Cavalcade of Mammals

Here’s a Mochi flashcard deck with cancer drugs, link.

Oval: 15.25″ x 6.875″, half point width 5.9375″
81.7 in2 total area

12 Voronoi regions:
7.6 in2 (73.5g, 8.6 layers 2x + 0.6)
9.4 (91.0, 10.6 layers, 3x – 1.4)
10.4 (100.6, 11.8 layers, 3x)
10.4 (100.6, 11.8 layers, 3x)
5.3 (51.2, 6.0 layers, 1.5x)
7.2 (69.6, 8.1 layers, 2x + 0.1)
6.4 (62.0, 7.2 layers, 2x – 0.8)
3.7 (35.8, 4.2 layers, 1x +0.2) 1.5″ doesn’t quite fit
6.7 (64.8, 7.6 layers, 2x – 0.5)
3.9 (37.8, 4.4 layers, 1x + 0.4) 1.5″ doesn’t quite fit
4.9 (47.4, 5.5 layers, 1.5x – 0.5)
5.9 (57.0, 6.7 layers, 1.5x + 0.7) 1.5″ doesn’t quite fit

Place 1.5″ circles (1.77 in2, 8.5g) at each Voronoi seed point.

3 colors + clear: bottom clear – A – B – C (one of each 4 layers, 2x each 7-8 layers, 3x each 12 layers)

Tintin store in Porto

DIY cat tower

Big doll mold

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. […] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

The Time I Built an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases

New gene therapies confront many sickle cell patients with an impossible choice: a cure or fertility.
CRISPR treatment for sickle cell approved (Casgevy)

USB Logic Analyzer – 24MHz/8-Channel ($20)
Bus Pirate – v3.6a ($33) — v4.0 still experimental

Flipper Zero — Multi-tool Device for Geeks ($150)
CC1101 chip, making it a powerful transceiver < 1 GHz, 125 kHz RF
ID antenna, NFC module 13.56 MHz, BLE, infrared transmitter/receiver, 1-Wire, GPIO

Mini WiFi Surveillance HD Camera, $12.50
2K Pan/Tilt Security Camera, $26

A New mRNA Malaria Vaccine. By targeting resident memory T cells in the liver, a novel mRNA malaria vaccine prevented infection, even in those with prior exposure.

Falling In And Out Of Love With LA’s Mystery-Cloaked Magic Castle, part2, part3

How Many Creationists Are There in America?
2019 poll: 61%-81% US adults pick evolution, 32%-62% of US white evangelical prostestants

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump

Hair Turns Gray Due to Stuck Stem Cells: Hair-coloring stem cells must swing back and forth between their maturity states to give hair its color. Sun et al., 2023

Unvaccinated more likely to have heart attack, stroke after COVID, study finds. Being fully vaccinated reduced the risk by about 41 percent.Jiang et al, 2023

Are the costs of Brexit big or small? by John Springford
“the British economy is around 5 per cent smaller due to Brexit”

The Overwhelming Case for CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) by Willem H. Buiter

Scarce Labor As The Cause Of Innovation. The Habakkuk thesis, Rome and the robotics revolution by Angela Nagl

Book: Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants. by John D. Clark

The Tacit Knowledge Series

Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new? On Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto” by Dave Karpf

The Trilateral Shitpost Fire that was the 1980 GOP convention, part 1: On the long history of thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories on the GOP’s right edge by Seth Cotlar

An Exciting New Approach to Autoimmune Diseases by Eric Topol

Absent Gods, Absent Catastrophes : The Sharing Knife and The Lord of the Rings

Disaster Conservatism: There’s nothing worth saving from the Tory years. Nothing at allby Nick Cohen

The Bluestocking, vol 259: Dahl and Fleming

Two Stories About Tacit Knowledge To build a nuke or (can) not build a nuke by Rohit.Krishnan

Book: The Gutenberg Parenthesis The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet by Jeff Jarvis (2023)
“The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come.”

Book: Glass Art From the Kiln by Rene Culler (2010)

Marx generator This circuit generates a high-voltage pulse by charging a number of capacitors in parallel with DC, then suddenly connecting them in series.

