If she looses this she faces the real possibility of being convicted of Aggravated Crimes against Humanity,meaning in India she could face the death penalty.
Hydroxychloriquine and Ivermectin may very well have been shelved for purely political reasons. That is certainly what it looks like with 20/20 hindsight from what is admittedly a layman's perspective. Given the timing of the discontinuation and the death toll , it does not seem unreasonable to this blogger that upwards of a million people may very well have died as a result of these drugs becoming gauche and being discontinued in the wake of Trump touting them .
I base this on the assumption that since both drugs were cheap and available, most people could have been given them had their use not have been proscribed. This is especially rue in places like India where they are in wide use for treating various tropical parasites.
A seven digit death toll is hardly the sole responsibility of one bureaucrat. There are many, many people amongst government, industry, the medical profession and those who curate social media who stifled the news that these drugs could have made all the difference.
One can hope that they will receive their due scrutiny and a just reward for their actions.
1
When this came up on another site I follow last week ago, there were several comments, of course speaking as if they were total fact and could not be denied, that Ivermectin was neither effective against Covid nor safe in that usage; that the studies were very problematic in their methodology, and the dosage they were using was toxic in itself. All of which may be true, or may not. But the whole "I are expert, how dare you question me, I'm not even going to bother wasting my time rebutting these claims properly and showing the data" does not help. It just further breaks confidence and association, where people are picking and choosing who to believe with no actual ability to get the real facts and arguments from both sides.
Posted by: David Eastman at Tue Jun 29 00:10:45 2021 (t/97R)
2
A toxic dosage of Ivermectin, for a human, would be about a gallon or two of the stuff.
I mean, farmers routinely take apple-flavored doses meant for horses or cows, for worming, as an off-label use for various human ailments, instead of taking the human prescription pills. You could practically bathe in that stuff. It has been around for a hundred years and is very well understood.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Tue Jun 29 10:53:58 2021 (sF8WE)
3
That said.... Although most mammals can take huge amounts of Ivermectin, as often as you like, without any harm whatsoever, there are a very small number of humans and animals that just can't deal with Ivermectin in any quantity, however small. It is a genetic thing, and that is why you usually dose small the first time an individual human or animal takes the drug.
So anybody talking about Ivermectin toxicity is talking about the genetically unlucky few, not the vast majority who can bathe in it.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Tue Jun 29 11:01:02 2021 (sF8WE)
4
Yeah, I've been banging the drum lately on how more than one profession has shat the bed recently.
The fundamental test of an expert is whether J. Random Layman is better off working with them, or ignoring them, when it comes to the expert's specialty. If ignoring is always better, government licensure, legal mandates, doctorates in the specialty, 'professional' organizations, etc. cannot make someone an expert or a professional.
For me, the interesting element is the Indian Bar Association. It makes sense that a hypothetical conspiracy within the American Bar Association might not automatically extend to the Indian Bar Association.
It also makes sense that India might be a little bit more attentive to whether people are complicit in PRC information/biological warfare efforts.
Yeah, this will be very interesting.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tue Jun 29 12:30:12 2021 (6y7dz)
It also makes sense that India might be a little bit more attentive to whether people are complicit in PRC information/biological warfare efforts.
Also: a LOT of Indians died and are still doing so. Add to that that the Indian govt. seems to give a damn about that and you've got the groundwork for at least an attempt at accountability.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Jun 29 18:12:02 2021 (5iiQK)
A totalitarian State controls every aspect of private and social life. Laws are oppressive. Surveillance is total. Privacy is dead. You are a State-installed manager of an apartment house. The State requires you to spy on your tenants, and report any illegal or subversive activity. However, you can also choose to keep the information to yourself, or use it to blackmail the residents, resulting in a multitude of choices and endings.
I cannot comment much on this game as I haven't played it, but I watched an hour or so of Mayoi Hitsuji playing it this evening and boy howdy, I don't wanna go to bed now 'cause I'm gonna have nightmares.
This is just more proof that people were very silly to get worked up about G.T.A.
It appears that a planet is entering the inner solar system.
It's technically a dwarf planet...but I don't think we can say dwarf anymore so revel in the clickbait.
