Simple Science

 

Stephen Banks

Jmtuly sruhtSpSossrn3sS1 at sidor4:ene05u eAdMd  · 

I'm going to vastly oversimplify, because so many people are vast simpletons.

A virus needs a host.

It can't stay in one host long, because either the host dies or the host adapts and kills the virus.

The virus doesn't just move to the next host, it multiplies and each of its "children" jumps to a new host.

Each time it does this, it "learns" from its host so the children adapt to be more successful in the next host. That's what the variants are (this is not strictly true, like I said I'm oversimplifying.)

Masks deter the jump. They do. They just do. They are like a border wall if it actually worked. The higher grade the mask, the higher the wall and the fewer beasties can jump it. If the virus in one host can't jump to another, eventually it will either be killed or the host will die and it will starve (or at least be buried/cremated with the host.)

Vaccines don't deter the jump. They can make it harder for the virus to "win" the battle and kill the host. They can make the host harder to stick in (so it doesn't have a base to jump from,) or faster at killing the virus.

So here's the thing. If everyone had just worn god damn masks at the start, the virus would have died off before it mutated. If everyone had gotten god damn vaccinations as soon as they became available, the virus would have died off. But because they didn't, the virus was able to "learn" how to jump harder and stick more often and kill faster. That's why we have the delta variant. That's why the vaccines we have aren't enough on their own any more. That's why we'll never get out of this pandemic.

All of you anti-science morons whining that the CDC was wrong because _they_ are adapting are the same ones who refused to mask up and get vaccinated in the first place when the simple guidelines could have put an end to this before it got out of hand. It's YOUR FAULT that I can't go to dinner and a show without wearing a mask and forgoing any physical contact. You. You are responsible.

So shut the fuck up, get a vaccine, wear a god damn mask, and when science comes up with the next thing for you to do, DO IT. Because frankly, I'm fully vaccinated and won't get very sick, but it's pretty easy for me to become a delta carrier; and I'm sort of hoping science will get desperate enough to recommend coughing on all you idiots and wiping you out to stop this lunacy once and for all.

It's the Moon's fault we're getting so hot!

Texas Republican asks: can we fix the moon’s orbit to fight climate change?

The Texas Republican congressman Louie Gohmert has asked a senior US government official if changing the moon’s orbit around the Earth, or the Earth’s orbit around the sun, might be a solution for climate change.

Bizarrely, the question was not posed to anyone from Nasa or even the Pentagon. Instead it was asked of a senior forestry service official during a House natural resources committee hearing on Tuesday.

Speaking with Jennifer Eberlien, associate deputy chief of the National Forest Service, Gohmert asked if it was possible to alter the orbits of the moon, or the Earth, as a way of combating climate change.

“I understand from what’s been testified to the Forest Service and the BLM [Bureau of Land Management], you want very much to work on the issue of climate change,” Gohmert said, adding that a past director of Nasa had once told him that orbits of the moon and the Earth were indeed changing.

“We know there’s been significant solar flare activity, and so … is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit, or the Earth’s orbit around the sun?” Gohmert asked. “Obviously that would have profound effects on our climate.”

Wait a minute, let me get my calculator...

 

Those were the days

I guess yelling through a mask makes facts hard to hear

Whatever.../s

Sunday slurry

Robocall justice.  I promise never to buy any product being sold by cold calling people.

Science!

Prisoner's dilemma.

Explaining what privilege means.

Torture doctors could be prosecuted?  It's about time!!  Jean Maria Arrigo needs to be praised as well.

Wonderful graphs showing that human activity is warming the world.  And plastic in your food will kill you.

Donald Trump will allow Jeb to position himself as the sane one.

More guns = more crime.

Late Night Show

A new movie about women fighting for the right to vote... to educate those who don't know their history what it took for voting to be a right.

Weather whiplash... a great term to describe how our lives and our weather will be from now on out.  And in the 80s in Alaska.

Sitting on manspreaders.

It's not the fat, it's the sugar.

It's not clean water, it's been fracked.  And the lack of glaciers and snow pack has some people worried.  Ya THINK?

Lobsters were once really really big.  And probably still delicious....

Trans guy illustrates what male privilege is.

A school blackboard uncovered last written on in the year 1917.

A bible instead of a textbook inside of a science class?

