Note the sender of this tweet:
— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) May 24, 2021
CrossFitters were annoying in every century https://t.co/jJYobpIDtB
— Alison McQuade (@akmcquade) May 27, 2021
And squirrels are aggressive around food!
I am trying to imagine the series of event that lead to this sign ?? pic.twitter.com/0EWGIFS9iV
— Richard Daily, MD & Benzie (@rdaily) May 22, 2021
Helpful reminder:
Twitter versus real life… pic.twitter.com/kmAZF91YJz
— Rex Chapman???? (@RexChapman) May 20, 2021
And finally, timeless wisdom:
(Basic Instructions via GoComics.com)
Today In Revolutionary Warfare: Senator McConnell Blocks An Independent 6 January Commission
Gin & Tonic
Here to annoy raven.
MattF
Jazz bagpipes.
Topology is a hell of a drug.
Spanky
@Gin & Tonic: In b4 raven.
Spanky
Why do the Spanish even have dinosaur statues?
Mary G
Big brothers/sisters everywhere:
Chetan Murthy
Whoa. BSG is being rebooted -again-? Interesting.
dmsilev
I just now saw one of our campus turtles patiently waiting at the pickup window at the campus library. Waiting for what, I don’t know; you need an ID card to check out books.
Another Scott
@MattF: Ropes are fun!
And who among us hasn’t been in this situation (one of the More Tweets):
(I hate it when that happens…)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: (c) 2014.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Another Scott: Wanna bet he was running a Mac? That wouldn’t have happened with a Debian-based install.
dmsilev
@Spanky: The real question is why don’t the Spanish have topiary dinosaur statues?
Chetan Murthy
@Another Scott: Wait, so far, there have only been *two* (re)boots, right? The original, and the one in 2014 (or whenever it was — the one with Katee Sackoff, Olmos, Bamber, et al).
What’s the third?
Gin & Tonic
Pollution abatement is a long-term project, but it can work.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: At least you didn’t say it. Thank you for that.
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: A 3rd this year.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: That is so awesome, I had to watch it 3 times.
CaseyL
@Chetan Murthy: A new BSG (“not a reboot! not a sequel! not sure what to call it, actually!”) was announced in January, but in March their main writer left for another series. I haven’t heard anything more recent.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: I enjoyed the BSG reboot a lot. But geez, can’t think think of anything *original* to do instead of yet another? Really” Really?
RepubAnon
@dmsilev: The moral is – you can always buy another cell phone:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57226774
Martin
I really think this article needs to be front-paged.
It’s a really important look into scientific literacy, the problems of territorialism within academia and science, and explains why the guidance changed so much throughout the pandemic, and reveals a bit of why people lost faith in some of that guidance. For a site that hosts Tom Levinson, it seems like a perfect fit for us.
It’s also a bit of insight into why many Asian countries who didn’t rely on 60 year old research turned cultural knowledge took very different paths than the US. They relied more on their direct experience from similar diseases in recent history, and less on theory. And of course, western countries didn’t respect that experience.
RSA
@Another Scott: How funny. This past week I installed Anaconda and Jupyter on my Mac, along with some other tools, to do some prototyping for a robotics project. It’s all been pretty solid—the main limitation has been trying to move beyond the novice stage with both Python and OWL.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Everyone forgets about (and rightfully so) Galactica 1980.
;)
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: is it interesting though?
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: The saga of “aerosol” vs “droplet” transmission of covid is a fantastic one for teaching the social process of science. That it’s not now and never has been about “getting it right the first time” or even “getting it right eventually”, but rather “getting it right more often than the other methods”.
Which is another way of saying: I remember when this controversy started in March. And pretty quickly I concluded that I didn’t know the answer, wasn’t going to be able to figure out the answer, and couldn’t wait for others to do so. So I assumed the worst. Which is the only reasonable thing to do when it’s life-or-death and it’s clear the science is unsettled.
In a similar way, a friend once told me that unless it were life-or-death, he tries not to take drugs that are still patented. He’d prefer to let the first 2-3 longitudinally-studied cohorts be the guinea pigs.
trollhattan
OMG those dogs, I’m dying here. ????????
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax: Rightly so indeed. I watched that. Boy, it was bad. I remembered it, but it was sequel, not a reboot, so I didn’t count it.
trollhattan
@NotMax:
Nearly forgot. Man, was that a nice moment.