It's also a part of the solar system, specifically the Kuiper belt and is just on a really long orbit that is bringing it into the inner Solar System, so, it's basically a comet. However, 2014 UN271 may be more than 200 miles in diameter and probably qualifies as a Dwarf Planet. (Oh, looky there, I said it.)
This appears to be a big Trans-Neptunian Object like Pluto, Eris, or Makemake, which scientists are eager to visit, but are so far away (much farther than even Pluto) that the expense and time required for such missions mean that they are unlikely to be visited in the foreseeable future.
2014 UN271 however, is coming to us! On Saturday, April 5 2031, the object will reach its closest approach to the sun, just inside the orbit of Saturn. 10 years is long enough that a mission can be put together and while Saturn is way out there, its much easier to reach than most of these things. This could be really cool.
There are a couple of things about this object that are speculative; one is its size, which is anywhere between 60 and 230 miles across, the reason for this is that it appears to be outgassing already even though it's beyond Neptune right now. If so, it probably is covered in very low melting point volatiles. This COULD mean that even being beyond Jupiter when it turns back, it could be a truly spectacular comet.
Leaving the staid realm of orbital mechanics and engineering for a moment to wandering into the whackadoodle speculations of history majors, it should be noted that in addition to the scientific bounty this TNO brings with it some spectacularly unlikely potential for hijinks.
These objects appear to be made largely of tholins, ice, and frozen nitrogen. Nitrogen is something that one needs a LOT of if one were (for some reason) going to, say, terraform Mars, and planetary quantities of nitrogen that are accessible are hard to come by. So I could see Elon Musk sending some rather desperate expedition to this thing to set up some mass drivers and frantically mine it for its nitrogen, water, and organics during the few years it is within shooting distance of Mars, all the while frantically hurling blocks of volatiles towards the red planet, maybe with foil screens around them to ensure they don't completely evaporate before impact. This is a dubious prospect for a whole host of reasons but it might make a great story.
1
Terraforming Mars is slowly becoming a plot point in the novels of my future history. Are there some not overly technical articles you could recommend to better inform myself? Thanks!
Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Sun Jun 27 10:56:33 2021 (QMNdN)
2
I've heard good things about this book.
The reviewer, Geoffrey Landis, is a NASA scientist and a SciFi writer who has written several papers on matters of interest.
Landis and Gregory Benford have both published papers on terraforming the moon, but I can't find any of them online at the moment, still, if you have access to a university library or research gate you might find it via those names.
Robert Zubrin's last few books give a VERY cursory overview of terraforming techniques for Mars.
This short paper has some hyperlinked citations that may be of interest.
A post over a Crowlspace has some figures, but few citations.
A paper on Terraforming...uh...Ceres...is here.
Theres a bit on settling Venus via cloud cities here and in the links to this old post.
Note that while I tentatively support terraforming Mars as a sort of modern cathedral and vanity project, I'm much more in the Dandridge Cole/ Gerard O'Neal camp in that I think the long term and superior way of settling space is by big habitats like the Stanford Torus and the Island One cylinders.
Note too that I've got a bachelors degree in History, which is a degree exquisitely untainted by any practical expertise in such matters.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Jun 28 01:41:46 2021 (5iiQK)
3
From a "harvesting the riches of space" argument, I agree it makes very little sense to expend massive amounts of energy to get out of one gravity well... only to go down another.
I skirt this by noting population pressure: in two generations my Earth is in a full-out Maunder Minimum, if not ice age, just as the Russians and Japanese were able to turn about their demographic implosions. The people of the nations of the Polar Alliance need a place to go and Mars fits the bill.
Thanks for the links; much appreciated!
Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Mon Jun 28 16:44:14 2021 (QMNdN)
Is my website down? It's a bit like a certain cat: yes and no.
To go to from anywhere else, it's not down. To try to go there from your blog? It's down. Odd.
Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Tue Jun 29 13:29:56 2021 (EAXgS)
7
If we could land a probe on it, we could get a free ride to wherever it's going.
Posted by: Mauser at Wed Jun 30 19:37:39 2021 (Ix1l6)
8From a "harvesting the riches of space" argument, I agree it makes very
little sense to expend massive amounts of energy to get out of one
gravity well... only to go down another.
