- 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.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- My Christmas story “The Camel’s Question” has done pretty well for its first two days on the market, considering how narrow the market for Christmas fiction is and how short the window for selling it into that market. I’m particularly pleased with the cover image, which was inexpensive ($8) and yet startlingly good in context.
- There are currently 47 active volcanoes around the world, and volcanic activity is in fact increasing.
- This is scary as hell: A wheelchair-bound Candian military veteran asked Canada’s national helth service for a wheelchair lift. They offered her euthanasia instead. Canada is performing Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) on about 10,000 people per year. In 2023 MAID will become available to people who suffer mental illness.
- The snow extent in the northern hemisphere this past November was trending toward the highest in 56 years. Several weather models suggest that the entire eastern half of the US is looking at blizzards and very cold temps between now and Christmas. I’ve never been gladder that I live in Arizona, heh.
- This article from Issues & Insights pokes a serious hole in this business of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” neither of which are what they claim to be. People who know nothing of medical science tag any suggestion that Ivermectin is effective against COVID-19 as “misinformation” and do whatever they can to silence MDs who argue that it’s cheap, safe, and needs to be studied in more depth–and could well have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Calling something “misinformation” and then deplatforming those who disagree is the way censorship is done these days.
- Elon Musk and Apple have buried the hatchet, and Twitter’s biggest advertiser is returning to the platform. The grownups in the room realize that ad boycotts simply hand customers to your competitors.
- Evidence is piling up (has been for awhile, actually) that even N95 masks have little or no protective power against COVID aerosols. I posted this link on Twitter some time back–and I wasn’t banned. Elon Musk has made a huge difference in freedom of what I will call “polite conversation;” that is, posting informational links and analysis rather than getting in shouting matches.
- Musk, yeah. He still has a lot of work to do, but the data shows that Twitter is by no means dying.
- Everybody blames too much salt for hypertension. In truth, the science is a lot more nuanced than conventional wisdom would suggest. I did the science on myself regarding salt and blood pressure: I gave up salt for three months. My blood pressure did not go down. I went back to my usual level of added salt, and my blood pressure did not go up. My godmother gave up salt when she was 77. She was dead a year later. Something doesn’t add up here.
- It looks like we are finally doing hard research on bacteriophage therapy against antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Why wasn’t this done twenty years ago?
Odd Lots
- KBAQ, our local classical radio station here in Phoenix, is going to be playing Halloween-ish classical music this evening, from 7 to 10PM Pacific time. You don’t have to be in Phoenix to hear it; the station can be streamed for free by clicking on the Listen Live button from your Web browser.
- The hard outer coating of candy corn is made from the same stuff as the old (and now uncommon) wood finish, shellac. I.e., the lac bug, which produces a resin that can be turned into a hard coating. I used to use a lot of shellac on my home-made bookshelves. I always wondered howthehell many bugs it took to make a quart of shellac. As for lac resin in candy corn:, it can’t be too toxic, or I wouldn’t still be here.
- From the Speaking Of That Department: When I was six, my Grandma Sade gave me a Pez dispenser and a little thing of Pez candies. When I ran out of Pez, I tried putting candy corn (which we had a bag of at home) into the dispenser. The dispenser broke, to my severe annoyance. The upside is that I took it apart and discovered how it worked. That said, I’m not entirely sure I ever had another Pez dispenser.
- M&Ms are popular with astronauts, so much so that the little spheroids are on the International Space Station menu. I’ll bet the same isn’t true of candy corn.
- Stratolaunch is having excellent results with their Roc carrier plane, which is currently the largest airplane in the world. It’s basically two aircraft joined beneath a single looooooong wing, from which Stratolaunch will test-fly hypersonic aircraft. More video here, with a better view of the Roc.
- Dayum. China has developed a drone that can drop robot dogs equipped with machine guns. This very gizmo was a plot point in my unfinished novel The Molten Flesh. There was also a drone with a lethal laser, but having protagonist Ron Uhlein jump on the back of a robodog gun made for a much livelier action scene.
- Under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter is about to start charging bluechecks $20/month for their blue checks. My guess is that Twitter will thereafter have a lot fewer bluechecks.