The incompetence of Pluto's moons.

USA congressional districts

Global warming accelerating

Kitten discovers the pattern on the rug.

Christmas contraceptives

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Excellent overview of 2014.  Best science photos for 2014.

Weird methane readings on Mars... ALIENS!!!1

Bernie Sanders takes on the Koch brothers.

Saint Ronnie couldn't get elected dog catcher in these interesting teabaggery times...

Tampons may save your life...

If you can erase the word, the action never happened.  Right?

Institutionalized racism is hard to root out.

Chipping away at contraceptives.  And women aren't choosing to have more babies, they're just wiser with their birth control methods.  Cutting through the deliberately confusing terminology used when discussing abortion.

Climate change to WWII and O'Reilly in between!

Climate change?  What climate change?  What climate change might unleash.

Whale graveyard in Chile.  Counting whales from space.

Poor Bill O'Reilly... scared of tough wimmen.  Maybe he feels like this?

Therapy dogs.

Plastic in our food... is good for us.  Right?  How about raw fish?

Harry Potter and the aftermath.

President Obama hanging out with scientists.

Fukushima radiation affected the USS Reagan and its crew.

Finding the forgotten Russian soldiers from WWII.

Cold and dry

Cold enough for ya?  It is actually global warming in action.  Science.

Curiosity making tracks on Mars.

California is dry.  I mean really dry.

You're either fer us or again us...

For:

Wonderful little known part of the ACA.

Teaching children how to enjoy vegetables.

Against:

By tilting the playing field in favor of industry... and against the environment and people's overall health.

By enchanting people with blunt talk... and disguising the fact that the Koch brothers LOVE Governor Christie. (transcript found here.)

By ignoring all the things in your 21st century house that will mess with your hormones and health.

By believing Obamacare will kill you, abort your babies, prevent your children learning about creationism, and all the things the evil Kenyan illegal president has done in his life and in his two terms. (How do you reason with people who accept these as fact?)

By believing corporations who lie to you to bend democracy for their benefit.

By not caring that our oceans are broken.

And then there are those who explain both sides extremely well.

Simply Sunday

Eden and Adam and Eve are apparently scientific enough to be in science textbooks.... in Texas.

Supervolcano ... on Mars.

Oldest alcoholic drinks on earth.

Killer hornets in China.

Senator Elizabeth Warren on the GOP shutdown.

Rep. Joe Barton thinks wind is a finite resource:

Barton has used the threat of global warming to combat something he hates even more: wind energy. In a 2009 hearing, Barton implied that wind is a "finite resource" and that harnessing it would "slow the winds down" which would "cause the temperature to go up."

Friday froth

6 Baffling Discoveries That Science Can’t Explain

Healthy tips for surviving our chemicalized world

Fixing the climate.

Learning a new language is good for your brain.

Monsanto's unapproved wheat found in Oregon is affecting the export of wheat to those countries who have said no to GMOs.  Too late.... so the farmers are suing Monsanto.

One girl in a village.

Everything you ever wanted to know about ticks.

19-Year-Old Develops Ocean Cleanup Array That Could Remove 7,250,000 Tons Of Plastic From Oceans

Roman Seawater Concrete Holds the Secret to Cutting Carbon Emissions

High Fructose Corn Syrup is addictive....

Monday mopings...

Um... shouldn't we be worried a bit about this? Vial of easily weaponized virus goes missing in Texas

Overfishing our oceans.

Monsanto's death patents.

Five reasons why not to eat anything from China.

But Chevron is so trustworthy!

Conservapedia Disproves E=mc²

We could have told you this: Researchers link ‘unfounded’ wars to increased risk of PTSD. War for war's sake will destroy armies. Wars for no just cause destroys soldiers.

 Might as well make yourselves useful: Cleaning up the oceans with drones.

Monday meandering about the net...

bed bugs.

Answering the silly question anti-evolutionists ask.

This is too cute.

Paul Krugman warns us about the current 'Republican brain':

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence. 

The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts. But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold.

Not conservative enough, obviously.

Science is cool...

Spray-on solar panels.

British engineers produce amazing 'petrol from air' technology:

A small company in the north of England has developed the “air capture” technology to create synthetic petrol using only air and electricity. 

The company, Air Fuel Synthesis, then uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol. 