Problem is, most of the "riches of space" that haven't been collected down a gravity well are spread out in tiny pieces across vast distances. Any sort of "Belter" civilization would be less "Carribean pirates in space" and more exceedingly patient and foresightful collectors of metals and volatiles (usually different types of asteroids in different orbits), since it'll take them years and kms/sec delta-V to hop from rock to rock.
Ceres might be one location it makes sense to establish a colony though for collecting volatiles. The gravity is light, it's in the inner solar system, and it can provide hydrogen reaction mass for arc-jets for inner-system transportation systems.
Posted by: MadRocketSci at Fri Jul 2 21:22:30 2021 (hRoyQ)
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well." - Syme (from some book by some reactionary no one remembers)
The following words are now disallowed.
Victim / Survivor
Disabled person
Wheelchair-bound
Mentally ill
Child prostitute
Non-consensual sex
Abusive relationships
Addict
Homeless person
Prostitute
Tribe
Powow
Spirit Animal
"Everything going on right nowâ€
Committed suicide,
Failed suicide
Successful suicide
Completed suicide
Child prostitute
Abusive relationships
Victim
Survivor
Female-identifying
Male-identifying
Female-bodied
Male-bodied
"I'm going to kill myself"
"Kill me"
You guys,
Ladies and Gentlemen
Policeman
Congressman
Freshman
He
She
African-American
Crazy
Insane
Lame
"People of Color"
Transexual
Hermaphrodite
Transgendered
Long time no see
No can do
Sold down the river
Killing it
Take a shot at it
Take a stab at it
Trigger warning
Rule of thumb
Go off the reservation
From here, I've omitted the ones that were ALWAYS slurs that they sifted into the list in an apparent attempt to make the list seem less Dystopian.
We'll be taking bets on when 'Dystopian', 'cautionary tale', and 'how-to-manual' get on the list.
1
Not included on the list (Because its' use will be mandatory in every day language.) - capitalist roader.
If that phrase does not make any sense to you, you are in good company - it did not make any sense to the late Lee Kuan Yew when he first heard during an official visit to the PRC over 50 years ago.
I always recommend Lee's memoirs (Singapore Story and From Third World to First.) for many reasons, not the least of which is the ability to read passages from each volume which are guaranteed to piss off all the proper people. I got my default response to any idiot who claim only white people can be racist from Singapore Story.
Posted by: cxt217 at Sun Jun 27 19:38:38 2021 (4i7w0)
On the Road Again
I've got to run 300 miles south for several days to attend to some family matters. There's little connectivity in the swamp, so posting will be even more diffident.
As compensation, here is a young lady who is simultaneously cute as a button and someone you probably do NOT want to get on the wrong side of.
The cute girl with the fuzzy pets is from a light novel by Schuld which was illustrated by the awesomeLansane, who, in turn, you can directly support via Fanbox or SKEB.
1
I'm a rich white guy, so I switched to all-electric garden tools. I am not sure I agree with electric cars, but electric law mower is 100 times better than the gasoline-powered one, especially if you have 2 batteries that can be swapped.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sun Jun 20 12:45:45 2021 (LZ7Bg)
2
Pete, do the batteries for the lawn mower come with a warrantee? I've had some bad luck with tool batteries forgetting how to hold a charge, and those things are expensive. Might just be the brand (Ryobi), but I'm wary of electrics as a result.
Posted by: jabrwok at Sun Jun 20 14:16:08 2021 (T4WaI)
3
After my second string trimmer refused to start and stay running after a winter int he garage, I've kinda given up on them. "Use fuel without Ethanol" the manual says, to absolve them of any guilt. As if you can get any. E10 is a reality everywhere, design for it!
Posted by: Mauser at Sun Jun 20 19:57:42 2021 (Ix1l6)
4
Mauser, I've been told you can get gas without ethanol, but it's boutique pricing.
The ethanol, I'm given to understand, basically varnishes surfaces in the carburetor and that somehow keeps the engine from starting. You can supposedly devarnish the surface but it seems like it's less work--but more expensive--to replace the carb.