- The bluecheck program has been tacky since the platform’s creation, arbitrarily separating a wholly artificial elite from the masses. If Musk changes this to provide a bluecheck to anyone presenting verification credentials and $20, the blue check will still be useful, but it will no longer confer prestige. Real prestige takes years of effort to learn. This kind of fake prestige should be the first thing to go.
- Where will the hyperventilating anti-Musk crowd go? Could to be Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, a decentralized network of networks held together by federation. I wrote about Bluesky at some length in yesterday’s Contra entry, which would be a good starting point if you’re interested.
- My guess is that Bluesky is roughly comparable to Mastodon, a federated social network that’s been around for some time. More is on Wikipedia. It sounds good–I like decentralization–but I find it remarkable how little there is about it online.
- For the first time in US history, there will be a total eclipse of the Moon on election day, November 8 of this year. They’re calling it the Blood Moon, which has a really creepy vibe to it, considering the current chaotic state of our political gestalt, On the other hand, today is Halloween, and creepy vibes are all over the place.
Odd Lots
- Here’s a longish research paper from the NIH National Library of Medicine exploring studies of the effects of light at night (LAN) on various body functions. One of the most startling is the degree to which night work correlates to obesity and Type II diabetes. Less clear but more concerning are links between LAN and certain cancers. The message appears to be: Sleep at night, in the dark. Carol and I do that, and have all our lives.
- Hating the Other evidently heightens activity in our reward centers. The late Colin Wilson explored the issue, and claimed that in modern society we have to give ourselves permission to hate the Other…but once we do, hating the Other is delicious and hard to stop. This explains a lot about tribalism in modern politics, 90% of which is about hating the Other–and an important reason why I don’t write about politics.
- Virginia Postrel has a related article on her Substack, about the role of what she calls “purity” and its relation to cancel culture. She mentions Gavin Haynes’ notion of a “purity spiral,” which I think nails the whole purity business. It’s an effort to outbid others in pursuit of an unattainable ideal. It is thus more evidence supporting my notion that idealism is evil.
- I’ve always wondered why music in a minor key sounds sad, spooky, or creepy. Here’s one of the better online essays on the subject.
- I include this (slightly) related item because it asks a question I’ve never heard asked before: What is the most evil chord in music? I would guess it’s the chord that runs around with a chainsaw, cutting treble clefs in thirds, and playing hob in a minor key.
- I wonder how I got to be 70 without ever hearing about raccoon dogs, which are neither raccoons nor dogs. They’re an interesting, albeit invasive, species of canid found in the Far East. The Japanese call them Tanuki, though I don’t recall them coming up in conversation when I was in Japan in 1981.
- Speaking of my 70th birthday, my writer friend and collaborator Jim Strickland brought a Cabernet Sauvignon to our dual birthday party on July 16. I tried it and found it…not bitter. That was a first in my wine experience, granting that once I tasted a few bitter specimens, I basically stopped trying them. The wine in question is from Daou, vintage 2020. About $20 at our Kroger-affiliate supermarket. Quite dry, but no oak, which spoils all the other flavors for me..
- Well. Ever heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” played on several disemboweled scanners and piles of 5″ floppy drives, plus the occasional phone modem? Here’s your chance.
- In case you don’t yet have enough interesting things to read, here’s the Smithsonian’s history of the hard hat.
- Back in June, people in San Francisco reported that anchovies were falling from the sky. People did not report anyone running around the city’s streets holding a pizza and hoping for free fish.
- Hey, this was evidently a banner year for Pacific Coast anchovies. My guess is that with no one putting them on pizzas anymore, their depleted populations have rebounded.
- After using it since 2005, LiveJournal has canceled my account there. I don’t think anybody was reading it anyway. It was a mirror, and I have better backup schemes now.
Odd Lots
- I hurt my back and had to cancel a trip to Chicago to see family, and then to Chattanooga for Libertycon, which is the only con I go to anymore. Now, two weeks before my 70th birthday, I have to remind myself that, weight training or no weight training, lifting and carrying heavy things can be a hazard to your health.