Gin & Tonic
@RepubAnon: Some years back I was heading down the stairs at the Fulton St. subway station late at night, pulled my Blackberry out of my pocket and – like in a movie – watched it bounce down the stairs, hit once on the platform and down onto the tracks. Needless to say, I didn’t go down to get it.
John Revolta
If you look closely you can still see some of Bybon’s hair in the dented spot there
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: What are you talking about? It’s basically the same install.
Mind you, anaconda is just asking for trouble. That’s the real lesson – keep that shit off of your machine. Use poetry instead of pipenv, build your own environment, click instead of argparse, typehint everything.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: I’m referring to the fact that he managed to brick his machine. I mean, python+anaconda+jupyter should never be able to brick a machine, unless the installer does wacky things as root. And that need to be root …. well, the only time one does that on Debian boxes, is to install DEBs. Which typically go thru a better process than random script-installs.
John Revolta
Also, I understand that originally you could just yell “Book drop!”, but then the squirrels got wise to this.
Obvious Russian Troll
@RepubAnon: Everybody thinks it’s easy to get your phone out of a dinosaur statue until they actually get stuck in a dinosaur statue.
I also have to wonder if intoxicants weren’t involved. They certainly wouldn’t have helped.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: I should add that I know that the Mac is BSD at the bottom. But its installers are not like the package-installers on modern UNIX/Linux, e.g. rpm/deb.
Jeffro
@RepubAnon: there was a guy they found a couple years ago in Iowa who had fallen behind a couple of large, free-standing walk-in freezer units at a grocery store. Kind of met the same fate.
Moral of the story: um, I dunno…don’t lean headfirst into small spaces where you’re not likely to be found for a while? (Or a decade, in Iowa Guy’s case).
Kropacetic
@Chetan Murthy: I haven’t seen any BSG, but in defense of the reboot phenomenon; as long as original elements manifest and the story has something meaningful to say, I’m generally for reboots.
All stories recycle old ideas to some extent. If the themes, character archetypes, and setting you’d like to work with already exist in a particular IP and you either have or can obtain the right to work with that IP; it may even be more honest to work with that IP at least as a base.
It can even be fun to focus on ideas that may have been less developed in other iterations or see a once familiar story in a new context or even with major details changed.
Besides, many people have many much-beloved characters for whom they’d love to see new stories. Writers who treat the source material with respect, while also wanting to tell a good story manage to put some ideas worthy of real critical thought into these popcorn movies/shows.
Obvious Russian Troll
@Chetan Murthy: The scenario I can see is where he needed to do an upgrade at the OS level in order to install one piece or another.
(Which could also be possible if he has a Mac–there was an upgrade a few months ago that was bricking older Macbook Pros. Apple, I love you but we need to talk about this. And your goddamn keyboards.)
Another Scott
@RSA: I’ve only installed Anaconda on a couple of Win10 machines, but I do recall thinking that the upgrade process was pretty opaque (as in – dig into the Help rather than trying to use Pip or something). And my recollection is that the built-in Python on the Mac often doesn’t play well with big libraries like wxPython, so being aware of that and knowing how to work around it (e.g. install a different version of Python without breaking what macOS thinks Python should be) is important.
So, all of the disasters happening on a Mac wouldn’t surprise me at all! ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Interesting article. I am going to read it more carefully later, but skimmed through it, and tried to make note of its main points.
The comparison to measles was worked out fairly early and was a very important distinction that some people just refused to acknowledge when they attacked or defended the use of masks.
So the textbooks were not entirely wrong. In any event, the issue of effective ventilation needs to be investigated more thoroughly, especially was parts of the world head into winter, with more people returning to work and school and staying inside more.
I am sure that similar conversations are taking place elsewhere, but in Los Angeles County, there is a noisy bunch of idiots who have always been unhappy about the closures of bars and restaurants during the pandemic, and who sometimes claim that there are no studies which “prove” that restaurants were responsible for the spread of the virus.
But it was not possible to set up tests inside restaurants, or to track workers and customers. And some attempts at modeling were not very rigorous. But this is an area that desperately needs more investigation.
There is a similar situation with respect to public schools and colleges.
The research noted in the Wired story may help tremendously with this.