The people I've seen talking about it were using slightly bigger stuff like lawnmowers and chainsaws. I don't know how directly this would apply to a string trimmer, but I've also only ever used electric string trimmers.
Posted by: Rick C at Mon Jun 21 08:35:04 2021 (eqaFC)
5
All batteries lose capacity and eventually die. But indeed I found that lawnmower battery (I have Ego) gets old a little quicker than a cellphone. My main Ego battery lost about 40-50% over a period of 3 years. I have a 5-year-old iPad that still has 70%. My current cellphone still lasts 2-3 days, while before it lasted a week or almost that long. It is about as old as my lawnmower battery too, so the same rate of aging. BUT. I only mow the grass once every two-three weeks. And I keep the battery in garage, where the temperature swings are not as extreme. So it seems like the battery management controller built into the lawnmower battery is not as good as one in the cellphone. It is also possible that its thermal environment is not conductive to long life.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Jun 21 18:44:47 2021 (LZ7Bg)
6
The pure gas is often available where you can find boaters, although the prices aren't great. According to pure-gas.org, there are two stations in Everett, WA.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Jun 21 18:50:15 2021 (LZ7Bg)
7
Yeah, it's too late for my two dead trimmers. (Hmmm, I'd have to get the pure gas, and them mix in crappy 2-cycle oil). Although I've had thoughts about grabbing one of my 1 hp electric motors from my BattleBots days and hooking it up. The one issue being the lack of a speed controller meaning that it will try to go from 0 to 5000 rpm in an instant.
I've heard another part of the problem is the fuel pick-up tubing swells up in the ethanol.
Posted by: Mauser at Thu Jun 24 00:49:08 2021 (Ix1l6)
8
In the case of my gas mower, ethanol made my fuel tank crack into two halves by eating the glue. However, the seam line was horizontal. So everything worked fine as long as I didn't fill it more than halfway. It kept it like that for about 10 years. I bought it in 2003, California went from MTBE to Ethanol some time later, and I switched to an electric mower in 2018.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Fri Jun 25 15:36:24 2021 (LZ7Bg)
Dispatch From the Department of Duck Data
I have not been able to contact Wonderduck by phone for
several days, but he did reply to a text and indicated that he had made much progress in therapy and can now do bendy and move-y things he could not do before. However, the rehab facility will not release him until he clears one final hurdle.
1
Thanks for the update.
I think he should be fine. I knew several people who were done to death by the hospital environment, but the only thing that can do him in while in rehab is a real infection (more real than Wuhan Corona).
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Jun 16 16:03:15 2021 (LZ7Bg)
People Sometimes Refer to Covid-19 as China's Chernobyl
Unfortunately, a developing situation in Guandong Province may be a better candidate for that dubious title.
It appears that a nuclear plant, partially owned by a French company, has, possibly, started leaking radioactivity. The French company, Framatome, has warned of an "imminent radiological threat†and their people seem to be....rather anxious.
China, on the other hand, says that nothing is wrong and that"Two reactors have since the start of commercial operations been operating according to nuclear safety rules and regulations… currently, regular monitoring data shows the Taishan station and its surrounding environment meet normal parameters,†as reported and translated by the Asahi Shinbun.
OTOH, another part of the CCP's response, according to EDF (Framatome's French parent company), has been to raise the allowed radiation readings so as not to cause any distressing alarms to go off.
But we don't really know WHAT is actually happening.
It's still possible that all these reports represent an over-reaction. The French are saying that there is no melt-down or anything of that nature, and, in any event, news reports of anything nuclear tend to be rather breathless.
However, the French (who are involved) and the Japanese (who are potentially downwind if it gets bad) seem to be quite concerned about the situation.
1
If the communist government is in its late stages, local workers at foreign organized facilities may not be behaving in strictly sane ways. For the foreign company, a release is bad for their reputation and further earnings, and fixing it before it gets worse may mitigate some of the reputational damage. But, for the communist government, the incentives are different. Local deaths, now or later, are not a problem for them. Admitting to a problem is itself a real problem for them. That said, late stage communist regimes are too noisy to take any information too seriously.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tue Jun 15 13:34:59 2021 (6y7dz)
2
An interesting story that has been going around Taiwanese media over the last week is that the open arrival and departure of a USAF C-17 (At a military airbase, but in daylight and in public.) was for the purpose of extracting a high level defector from the mainland back to CONUS. While I doubt that is the case, the close timing of the C-17 and the French report (Which, it must be remembered, the US only knows because the French government heard it first from the company and approve it to be passed on.).