- Health, yeah. New medical research from South Australia shows a causal relationship between low vitamin D levels and dementia. Vitamin D has a number of benefits, most of which have been known for years. Carol and I have an ace in the hole: We’re in Arizona, where cloudy days are rare, so we get a lot more sunlight than we used to. And we take a 5000 IU supplement every morning, mostly because we’re not kids anymore, and D synthesis declines with age, sunshine or no sunshine. Bottom line: Don’t be D-ficient.
- I dunno, but it sure looks like all the recent Corvettes we’ve seen here around town look like a car that some giant foot stepped on. Not to be outdone by Chevy, Cadillac is fielding the same profile. We giggle every time they go by.
- I’ve never heard of “foot pool” before, but it looks like a lot of fun. Most of the activity I see mentioned online are from the UK.
- Bet you never wanted to read the history of canned wine, eh? Well, here it is. I clearly remember drinking a can of white zinfandel among friends circa 1971. Nothing about it seemed odd to me then, as I had yet to encounter conventional wine culture.
- New research suggests that THE MOST HIDEOUSLY DANGEROUS DEADLY DRUG IN THE ENTIRE COSMOS DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT has anticancer properties. More research is planned, if the poor researchers are ever allowed to lay hands on the stuff.
- Can we literally throw things into orbit? A startup named SpinLaunch has built a small-scale proof-of-concept launching machine, and has managed to throw a 9-foot payload up as high as 30,000 feet. Fuel, water, atmosphere, clothes? Though the article does not state an acceleration in g’s, it’s gotta be intense, and way beyond what living material can stand. But for provisioning space stations it could be just the thing. Good luck, guys.
- Wow. I didn’t know this: Big dust clouds near the center of our galaxy taste like…raspberries. Oh, and they smell like rum. Alas, it’s just the ethyl formate talking.
- A new research paper out of the New England Journal of Medicine has found that in a small trial of a new drug called dostarlimab, with a cohort of 18 colorectal cancer patients, the remission rate was…100%. Dostalimab is a monoclonal antibody originally intended to treat endometrial cancer. Researchers think it may be a much more general cancer treatment, and new studies are planned.
- And here’s another: A study conducted at the University of Toronto showed that toddlers who grew up with dogs (but not cats) appear to have some protection against Crohn’s Disease. The article doesn’t say that having a cat nullifies the protection, only that growing up with cats has no similar effects.
- Finally, Amazon must have thought I was Geoffrey Chaucer. Or that the man was WAYYYYY ahead of his time. (Read the page closely.)
Odd Lots
- 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.
Lots of Odd Lots
- The weirdest site to cross my desktop recently is this one, which attempts (and fails wretchedly) to demonstrate how to pronounce my last name. Many of my readers may never have heard my name spoken out loud. This is not where you go to hear it. My last name has three syllables, accent on the first. The ‘e’ and the ‘a’ are schwas. Those who know how to read an upside-down ‘e’ will understand that the name is pronounced Dun-tə-mən.
- Vitamin D appears to have a strong protective effect against SARS2, but it looks like you also need vitamin K2 and magnesium to allow D to work at peak effectiveness.
- We were spoiled by a very long and very deep solar minimum. The Sun is getting frisky again, and is putting out some pretty spectacular flares and CMEs. The last several weeks have been so frisky that nearly all of a 49-satellite Starlink launch failed to remain in orbit due to geomagnetic storm effects that puffed up the atmosphere sufficiently that the drag caused the satellites to lose velocity and burn up in the atmo.
- If such things interest you, be sure to bookmark SpaceWeatherLive, which provides all kinds of stats about the current state of the Sun.
- The ancient Persians were cool. This is how they did it.
- Crossing the broad Atlantic, a shipful of hot cars got a little too hot. VWs, sure. But also Audis, Porsches, and Bentleys. Did somebody sneak in a Firebird?
- From the Strange Bedfellows Department: Android 13 Tiramisu will include virtualization capable of running ARM Windows 11. That’s not really the goal for the Android team, but Android developers have already gotten the Windows Doom implementation to run on it. I’m not sure my 2017-era Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 has the muscle to run Android 13, much less Android 13 running Windows 11 in a VM. I like that little slab. I’m not sure I’ll give it up to play Doom.