MattF
@Chetan Murthy: My understanding is that one of the essential features of Anaconda on Unix is that the whole thing resides in userland— so if it crashes, the system level stuff is unaffected. Since MacOS is Unix under the hood, that should be true for MacOS as well. Am I wrong?
Chetan Murthy
@Obvious Russian Troll: There again is something that Debian-based distros rarely cause. Debian has a long history of not bricking machines at upgrade time. I had a machine I kept going for well over 10yr, release-to-release.
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: I got stuck in the beginning on this one and at one point realized that pollen was like 30µ, that I’m normally on 3 different allergy meds, and don’t need to be sitting within 6′ of a plant to suffer. Something about the early guidance didn’t add up, and like you I’m not qualified to sort it out.
Our main focus early on was what would happen in a lecture hall. Even assuming just surface transmission, it was completely unworkable. If it was aerosolized, just hell no. And we had no way of operating without lecture halls. It was clear we’d have to shut down. The only question was what would be the precipitating factor – our own ability to recognize the inevitability of that, or waiting for someone to get sick, or someone to die. Thankfully we didn’t wait.
Drunkenhausfrau
Odd request: a MAGA relative sent family email containing PragerU video saying green energy cannot be done, limits to batteries, wind doesn’t always blow, blah de garbage blah. I responded that PragerU videos are right wing misinformation. (I don’t usually want to pick a family fight but am tired of my 90 year olds mom getting brainwashed.) now, MAGA relative has challenged me to find a knowledgeable scientific point by point rebuttal to said PU rwnj video. Anybody know where I should look for such evidence?
Chetan Murthy
@MattF: You’re not wrong. That’s why I focused on the -installation- process. B/c that’s the one place where Macs are different from UNIX/Linux.
Chetan Murthy
@Drunkenhausfrau: Don’t go down that rabbit hole. They’ll never be satisfied. Instead, point out that Prager U is as terustworthy as my asshole, and they need to produce scientific substantiation for the claims, b/c the entirety of the scientific establishment is against them.
Obvious Russian Troll
@Chetan Murthy: I’d be running all that crap in a VM so I wouldn’t have to worry about it.
Kristine
@Mary G: that is the best tweet of the week
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: Homebrew is, and I’ve never seen a Mac user use anything else for managing a python install. Homebrew is so ubiquitous that Apple threw their engineers on the project to ensure that packages would build cleanly against M1 Macs.
What’s more Homebrew has extensions to install packages directly from github, from the Mac App Store, and Apple’s own system installers, so you can create one script to build your entire environment.
RSA
@Another Scott: Thanks for the advice. I switch back and forth between my Mac and my Linux machine, and I was hoping that on the Mac things would just work. Typically they do, but of course when they don’t it’s hard to figure out why not.
I should just put in the time to learn the basics, but I’m a little impatient—I just want to get stuff done.
Kropacetic
Certainly there must be some form of surgical recontruction available for such an untrustworthy asshole. Or are diapers the solution?
Martin
@Another Scott: I’ve never seen anyone use the built-in python on Mac. Everyone hands that to homebrew to manage.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: I remember that Li’s paper made a pretty big splash when it came out (on a preprint server) in April 2020.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20067728v1
Cheers,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
Drunkenhausfrau:
Here are some:
https://www.google.com/search?q=rebuttal+to+prager+U+green+energy+criticidm&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
If the link doesn’t work, I googled “rebuttal to Prager U green energy criticism.”
I HATE Prager!
Another Scott
@Drunkenhausfrau: Google suggested “prageru lies” before I finished typing prageru.
Lots of stuff there.
Or more specifically, ArsTechnica.
Or more simply, Prager University is not a university.
HTH. Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Kropacetic:
I was never much of a fan of any iteration of BSG, so they could reboot it until the cows came home, and I would never be much interested.
But I agree with your main point and don’t oppose reboots. But sometimes just slapping an old brand name on substantially different material results in strange hybrid shows that don’t work for old or new fans.
And I think that sometimes studios and production companies fall back on reboots in order to play it safe. They figure that no one will object if producers try to resurrect something that was a hit in the past. But this can sometimes be exactly the wrong thing to do, since you cannot also resurrect the cultural context that may have contributed to a show’s popularity.
ETA: I recently watched some YouTube clips featuring interviews with the creator of the old TV show, “The Fugitive.” Most of the TV executives were strongly against the series, and one guy supposedly even got up and walked out of the room while listening to the pitch for the show.