Posted by: cxt217 at Wed Jun 16 17:48:09 2021 (4i7w0)
Home Again. Home Again. Jiggity Jig.
Banality below fold.
Compensatory picture of babe on bike with box-cannon is by Akai Sashimi, whose awesome work can be supported onFanbox or by buying their art book which is coming out today!
1
Thoughts
- Now I see that Super Cub can actually be improved
- That delivery suspension system is real
- Coincidentally I was practicing hand-to-hand transitions in my last CQB class, so her taking a shot with the left while the gun is out of right-hand (cross-draw) holster would not be weird at all, if she weren't on a motorcycle.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue Jun 15 16:22:07 2021 (LZ7Bg)
2
I note that upon closer examination, that box canon is shooting authentic .30 Mauser ammo.
There's a lot to like in that picture.
Posted by: Mauser at Wed Jun 16 14:53:23 2021 (Ix1l6)
3
Nah. She's Chinese so she's probably loading Tokarev and that antique will break in a few more rounds.
But I'm a pessimist so YMMV.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Jun 16 16:04:06 2021 (5iiQK)
1
Kaku and the Rovelli probably should be switched.
Dover has some nice texts. Cheap coverage of some topics that are usually a lot more expensive, at least in paper.
Took me a while to realize why you might have wondered if it was a real quote.
Even now, Statistical Mechanics is supposed to worse than Continuum Mechanics.
Back then, before Fisher's statistics, and other recent developments in statistics, I can see it being a lot worse. Might have been the sort of thing that takes a pretty extreme personality type to study.
You totally should read up on statistical mechanics approaches to super sonic reacting turbulent flows. Would definitely suck less than trying to follow the current political situation very closely.
I'm pretty sure that statistical mechanics is one of those topics that needs a pretty good foundation, and to avoid unreasonable expectations for what one is able to learn.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Fri Jun 11 13:21:36 2021 (6y7dz)
2
I read the kindle edition of The High Frontier. It came off as kind of ... pie in the sky - if you will. Although after thinking about the design of O'Neill colonies, I had an idea for improving the ratio of land to window space, and simultaneously improving the light gathering capabilities of the mirrors for colonies out, say, in the orbit of Mars, or further.
(Short form. Windows can be narrower if you parabolically curve the mirrors so the focus is near, but not at, the window, and spreads across a wider swath of land. You can similarly double-up, so that two mirrors, focused through two adjacent windows, light the same swath of land - AND have two mirrors each shining through the same slot aimed at different lands.)
Posted by: Mauser at Fri Jun 11 22:30:39 2021 (Ix1l6)
3
The island designs are definitely soft. You can look the flywheels in some editions of the machinery's handbook, and apply the thinking to any spinning colony design. Colony bursts in Gundam should be more frequent.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sat Jun 12 08:46:07 2021 (6y7dz)
4
Ugh, more gratuitous shoehorning of quantum mechanics into things where it isn't essential, and doesn't help.
There is a classical version of statistical mechanics. It deals with the lengths of time a system spends within various positions in an abstract configuration space. Classical positional entropy is proportional to ln(V). Classical entropies only have meaning in a relative sense, because they relate ratios of phase volumes between states.
Posted by: MadRocketSci at Sat Jun 12 18:31:20 2021 (hRoyQ)
5
They're basically doing all the same stuff, they're just dividing up their velocity configuration space into cubes of size related to hbar/m. No additional physical content.
Posted by: MadRocketSci at Sat Jun 12 18:35:04 2021 (hRoyQ)
6
One of the reviews thought that the book was useful for solid state physics.
Is it possible that the quantum version of statistical mechanics is useful for a deeper understanding of very tiny electrical gates?