- Also from the Strange Bedfellows Department: The next release of Windows 11 will be able to run Android ARM apps seminatively, by compiling them to x64 code using Intel’s Bridge post-compiler technology. How long this compilation process will take is unclear, as well as whether it need only be done once, or every time an ARM app is launched. I’m looking into it because it’s a neat hack, not because I’m desperate to run Android apps on my Windows machine.
- Recent research shows that Viagra and its cousins could well treat vascular dementia by increasing blood flow to the brain as well as, well, elsewhere. Sounds weird, but in truth, this is the 21st Century, and given a choice between flying cars and a cure for dementia, heh, the cars lose.
- In this superb piece from The Tablet , author Dr. Vinay Prasad, an MD oncologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, blows holes in whatever may be left of the CDC’s reputation as a scientific rather than political agency. Their studies are often designed expressly to scare people, and when looked at closely fail to support the conclusions that the CDC insists they do. Read The Whole Thing, as Glenn says.
- I like volcanoes (from a distance) and drone technology makes taking photos of eruptions a lot less risky than it used to be. Here’s a collection of drone photos of the current eruption of Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall volcano. Fine stuff. Reminds me of a certain book I read some time back…
- Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, is activing up again. Here’s a set of photos (not taken from drones) that shows the immensity of the mountain, its lava fountains, and the clouds of ash it hurled 12 kilometers high.
- From the Solutions Looking Desperately for a Problem Department: The Idaho Potato Commission has developed a limited-edition perfume that will make you smell like a plate of French fries. Now, Mc D…why not get into the perfume business? Your customers could smell like a Big Mac–which is at least as compelling as smelling like French fries. Maybe less.
- French fries, egad: The Latest Thing in NYC is French Tacos. We are sternly reminded in the article that even a single French Taco is called a French Tacos, which sounds Classical Greek more than French. (Tahk-awss?) The item is described as “a rather successful marriage between panini, kebab, and burrito.” And they put the French fries inside the tortilla. Labor-saving fast food at its best…or at least its weirdest.
- 1800 years ago, a Roman teen girl named Crepereia Tryphaena died. In her casket was a doll carved of ivory with jointed limbs and the proportions we would today associate with Barbie. The Romans scooped Mattel in 150 AD!
- One of the reasons I live in Arizona is that the risk of injury by exploding trees is minimal. Way up north, when temps drop to forty below, maple trees freeze to their cores and the expansion of the frozen sap causes the trees to explode with a sound like a gunshot. I’ll bet the late George Ewing could tell us a few things about exploding trees. I miss him terribly.
Odd Lots
- 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!
Odd Lots
- While putting our Christmas decorations up a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that I only hear the word “stocking” in connection with Christmas these days. Does anyone actually wear stockings anymore?
- Well, the best Christmas present we telescope freaks could ask for is a successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, now scheduled to head for orbit on Christmas day at 7:20 AM EST. Here’s the countdown page. I’m keeping it in a tab.
- My first car was a Chevy. As far as I’m concerned, this is the best car commercial of all time.
- Astronomers are finding a great many free-floating planets (FFPs), which are planets just drifting around without any star to circle. How they form remains a mystery; are they failed stars or ejected planets? And what sorts of stories could an SF writer tell about FFPs?
- Now here’s a headline that somebody waited years to write: Imaginary numbers might be needed to describe reality. You need to know more quantum physics than I do to understand the point they’re making, but it’s a marvelous headline nonetheless.
- Watching a video lecture twice at double speed can help you retain what you learn better than watching it only once. I dunno. I still prefer books.
- This is why we don’t live in the midwest anymore. Freezing rain? Our problem is evaporating rain. And you don’t skid on heat, heh.
- We’re short on snow here in the desert southwest. We have no shortage of tumbleweeds, though. And this leads to the obvious conclusion.
- I’ve posted a much cleaner version of my flash fiction story “STORMY Vs. the Tornadoes,” which originally ran in PC Techniques. The new copy is an excerpt from Souls in Silicon , my collection of stories about strong AI. $2.99 ebook, $11.99 paperback.