Later, when the show had been successful, but was nearing the end of its run, these same TV executives objected when the show’s producers asked to develop a final episode which actually resolved everything. The TV executives believed that people just watched episodes as open-ended fare and didn’t care whether or not a show continued, stopped or came to some conclusion. The series finale of “The Fugitive” ended up being one of the most watched episodes of TV in the history of the medium.
Much later on, when the movie studio approached the creators of the TV show about doing a theatrical film, the creators didn’t think that audiences would be interested. The film went on to be a big hit.
Hollywood is a strange place.
craigie
@Spanky:
Simple. To catch drunks.
Martin
@Brachiator: The main takeaway from me (with a degree in physics) is the medical folks are saying that particles larger than x can’t be airborne, and the physicists are saying ‘what the fuck are you talking about, of course they can’ and the medical folks just dismissing them because their literature says otherwise.
Hell, CA has entire agencies dedicated to understanding this.
Steeplejack
@Chetan Murthy:
There is supposedly a reboot in the works, but progress is slow.
Adam L Silverman
@Chetan Murthy: They’re working on the third one right now.
There were also a couple of made for TV movies around the previous reboot. One focusing on a young Bill Adama on a special mission and one focusing on Admiral Cain and the Battlestar Pegasus. And then there was an attempt prequel spinoff show called Caprica starring Esai Morales.
Cheryl Rofer
@Martin: I am sick and tired of articles along the line of “THE WAY SCIENTISTS FOULED UP AND I, THE AUTHOR AM THE ONLY PERSON YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO.”
So no, I’m not gonna read that one, saw it on Twitter earlier. The author’s being the smartest kid in the class does nothing to help us through the pandemic.
Ohio Mom
Drunkenhausfrau:
In my limited understanding, battery storage is not yet where it needs to be. Can’t argue with that. BUT very many very smart engineers and scientists are working really hard on this and there is no reason to think they won’t continue to make progress.
I say this because I like to throw people like your relative a bone — in this case, agreeing that today’s battery storage capability is indeed limited — Watch the smug look on their face, and then give a counterpoint — examples of all the rapid technological progress we’ve all witnessed — and Watch their confused faces as the cognitive dissonance hits.
Good luck!
Martin
@Drunkenhausfrau: Well, apart from the others observations that PragerU isn’t actually a university, Norway is 100% renewables and EVs are over 50% of auto sales there. Plus this is an extreme climate nation. They are also a huge oil producer, and they sell basically all of that to the rest of Europe.
If Norway can do it, then certainly the US can.
MomSense
@Cheryl Rofer:
Ok, my public health relatives (one at CDC in Atlanta after his pandemic response team was disbanded and one at a major hospital formerly of CDC) are both fucking furious at the WHO about the droplet and six feet distance. They can’t discuss it publicly.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
That’s funny.
Years ago, I would sometimes listen to Dennis Prager’s radio show on Los Angeles radio station KABC. He was not a total right wing hack back then.
But when he began to embrace bullshit, he grabbed on with both hands and held on as tight as he could.
debbie
@Mary G:
Wow!
Drunkenhausfrau
@Drunkenhausfrau: Found a good one! (Out of my area of expertise, but I believe it’s good.)
arstecnica article directly rebutting the Prager garbage.
Drunkenhausfrau
@Ohio Mom: thank you
Cheryl Rofer
@MomSense: I know some people feel very strongly about this. I assumed from the beginning that whatever came out of infected people’s lungs, whatever size it was, was probably infective and should be avoided. Hence masks and handwashing. ETA: And distance.
It now turns out that whatever gets onto surfaces isn’t that infective, which I suspected from the beginning and thus left myself a little leeway in that area, although I didn’t see fit to blast out my intuition. Pity; I could be saying now “I told you so,” like some others (not a subtweet of anyone here) are doing.
We’ve been learning through the pandemic. We’ve done better on some things than others. I can see how someone at the CDC would be more invested in this than I am. But I’d argue that the biggest cause of deaths was TFG. By a lot.
Drunkenhausfrau
@Ohio Mom: exactly the effect I am going for!
Drunkenhausfrau
@Martin: thanks for this! Will add it to my arsenal.