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sat Jun 12 19:58:07 2021 (6y7dz)
The U.S. cemetery Colleville-sur-Merat at Point Du Hoc. Here, 9387 white crosses mark the final resting places of men who climbed the cliffs overlooking what was once designated Omaha Beach.
Rejoice Fellow Citizens! The Meat Ration is Being Increased from 5 Grams to 2!
Wait. What!?
There's more on this here, here, here, and here. Basically, a ransomware attack on the packing plants of Brazilian meat packing giant JBS has shut down at least a fifth of the U.S. meat supply, and it is worse in other countries.
Well, Drat.
In what is yet another amazing biological achievement for the Middle Kingdom, China is reporting the first human case of H10N3 bird flu.
Fortunately, China (ever reliable on such matters) has said that the risk of human to human transmission is low.
Even, if, by some unlikely happenstance, China were to somehow be incorrect in this assessment, we can all rejoice that governments around the world have, over the last year, put in place draconian ways to control the movement, speech, and access to information of their citizens, as soon as someone sneezes.
Hobby Space News of the commercial space industry A Babe In The Universe Rather Eclectic Cosmology Encyclopedia Astronautica Superb spacecraft resource The Unwanted Blog Scott Lowther blogs about forgotten aerospace projects and sells amazingly informative articles on the same. Also, there are cats. Transterrestrial Musings Commentary on Infinity...and beyond! Colony WorldsSpace colonization news! The Alternate Energy Blog It's a blog about alternate energy (DUH!) Next Big Future Brian Wang: Tracking our progress to the FUTURE. Nuclear Green Charles Barton, who seems to be either a cool curmudgeon, or a rational hippy, talks about energy policy and the terrible environmental consequences of not going nuclear Energy From Thorium Focuses on the merits of thorium cycle nuclear reactors WizBang Current events commentary...with a wiz and a bang The Gates of Vienna Tenaciously studying a very old war The Anchoress insightful blogging, presumably from the catacombs Murdoc Online"Howling Mad Murdoc" has a millblog...golly! EaglespeakMaritime security matters Commander Salamander Fullbore blackshoe blogging! Belmont Club Richard Fernandez blogs on current events BaldilocksUnderstated and interesting blog on current events The Dissident Frogman French bi-lingual current events blog The "Moderate" VoiceI don't think that word means what they think it does....but this lefty blog is a worthy read nonetheless. Meryl Yourish News, Jews and Meryls' Views Classical Values Eric Scheie blogs about the culture war and its incompatibility with our republic. Jerry Pournell: Chaos ManorOne of Science fictions greats blogs on futurism, current events, technology and wisdom A Distant Soil The website of Colleen Dorans' superb fantasy comic, includes a blog focused on the comic industry, creator issues and human rights. John C. Wright The Sci-Fi/ Fantasy writer muses on a wide range of topics. Now Read This! The founder of the UK Comics Creators Guild blogs on comics past and present. The Rambling Rebuilder Charity, relief work, roleplaying games Rats NestThe Art and rantings of Vince Riley Gorilla Daze Allan Harvey, UK based cartoonist and comics historian has a comicophillic blog! Pulpjunkie Tim Driscoll reviews old movies, silents and talkies, classics and clunkers. Suburban Banshee Just like a suburban Leprechaun....but taller, more dangerous and a certified genius. Satharn's Musings Through TimeThe Crazy Catlady of The Barony of Tir Ysgithr アニ・ノート(Ani-Nouto) Thoughtful, curmudgeonly, otakuism that pulls no punches and suffers no fools. Chizumatic Stephen Den Beste analyzes anime...with a microscope, a slide rule and a tricorder. Wonderduck Anime, Formula One Racing, Sad Girls in Snow...Duck Triumphalism Beta Waffle What will likely be the most thoroughly tested waffle evah! Zoopraxiscope Too In this thrilling sequel to Zoopraxiscope, Don, Middle American Man of Mystery, keeps tabs on anime, orchids, and absurdities. Mahou Meido MeganekkoUbu blogs on Anime, computer games and other non-vital interests Twentysided More geekery than you can shake a stick at Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas Sounds like Plaigarism...but isn't Ambient IronyAll Meenuvians Praise the lathe of the maker! Hail Pixy!!