Company officials say they had produced five litres of petrol in less than three months from a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside. 

The fuel that is produced can be used in any regular petrol tank and, if renewable energy is used to provide the electricity it could become “completely carbon neutral”. 

Experts tonight hailed the astonishing breakthrough as a potential “game-changer” in the battle against climate change and a saviour for the world’s energy crisis. 

The technology, presented to a London engineering conference this week, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before "electrolysing" the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide. 

Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.

El Nino will make your state drier than usual this rainy season... or very very soggy.  (Sorry about that, Florida).  But there is no signs of global warming.  Nope nope ignore that.

Curiosity digs up Martian dirt.  Planets in perspective.

What the net can do

When it tries.

From my facebook thread

What is wrong with this picture? A flipped out nazi racist shoots up a Sikh religious group even as we land a SUV-sized rover on Mars. We are told by Fox News and the NRA that we must accept these shootings of innocent people as an expression of our freedoms and that we are to shrug off the deaths as mundane. On the other hand, we casually accept the fact we are capable of sending a huge and complex appliance to Mars millions of miles away and land it gently in a carefully chosen crater to look for intelligent life and to study geological strata. If we are capable of such fantastic science and logical thought, why do we accept acts of such heartbreaking stupidity? Why can't we fix this?

Suzie Kidnap: we can fix it. we need to get people of normal intelligence to pay attention to politics. right now, the oligarchy has a brain dead army of simpletons who will carry out their kings' every command, and vote as they are told. and that army is basically unopposed at this point.

Ellroon Gravenstone: Which is why education and science are being mocked, and faith is praised more than intelligence. I just can't get my head around how we can walk into this Era of Stupid without protest. How can the army of simpletons be greater than those of us who think?

Suzie Kidnap: i don't think they are greater in number. i think they are more motivated because they have been stirred up by wedge isssues; race, abortion, the gays. they are paying attention, and most of the normals still aren't. i fear what it might take to wake people up. the pace of these massacres in increasing in an alarming way. i am starting to be afraid to go out of the house.

Ellroon Gravenstone: Recall the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia where they killed all the doctors and other educated 'elites'... and then wonder when Fox News will incite the next moron to go kill those who dare to read books. (Fahrenheit 451 anyone?)

Ellroon Gravenstone: I remember one man entering our living room which is lined with book shelves. His first sentence was an aggressive,"Have you read all these books?".... He was mollified to hear I hadn't. Didn't show him the rest of the house ... bookshelves in every room.

Why am I in this handbasket and why is it getting so warm?

Drowning in our own garbage.

Let the United States Holy Wars begin!  Lo, the Lord sayeth, smite them, smite them, smite them!!

Surviving the flesh eating virus, lightning, and boobs.

The dangers of for-profit schools and prisons, and why the Republicans are embracing them wholeheartedly: More bodies, more money to wring out of them, and no oversight! Such a deal! Quality of schooling and dedication to returning prisoners to society are not involved:

Leonard invokes the “numerous lawsuits” against a company called Corinthian Colleges, including one in which a former admissions officer described high-pressure, even bullying recruitment tactics at one of the company’s schools, Everest: “The ultimate goal was to essentially make [potential students] wallow in their grief,” the admission officer’s affidavit says, feel that pain of having accomplished nothing in life, and then use that pain as their “reasons” to compel the leads to schedule an in-person meeting with an Everest admissions representative. A spokesman for Corinthian denied this account of its recruiting, but, as Leonard writes, “there’s little question that an obsessive focus on constantly boosting enrollment is crucial to survival in the for-profit college world. Sky-high withdrawal rates plague the industry.”

Further down in the same article:

Chang’s series in the Times-Picayune, meanwhile, took a close look at how it is that Louisiana nearly doubled its prison population in the past twenty years, to become the state with the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the country—the highest in the world, in fact. (Adam Gopnik has written for The New Yorker about our mass-incarceration culture.) What Chang finds is a system under which the state began housing the majority of its inmates in for-profit facilities, many of them run by cash-strapped local sheriffs and some by private prison companies. Both have a financial incentive to keep the prisons full— like hotels, prisons in Louisiana don’t want any vacancies. “If the inmate count drops, sheriffs bleed money,” writes Chang. “Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.”