VOR
I was watching a CNN piece where they interviewed the AZ rep who is responsible for the “audit”. One of the CNN anchors cited “Bertrand’s Teapot” as a way of illustrating the burden of proof is on those who make the wild claims. Bertrand Russell argued that if he asserted there was a teapot in space orbiting the sun, which is too small to be seen, then the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim, not those denying it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
In this scenario, the burden of proof ought to be on the PragerU alleged people.
joel hanes
@Chetan Murthy:
The Mac is not BSD at bottom.
It runs a descendant of the Mach kernel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
currants
@dmsilev: Really. I mean, they have a puppy, after all.
MomSense
@Cheryl Rofer:
From what I have been told by people in the room, the decision by the WHO was political. Also a lot of their assumptions (like the 3-6 feet distance) are based off data from 80 years ago that became orthodoxy no matter what new data indicated.
joel hanes
Those of you who are open to SF novels, and who have not yet read William Gibson’s two-volume
_The_Peripheral_ and _Agency_ should hasten to do so.
In my opinion.
joel hanes
I had only to read that account of the church choir practice at which half the singers got infected within an hour or so to decide that whatever you called it, I was going to act as if the virus could travel much farther than 20 feet, and as if it could hang in the air for hours indoors.
That was more than a year ago.
Brachiator
@Cheryl Rofer:
There were some interesting investigations of infections at meat packing plants that suggested that oral transmission at places with cooler temperatures might be a problem. Don’t know if there were a lot of follow up to this.
Steeplejack
@Drunkenhausfrau:
Ars Technica had a pretty good rebuttal, but I fear that you are embarking on a fool’s errand. Your relative will find something to object to or will raise endless questions on “What about this? What about that?”
Ohio Mom
Cheryl Rofer:
There is one aspect of the article Martin links to that is interesting.
It’s not the work the arosol scientist (whose tweet you apparently saw) did, it is the deep dive into medical literature from the mid-1900s that a graduate student, Katie Randall, did to find the original source for the droplet/aerosol cutoff.
It is a cautionary tale about recieved wisdom, and it is full of irony.
Randall was available to do the literature search because her original dissertation project was derailed by Covid. And like many other woman scientists, she had her thunder stolen (by another woman! Ouch!).
Old School
I haven’t read William Gibson. Does he relate to dinosaurs or dead men somehow? I’m not sure what I’m missing.
CarolPW
@Martin: That was fantastic reporting. I’m an environmental chemist rather than a physicist or medical doctor, but the atmospheric transport of agrochemicals in various spray application scenarios has been pretty well studied, including by me. They have the same general behavior as pathogens take. Looking at the reports early in the pandemic on both the choir and restaurant superspreader events compared to the CDC and WHO idiotic focus on fomites was driving me mad. Me and mine masked early.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“the Sanders campaign” here is* (hold on to your hats) David Sirota. Weird how Bernie was always surrounded by so many assholes out to damage actual Democrats.
*ETA: ‘seems to be David Sirota’, I should say. I haven’t read the book. But come on, we all know it was Sirota and Ryan “Tick Tock” Grim
debbie
@MomSense:
So what’s enough distance?
MomSense
@Brachiator:
We has some outbreaks because parents were organizing hockey games for their kids. In cold air and Dry air conditions the aerosols can improve the stability of the virus. So those aerosols stay potent and airborn longer.
MomSense
@debbie:
More like what is adequate ventilation and humidity with diligent mask wearing.
CarolPW
@Cheryl Rofer: Actually, the author said that these women scientists were the smartest people in the room and look at how those entrenched bureauocracies ignored them. It is very good and clears up a long-lasting misinterpretation in atmospheric transport of pathogens.
Brachiator
@MomSense:
Wow. And with the physical exertion, kids would be likely to inhale and exhale more deeply. Moving around a rink; a relatively large space, but one that was defined, with a lot of recurrent movement through that defined area.
What were the parents thinking?
WaterGirl
Just yesterday the map of the US had 12 or 13 dark orange states that were high risk.
Today’s map:
https://covidactnow.org/?s=1872791
The yellow states are medium risk. No state is low risk yet. (green)
WaterGirl
@Brachiator:
My opinion? Any thinking that was going on was wishful thinking.
Barbara
@Cheryl Rofer: Whoa. Read it anyway. It isn’t clear how much difference their work might have made but it surely would have encouraged many different venues to focus their efforts on ventilation upgrades as a way to improve their odds. It’s also an interesting historical tale.
Ken
That in itself might be a useful counter-argument.
