Cavalcade of Mammals

What Became of The Entwives: Political Lesbianism
the Levitron
Politicians and Pundits Demanded an Armed Revolution, So the Millers Attempted to Deliver One
And Melissa McEwan at Shakesville on rightwing eliminationism
The GOP had adopted its current language by 1964: Barry Goldwater on Civil Rights: June 19, 1964
US healthcare: high cost and poor outcomes


Recovered Economic History: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious”
Low lights of Obama’s first term

Laser enthusiast (trans from German)
Economics: Opponents Of Transfer Payments Are Not Serious
Origin of the Toll House cookie recipe
Earthtainer planter pdf
Testing de novo assembly bioinformatics
CC number generator for web site registrations
Color enhancing glasses help correct colorblindness
Chopra text generator
Bill Higgins blog
Is gluten sensitivity common?
Flexible opals Stober process
Jacob’s ladder with a flyback transformer
How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong by Jeremy Yoder
Human genetic substructure papers–Tishkoff et al., 2009, Rosenberg et al., 2005

Have the time displayed by colored liquids in glass tubes, either a column of liquid or a large segment. The time tube can be straight or circular.

Move the liquid by a mechanism where brass gears compress a bellows. The brass mechanism would be driven by a microcontroller.

Tess, software for designing tesselations
FBI suppression of peaceful activists
True Bugs posters
Truth about vaccines
Private equity companies in business as slumlords
Outbreaks sourced to labs
Peter Baker’s Days of Fire hackery
Handmade kalliroscope
Crab-ble – A Table That Walks
Nanopore sequencing
The Meaning of Oaths and a Forgotten Man by Lt. Col. Robert Bateman
DIY fog curtain
Pyro Board: A Two Dimensional Ruben’s Tube
Wave simulation java applets
Obama Declares Obamacare Victory
Books to read: Joan Robinson’s “Introduction to Modern Economics” (1973)
Magnet platforms moved by circuit board coils
Crude demonstration of 2D linear motor

The motors made for RC planes and cars are high speed and high power.

For example, the Turnigy Trackstar 1/10 12.0T 3300KV Brushless Motor, $23 specs are:
Kv: 3300
Max Voltage: 15v
Max current: 35amps
Watts: 550
Resistance: 0.0221Ohms
Max RPM: 50000

The load on a microfuge will be greater–22 tubes x 1.5 ml can be roughly 44g, figure a 100g total load with the rotor. So slower than max, but still quite fast.

High power ESC modules are sold to run these motors. So they take DC power, and a servo like signal (PWM), +5, GRD.

So a 10k RPM microfuge can be made with one of these motors + ESC, a servo for locking the lid, and a microcontroller to run it, take speed / time settings, and monitor and show the RPMs on a display.

Power could be from a PC power supply or a dedicated supply.

1 pixel moon
Guide to Convincing Parents to Vaccinate their Children
Boosting the signal: THE SMALL TOOLS MANIFESTO FOR BIOINFORMATICS
Zero senators per state
Why the Fed hates inflation
Progressive Caucus’s Better Off Budget
Levels of analysis of religion, Atran, Boyer & Wilson
Whistleblower Reveals Favoritism Toward the Rich, Robo-Signing at the IRS
Top 5 Bioinformatics papers
Measles spreading in the US
The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry by Lance Dodes (Author), Zachary Dodes
Autism risk

Could new measures substantially improve public health?

What would be the effect if, say, 90% of the country wore filter masks for one week, and concentrated on washing hands?

Infection is a chain, one individual infects one or more others, and an infection gets passed on. That is how disease persists–for most infectious agents, not in one person for months on end, but passed serially every few months as an individual gets infected, and over a few weeks mounts an immune response and fights it off.

An infectious agent requires a basic reproduction factor, an R₀, of more than one. If R₀ > 1, an infection is growing more common, if R₀ < 1, an infection is disappearing. For more diseases, for infection to persist it must spread.

Currently there are constant but weak efforts to reduce the spread of infection–encouraging the sick to stay home and hand washing. Vaccines for influenza. But what if a serious effort was made? A big effort could not be sustained, at least not in the US culture.

But what would be the effect of a large, short effort? If infection transmission can be stomped down for a short period, but long enough to break the chain of infection, it might have a large effect on public health. I wonder if this has been modeled?

On Ubuntu 12.04.

Downloaded from https://github.com/vangdfang/libcutter/.

