Odd Lots
- 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.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · climate · COVID · EVs · health
"
I mean, conventional gasoline cars will also catch on fire after hitting buildings: https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2022/11/28/fire-in-melbourne-sends-large-plumes-of-black-smoke-into-sky/
There were admittedly some extenuating circumstances in the case linked above…. and the usual laws of physics don’t apply in Florida….
There are (at least) two things that lead to sensationalization of / overreaction to fires in electric vehicles.
One is that when the battery in an EV catches fire, it is very difficult to put out because the battery contains both the fuel and oxidizer that feed the fire, so just smothering it with foam does not stop the fire. Many (most?) police and fire personnel do not yet understand this, and so have developed fear of what they do not understand, or perhaps not fear but superstition.
I don’t know what led the authorities in Scottsdale to shut down the town because of that EV fire, but I would not be a bit surprised if it were this fear of the unknown, or superstition about it.
The other thing that mostly leads to sensationalizing EV fires is that, because the authorities often don’t know how to handle an EV fire, they mishandle one, leading to reignition of the fire after they think it has been put out, or they overreact to one, and that apparently odd occurrence allows newspapers, TV, and others to attract readers/viewers by creating a lurid story from the incident (even if they understand why it happened, they still capitalize on it to attract an audience).
There might be a third factor coming from the traditional auto industry (or maybe just local dealers of traditional cars) capitalizing on the above to try to undermine public feelings about EVs, but that’s a little too much of a conspiracy theory for me to take very seriously. There are ways that the traditional auto industry is fighting against the popularity of EVs, but I doubt this is one of them.
If police and fire personnel were trained to understand the characteristics of fires in EV batteries and knew the proper tools and techniques to deal with them, that would go a long way to stopping the crazy stories that arise about them. I don’t know who is responsible for such training, but it seems like it isn’t happening.
Re Chat/AI – I’ve been playing with ChatGPT for scene ideas and research in my current work in progress. Interesting results, but I don’t use them verbatim. I use them as ‘idea generators’.
I’ve also used it to research things. It gives me a summary of what I would have found via the googles/bings/ducks, but in less time. I could get the same research info via searching, but would have to wade through several results at the cost of extra time involved.
So, perhaps useful for research and idea generation. But I don’t copy/paste into the story.
If I was a ‘blog generator’ trying to monetize blog and provide affiliate links, maybe I’d use AI to generate the blog text. But don’t think that is a responsible use of my time. There are others that don’t take that viewpoint.
Interesting Nature article on cholesterol, particularly for me as I have a family history of heart disease and have been on statins for decades (over 300mg/dl without them). Big takeaways for me were:
1) The cohort they studied appears to be Korean and Japanese-American. I wonder if ethnicity / locality has any effect?
2) They’re looking at all-cause mortality and do note that lower cholesterol is better when there is specific risk for heart disease.
So this suggests that trying to drive TC down below 200mg/dl for individuals in this cohort without known risks of heart disease may be hurting them. Probably worth more study across a broader base in other countries.
Yes, a small percentage of the population, such as you, do have unfortunate genetics that produce way too much cholesterol and benefit from statins. However, once the sugar and high carb processed food producers bought off the Harvard researchers and got them to blame heart disease on dietary fat instead of on sugar and high carbs, an unholy alliance of pharma, USDA, and a lot of the medical establishment built up a crusade against dietary fat and cholesterol that, although it has been shown to be baseless numerous times over the decades, still holds sway over a lot of the medical and nutritional advice offered to the public.
The situation is slowly improving, but I believe it will take many more decades before that crusade is finally stamped out.
Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories, Bad Calories” extensively documents that the skew was applied decades before the “food pyramid” study.
Re: global warming
I believe this is cherrypicking of data. See also:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-no-global-warming-has-not-paused-over-the-past-eight-years/
In regards to the article in Cell about vaccines, the article says over and over again that such vaccines appear to reduce severe cases of influenza (and covid). They’re not perfect, and they don’t elicit a strong immune response in the upper respiratory or pulmonary mucosa (which surprised me), and they don’t last particularly well. All true.
On balance, I think we come back to Faucci’s greatest sin is still not being honest with the public about the unknowns and the best-effort science that was going on,
IMHO. For that, yes, he needs to go. As with the NTSB, a government science organization that can’t be trusted to tell the truth, even if it’s less than helpful, is less than useless.
The conservative news site the Cell article was sited on is at best spinning this information badly. IMHO this kind of spinning makes a *news* organization worse than useless also. And sadly, most of them are.
Most news organizations in general are worse than useless, I meant to say, not just conservative ones.