Martin
@debbie: Essentially, there isn’t any. You need to replace enclosed air volumes frequently. Lots of active ventilation.
This is why you’re much safer being outside.
Jay
@Cheryl Rofer:
it was actually a very interesting article.
it covers the methodology of making a case to rebut dogma, much more than any posturing, preening, and slagging.
Brachiator
@Steeplejack:
Liked the Ars Technica rebuttal because it was relatively short, made its points well, and even noted how some of the objections to renewables were not inherently unreasonable, but still wrong.
ETA: I suppose in some ways, I am for whatever works and is clean. I don’t insist that energy must be sustainable and renewable. If someone said that some form of energy would be clean, cheap and could be used all over the world, but would only last for 500 years, I would say, “OK, bring it on.”
smedley the uncertain
@Martin: Could not find the article; just a Zoom video. I would like to read the article.
Jay
@smedley the uncertain:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/#intcid=_wired-homepage-right-rail_14ce8821-bfde-4408-94c5-486271d6669b_popular4-1
Ohio Mom
The Ars Techinca article was easy to follow, a definite point in its favor.
If you think Prager distorts green energy, you should only see what he does to Jewish theology. Ugh.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
I think I may have seen summaries of this work, or similar analyses of restaurants.
There are a couple of things that I really liked that I think could have been replicated.
To have a video record and accurate seating arrangement information was an excellent starting point. I think some other studies of bars and restaurants tried to use credit card records to help reconstruct at least who may have visited certain places.
I also found this interesting:
When reading about these studies, I would always wonder about what happened in the kitchen vs the main serving area, and what may have happened with customers and staff.
Much of the reporting about Covid-19 in nursing homes in Los Angeles County was often good about noting infections among patients and staff. One of the few missing data points was how it may have impacted visitors (family and visiting work people).
I really hope that we can get some good information about Covid-19 and how infections happened as people moved through various social spaces.
Kropacetic
@Brachiator: I haven’t encountered the Fugitive since childhood. I was intrigued because of your story but failed to find it streaming.
As a DC* fan, I’m in the midst of an abject lesson in studio fuckery. I have a lot of hope for the new Batman, though. Seems like it may really lean into the detective aspect of Batman.
*Oh, Disney too
DB11
@joel hanes: Exactly.
What still wasn’t clear at that time was if fomites and droplets were equally significant vectors of transmission.
What I found infuriating is how the WHO and (Trump-infected) CDC doubled down on their early advice and continued to ignore the mounting evidence of the primary significance of aerosols — right up until about a month ago (!), when they finally adjusted their guidance.
Say what you will about Eric Feigl-Ding’s attention-mongering and clout-chasing: he was right on the significance of aerosols early-on —and the concomitant importance of ventilation— as was Zeynep (who is a more-measured, credible and concise thinker).
Rob
@Martin: That was an interesting article. Thank you for linking to it.
Morzer
Noting for the record that some of us did the Death By Dinosaur story a couple of days ago, I have to report truly tragic news – Shakespeare has died after getting the COVID-19 vaccine:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/28/william-shakespeare-death-mistake-argentinian-tv
debbie
@Martin:
Which makes me think sanitizing surfaces still makes a difference.
Wapiti
@Old School: Gibson is the person who named “cyberspace”. His science fiction was ground-breaking.
His current novels (the latest two, and the three before that) are more “future history”. The stories have some mix of weird things that are true these days, and things that might be true, and it’s sometimes a challenge to a guess which are true and which are Gibson. So guy dies stuck in a dinosaur statue… could be in a Gibson story.
Mike in NC
Second night in Key West. The sidewalks were jam-packed with people overflowing into the streets. We were in New Orleans about 20-odd years ago and compared to this place, it was like a convention of Baptist teetotalers. Drunks all over the place here. Went to a restaurant with 7:15 reservations and we finally got served dinner at 9 PM, and mine was pretty lousy. Definitely will not be coming back to this place.
StringOnAStick
Did my first long mountain bike ride of the season, and really since I got my knees replaced almost two years ago. Tired, but I’m strong again and best of all, no longer suffering debilitating knee pain.
CarolPW
@debbie: ??? So something like outside is safer because people outside don’t lick the sidewalk but people inside lick the floor so it needs to be cleaned? I really don’t see how the connection to inside vs. outside contagion rates can be related to surface cleaning rather than air exchange.