- Enjoy Christmas Eve. At our house we always had the Polish Wigilia (vigil) supper at sundown, when the first star of evening (the Gwiadzka) appears. Alas, in Chicago, seeing any stars at all on Christmas Eve was probably a one-in-three chance. We did our best. I’ve always considered this verse from Nehemiah 8 as a Christmas Eve injunction: “Eat fat, drink sweet wine, and send portions to those who have nothing, for this day is holy to our Lord.”
Odd Lots
- Sandia Labs has invented a way to extract metals from coal ash, including rare-earth metals used in batteries and electronics. Furthermore, they do this using food-grade citric acid, which is relatively benign from an environmental standpoint. The treatment makes the coal ash residue much less toxic, and thus easier to dispose of.
- It took a few seconds to decide if this listicle item was in fact satire, but it seems to be factually accurate, to the extent that facts are presented. Behold a stack rank of The Most Miserable Cities in America. Arizona has both ends covered: Bullhead City is the most miserable city in the state, but Scottsdale is said to be the happiest city, and Phoenix the city with the greatest job security. The Phoenix suburb of Gilbert has the lowest poverty rate, not just in Arizona but in the whole country.
- A lot of misery is caused by debt. Here’s another stack rank of our 50 states (it’s a long piece; scroll down to find the full table) this time by debt per capita. Arizona is #42, which I consider pretty good. Wyoming is #50. My home state of Illinois is #4. and, as usual, the king in this wretched wreck of a castle is…skip the drumroll, please–New York.
- Mary Pat Campbell operates a fascinating site called Actuarial News, which aggregates articles about economics, risk and statistics in many areas, including COVID. She’s an excellent aggregator, in that her capsule summaries save time for me by letting me decide quickly whether a piece is worth reading in full. Highly recommended.
- Arizona has administered 8,197,928 doses of COVID vaccine as of today. 59% of the population is fully vaccinated, while 69.5% of eligible persons are fully vaccinated, including 88% of the over-65 cohort. Unfortunately, the state does not track breakthrough infections, which are a topic of great interest to me right now.
- Every new Windows 10 machine I’ve bought in the last couple of years has pestered me to “get even more out of Windows” at boot time. You can’t kill the screen except to delay it by 3 days. Here’s how to kill it so it never comes up again. I’ve done this on three machines so far and it’s worked every time.
- Antarctica just had its coldest winter on record . Average temp there went down to -61.1C, the coldest ever recorded. Russia’s Vostok station went down to -79C, (-110F) just one degree from the coldest temp ever recorded on Earth. Brrrr! As for fear of the Antarctic ice melting and killing us all, well…don’t sweat it.
- From the No Shit, Sherlock department comes a revelation that full-fat dairy products do not increase heart disease risk. I’ve been following the high-fat/low-fat issue for 20 years, and this is not new knowledge. Of course, the knucklehead interviewed at the end said that non-tropical vegetable oils are even healthier than dairy fat. To the contrary.
- A study performed by a Native American health service found that treating COVID-19 patients with monoclonal antibodies was very effective: Only 17% of infected patients treated in the study were later admitted to a hospital, and only 3% died.
- Here’s another drug to watch for early-intervention COVID-19 treatment: fluvoxamine (Luvox) which is a well-understood SSRI antidepressant that also has anti-inflammatory properties. See this paper published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
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Merck has a new antiviral in testing with “phenomenal” success against SARS-COV-2 . It will cost $70/pill. Why is there a furious war being waged against ivermectin? It’s a well-understood and safe generic that costs $2/pill. Meanwhile, much of the health industry, including hospitals, clinics, pharmacists, and even doctors (who should know better) are standing around watching people die, even as evidence is piling up that ivermectin is effective against early COVID-19. Merck’s new drug may be a gamechanger, but the game is crooked as hell.
- Since we’re talking about diseases, I’ll throw this in: Certainty is a disease. An interesting piece from Inc explains how certainty is a key element of the Dunning-Kruger effect. My own views go like this: Certainty and competence are inversely related. The more certain you are, the less competent you’re likely to be. Many years observing humanity suggests to me that the more you scream about how right you are, the more likely you are to be wrong.