It was hard to compile, requiring libsvg and several other libraries.
I added to the include directories:

CMakeLists.txt
—
include_directories(${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/include/ ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/include/pub /usr/include/freetype2)
—

Download keys.h from: http://www.jestinstoffel.com/files/keys.h

—
#ifndef KEYS_H
#define KEYS_H
#define MOVE_KEY_0 1194338851ul
#define MOVE_KEY_1 1563510831ul
#define MOVE_KEY_2 992311905ul
#define MOVE_KEY_3 913389615ul

#define CURVE_KEY_0 0x7D316E22ul
#define CURVE_KEY_1 0x4A4A7133ul
#define CURVE_KEY_2 0x5A3C5C5Ful
#define CURVE_KEY_3 0x78613A61ul
#endif

—

Full set of keys:
—
KEY0 - 0x272D6C37, 0x342A6173, 0x3663255B, 0x2B265A4D
KEY1 - 0x7D316E22, 0x4A4A7133, 0x5A3C5C5F, 0x78613A61
KEY2 - 0x47302A23, 0x5D31482F, 0x3B257A61, 0x3671382F
KEY3 - 0x303F6863, 0x71646D30, 0x4769457B, 0x6D342569
KEY4 - 0x45356650, 0x3A386D69, 0x575A7037, 0x335F357D
KEY5 - 0x343A2148, 0x614F3925, 0x753F6953, 0x47463626
KEY6 - 0x3F62626D, 0x7E555F44, 0x7E29425A, 0x52246268
KEY7 - 0x47302A23, 0x342A6173, 0x4769457B, 0x335F357D
—

Replaces include/pub/keys.h

./util/draw_svg ./util/svg_tests/Mini_DIY_circuit.svg /dev/ttyUSB0

Test run, worked!

Other options:
Freecut — Firmware replacement, haven’t tried.
Licut –Tried binaries and program compiled from source, did not work.

Cricut dissection, discusses the default blank cartridge.
ATX Hackerspace cricut page
Repair info
Build-to-spec Cricut Hacks Wiki (recovered from the Internet Archive)

Firefly’s 15 Best Chinese Curses (and How to Say Them)
If at First You Don’t Succeed: A short history of the Republicans’ 48 attempts to repeal Obamacare. By NEERA TANDEN
Origin of America the Beautiful
Syphilis: Then and Now. Researchers are zeroing in on the origin of syphilis and related diseases, which continue to plague the human population some 500 years after the first documented case. By Kristin N Harper, Molly K. Zuckerman, and George J. Armelagos
Misunderstanding Orange Juice as a Health Drink: Juice is, nutritionally, not much better than soda. How did U.S. consumers come to believe that oranges, in any form, were an important part of a healthy diet? by Adee Braun
The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet By Matt Taibbi
From & Friends: Failing upward at the Democratic Leadership Council with Al From. by Rick Perlstein
Oxford Nanopore MinION early data review
Chicago food inspection reports are online
Ten Terrific Resources for Writing Space-Based Hard Science Fiction
Honey Badger
Recent history of political murder in Argentina: An Interview with Uki Goñi by Jessica Sequeira
Panda’s Thumb tears apart “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design Review”
DNA-encoded libraries for drug discovery
Coiled fishing line as muscle fiber
How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson
Boltzmann’s Anthropic Brain
The Deep State and its vulnerability

Here’s an interesting graph comparing disease prevalence before vaccines and now:

This is quite a strong correlation, but how do we know that vaccines caused the diseases to become so rare? Did vaccines causes disease incidence for all these diseases to bottom out, or is it something else, say a coincidence, or maybe all diseases are just disappearing because Americans are healthier today?

So more information is needed. The first thing to consider is that all infectious disease hasn’t gone away. The cold is still as common as ever. Kids still get sore throats and ear aches. There are also the ones I don’t think about or haven’t heard of, like RSV, croup, Fifth disease. And looking at adults, clap, HPV, and gonnorhia are at epidemic levels. So infectious disease is still very common, but the worst diseases have become rare–the ones for which general vaccination is practiced .

Another line of evidence that vaccines are what stomped out the targeted diseases is the timing. They didn’t all disappear at once, not even close. What was observed is that each disease dropped off after widespread vaccination became common.

Here’s a study that looked at incidence for several disease in the US over decades: pdf

If you look at page 4, they summarize incidence over time for 8 diseases. At the top they summarize incidence. The colored section of the graph is detailed regional data. The grey vertical bar shows when widespread vaccination was introduced–a different year for each disease. After the vaccine is introduced, the disease incidence goes way down. Note that for smallpox, it was better vaccines replacing ones started in the 1800’s, so no grey bar is shown.

Here’s a simpler graph of measles from the CDC site:
CDC measles

So it isn’t general health or healthier people with immune systems that prevent disease causing a gradual decline in infectious disease. Instead, the incidence of a specific disease drops when the vaccine is introduced.

Rotavirus

And here’s one of the new vaccines–for rotavirus. Nearly all kids used to get it: “four of five children in the US had symptomatic rotavirus gastroenteritis, one in seven required a clinic or emergency department (ED) visit, one in 70 was hospitalized”. The vaccine was introduced in 2006 and the disease has already become much less common: CDC Surveillance of Rotavirus

See fig 4 especially.

So what I conclude from these lines of evidence is that the introduction of widespread vaccination for a disease causes it to become much, much less common.