ETA: or that people inside touch surfaces but people outside do not.
Jay
@CarolPW:
a fresh cough spreads both aerosols and droplets. Aerosols hang in the air, which good ventilation minimizes, droplets quickly fall onto the ground or surfaces and remain viable for up to 15 min.
Fomite transmission is uncommon, but can still happen.
So it’s worth sanitizing suspect surfaces.
Cheryl Rofer
@Barbara: Woulda coulda shoulda.
I’m sure it’s interesting in a way, but there has been far too much hindsight and too little recognition that we were learning about this thing in real time.
There’s also been this hard dichotomy between EITHER aerosol OR droplets. It’s turning out that aerosols are more important. But the guidance focused on both. The exception was that there was no hard demand to change ventilation systems, which wouldn’t have happened anyway.
So I’ll pass this one up, as I have other chapters in the aerosol-droplet saga.
debbie
@Jay:
My concern wasn’t inside vs. outside. A friend has said she’s stopped sanitizing, but I’ve been hesitant to do the same.
dww44
@Mike in NC: the restaurant or Key West?
Martin
@Cheryl Rofer: This isn’t that kind of article. It’s a retrospective of how aerosol physicists convinced the CDC that their 60 year old assumptions rooted in research on biological warfare might be wrong. It’s not about saying droplets are wrong. It’s about how the medical/epidemiological community developed a blindspot in their understanding and how that got resolved.
Ohio Mom
Mike in NC:
When I am planning visits to faraway places, I almost always google “Family fun in (location),” “Off the beaten track in (location),” “vegetarian restaurants (location)”, and the Lonely Planet for the location.
I find “Family fun” and “vegetarian” good sources for restaurants that are not overrun with drunks. “Off the beaten track” usually includes the sort of quirky places that are unique to wherever you are.
I think you have plenty of time to rescue your trip — TBH, I’m a little jealous. I love the beach and ocean, and I am the only person in Ohio Family who does.
Good luck!
Mike in NC
@dww44: Key West and any other part of Floriduh.
Jay
@debbie:
public spaces, I sanitize, private spaces, back to normal cleaning, which was clean before.
Outside Starbucks table with free wifi, just vacated?
Nope, I get my coffee and double smoked bacon sandwich to go, still don’t open doors with my hands, or escalator handrails, etc.
Cheryl Rofer
@Martin: Now I know all I need to know about it
I should edit to add that I have been swamped lately with reactions to my article on putative microwave directed-energy weapons, along with feeling freer to go to stores to buy stuff I’ve been putting off. So I’m being very careful with my time. I’ve tried to avoid the arguments about whether covid came from a lab leak (the less probable idea), although I did get slightly caught up in it because the garbage being spouted was so egregious. Gonna try to relax for the weekend.
Barbara
@Cheryl Rofer: The point is that these people were arguing in real time for WHO to be more cautious. It’s not overly critical of WHO or CDC but sheds light on how science can unwittingly accept insufficiently vetted truisms.
Jay
@Cheryl Rofer:
while Martin’s summary sort of covers it, it is an interesting article, not so much for the fighting against the dogma, which is barely covered by the article, but more about how they collaborated, even engaged a young historian to trace the roots of the dogma, which nobody else had found.
Jay
@Cheryl Rofer:
btw, have a good, relaxing weekend.
CarolPW
@Jay: Hand washing and masking makes perfect sense. Pandemic sterilization theater does not, much like airport security theater does not. My risk inside in public spaces from surfaces is vanishingly small, particularly if I have trained myself to not pick my nose or teeth or poke around in my eyes until I get home and wash my hands. My major risk is from the unmasked and unvaxed fuckheads.
Jackie
@Jay: I keep sani-wipes in my purse for those situations. Wipe down tables; hold a wipe in my hand for escalator/stair rails and, if my elbow can’t open the door, a wipe for the door handle.
Martin
@Barbara: Yeah, I don’t even particularly care about it as a critique on covid or the CDC or whoever. To me it’s just a tale about how science can inadvertently steer itself in the weeds and how parochialism can prevent them from getting back out again. It would have been just as good of a story if it were about the failures of Oroville dam or Chernobyl. For non-scientists, it’s a good bit of insight into how well-meaning scientists can sometimes get things wrong, and how we as citizens can improve our literacy to evaluate what experts say. At a minimum it serves as a detailed narrative that bad advice wasn’t given out of malice, but misunderstanding, which would be a hell of a lot of progress for a lot of people in this country.