Perimeter of an Ellipse. Estimate or infinite series.

This article by Kevin Drum argues that the Flint water lead poisoning episode was not that bad, there was little lasting damage, and the biggest issue today is people hyping the issue and scaring kids (link).

I have to disagree that “…little damage done. Lead levels never got all that high”. True, the attention the problem received led to a quick response that soon fixed the water, and the lead levels in children’s blood began to decline.

But when the lead issue was discovered, “Resident Zero”’s water had lead levels of 217–13,200 μg/L, 14X – 900X alarming levels (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b00791)!

In the initial study, in 7 of the 9 Flint wards, > 20% of households had water lead levels > 15 ppb, the action level. In the worst wards, child blood lead levels were elevated in 11%, 9%, and 6% of children (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2015.303003). In a quick search, I don’t see how high blood lead levels rose in these kids.

There were 17 months between the water switch and the start of corrective measures. The water lead issue was first identified in Feb 2015, and testing over the spring and summer raised greater and greater alarm as it became clear this was a widespread water issue, and then in Oct 2015 corrective measures were taken.

Several thousand children <6 years old (of 9,000 in Flint) had significantly elevated blood lead levels for more than a year due to this poisoning.

With an announcement by the DOE, that they sorta think COVID-19 leaked from a lab, the discussion is back on. But there is no new evidence, just a mention of ‘intel’.

I am not an intelligence professional, but I have a few related
questions. US intel on this could come from phone intercepts, emails
collected in real time or hacked out more recently, or from chatting
up Chinese virologists at conferences, etc., but this will give the US
at best a more limited view than the Chinese govt has. No doubt there
were calls, emails, reports issued, panic and alarm as China became
aware of the outbreak and tried to contain it. But how likely is it
that the Chinese govt or scientific officials knew the origins of
COVID-19 early on, or worked it out later on? If Chinese officials
don’t know, an effective intelligence operation can’t extract an
answer.

How could China know? If one or more people at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology came down with COVID-19, passed it on to family and
acquaintances, and then COVID-19 spread more widely, they could track
these connections. Classic gumshoe epidemiology. But that did not
happen.

Chinese doctors only became aware of a new disease in Dec 2019, health
officials jumped in by the end of Dec, and samples were collected from
Jan 2019 – March 2020 in the Wuhan market. These samples and those
from early cases in the region have all been sequenced, published, and
shared. This was close to the origin of the pandemic, and it is
unlikely China has any better information on what happened than the
rest of us have. COVID-19 passing into humans much earlier and only
becoming pandemic in 2019 is ruled out by the analysis of COVID-19
sequences.

The best guess at the origin of COVID-19 remains a couple of papers looking at the evidence, the epidemiological evidence of when and where early cases arose, and how it was transmitted, and the genomic evidence from sequencing of COVID-19 in early patients, and comparing these to each other to make a tree of early -> later virus genomes, and to see how the early viral genomes in human patients differ from wild relatives and samples found in the Wuhan live animal market. This sort of analysis can also provide estimates of time–how long the virus has been circulating in human hosts. (ref1, ref2, ref3).

In the Marvel movie, where Thanos snaps half the universe to dust. Incredibly, inexcusably stupid. Let’s take Earth as representative, the population doubles in ~50 years. So Thanos worked for decades, centuries (longer?), with heroic effort, developed an army that destroyed planets, and his big effort bought the universe 50 years?! Do these people not know basic math? Can’t think at all about population dynamics?

If Thanos had dusted 99% of people, it would have bought the universe 400 years. If he dusted 99.999% of people, he would have bought the universe 1000 years, maybe more if too few people survived to keep tech civilization humming along. So it’s all marginal, hardly changes anything.

So maybe Thanos doesn’t dust people, he dusts entire civilizations. If Thanos destroys 99.999% of civilizations, they again bounce back in 1000 years, but takes potentially more time to spread from planet to planet, say 100,000 years. Not nothing, but not that many years, 1 part in 100,000 of the age of the universe.

Thanos really needs to give his ‘less crowded universe’ plan more thought than the two seconds the scriptwriters / comic writer gave this.