat radiated out to space, Earth’s temperature would stabilize. Experts think the additional warming from this “hidden” heat are unlikely to exceed 0.9° Fahrenheit (0.5°Celsius). With no further human influence, natural processes would begin to slowly remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and global temperatures would gradually begin to decline."
Obviously, I'd like to see the real world experiment, too!
Small sample size, but, amongst the people I know who are in this segment of the industry the answer's been very simple. Further acknowledging "postviral" conditions opens a can of worms they don't want to open.
Unexpected source of a short, to the point, article about Bronny James, his cardiac arrest, and how COVID could have played a part:
Undoubtedly good news that they're phasing out those PFAs that we KNOW are bad, but, I think you're onto something here.
The short answer is that the science is in its early phases, but, the replacements do seem to bioaccumulate, although are(perhaps) less toxic.
Some replacements:
https://www.bvna.com/insight/pfas-replacement-compounds
Some of the science about them:
https://esaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ET2020-Obal1.pdf
https://echa.europa.eu/documents/10162/3ef82c03-e698-ccec-9a56-65a9491d20b4
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1438463916305685
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