Jay
@CarolPW:
for you guys, it’s pandemic theatre, for me, I’m in a 20 x40 room that has 400-500 people pass through, in an 8 1/2 hour shift, a lunch room and locker room that I share with 168 other people, and a 2 stall, 3 urinal bathroom that I share with between 4800 and 8600 people a day, not including the people who just wander around the store and not buy anything.
Jay
@Martin:
thank for the article Martin. I liked it, and I learned some stuff.
Jay
@CarolPW:
I don’t clean and sterilize so that you don’t get sick and die, I do it so I don’t.
Jay
@Jackie:
I have learned how to open doors with out using my hands,
don’t tell my cats.
I also don’t go out with out spare gloves, masks, hand sanitizer, sterilizing wipes,……..
and of course, first aid kit, basic tools, snacks and water.
TomatoQueen
@Mike in NC: Sorry Key West on a Friday night at the end of an unusual season is a disappointment. I haven’t been there in many many years & do remember finding the place at the time (early 80s) more comfortable during the day and early evening. Aside from the obligatory visit to Sloppy Joe’s, we stayed out of bars, and staying at a little motel with a hot plate and a sink allowed us to cook our yellow snapper right off the boat, after watching the sunset. Sleep off the boat trip then go look at Mel Fisher’s place then Papa’s house and play with all the cats.
Drunkenhausfrau
@Brachiator: I am hoping it at least makes some family members cautious about believing all the Maga crap he forwards. (Fools errand)
Uncle Cosmo
@Chetan Murthy: Myself, I’d love to see a Babylon 5 reboot. Full 5-year story arc, done as series guru Joe Straczynski intended.** Sure, it’s over 25 years old, but from what I remember, there really aren’t any technological developments in the interim that would seriously compromise the framework or the story arc – and some of it (e.g., Earth government taken over by an authoritarian coup) would be pretty damn timely!
** After Season 3, Straczynski was told B5 wasn’t getting a 5th season, so he shoehorned the resolution of the Shadow Wars into season 4. After production was well underway, Season 5 funding was once again on, & he had to cobble up episodes.
Uncle Cosmo
@NotMax: When the original BSG came out, Mad and Cracked both published parodies leaning heavily on the Lorne Greene connection – one called Cattlecar Galactica, the other Battlestar Ponderosa. (Sadly I can’t seem to dig up who did which.)
Uncle Cosmo
Well and precisely put! (Presumably) like the Murthian asshole, Prager U can be relied upon to unleash a pile of the purest shit into the outer world at semi-regular intervals. :^D
J R in WV
@Another Scott:
I can’t help bu notice that prageru ends with ru, which on the Innertubes means a site based in Russia. So inherently not trustworthy…
. . . . . .. .. ;~)
J R in WV
@Mike in NC:
So sorry you are having a bad trip to Key West. I commented on your earlier comment about your visit, when Wife and I lived in Key West (1970-73) it was much more modest, the conch houses were owned and lived in by conch families who had been in Key West for a couple of hundred years, except for the Cubanos who were more recent arrivals.
There were no cruise ships docking in Key West back then, only 10 or 12 hotels, a vibrant gay community, literary community, artists, divers, hippies, people who stopped when they reached the end of US 1A. Jerry Jeff Walker and Jimmy Buffet were playing in bars for drinks and tips, there was a ton of good music.
The restaurants were locally owned, run by the owner-chefs. Some were only open for the season, they would open their other place for the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, open their Key West place in late fall. There was a great French place right on Duval street, Wife and I went there for our first Anniversary in spring of 1972. We were actually pretty poor, I was an E2 in the Navy, wife worked for the Key West Citizen (the local newspaper), yet we felt well to do.
When we returned last it was 4 or 5 years ago, in September, we experienced restaurants like you did, jammed with people, like a huge mess hall… even the local off the beaten path Cuban restaurants were a disappointment, shocking. Also won’t be back — the interesting shops that sold old antiques and strange curios sell shitty tee shirts now. I hate Disney too. And crowds.
When we were in Key West the only crowd was for Sunset at Mallory Square, where hippies would breath fire and make joyous music while the sun went down. Was non-commercial fun.
Can’t have that!!!