2021-04-28

Will gallium nitride electronics change the world?

Re: Robison Crusoe

Apparently, I can't do math.  The book is a little over 300 years old.

On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 9:30 PM John Coffey <john2001plus@gmail.com> wrote:
The book Robison Crusoe is a little over 400 years old. I read it as a teenager.

It is one of the most widely published books.


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Covid at home pill treatment


  • Pfizer's experimental oral drug to treat Covid-19 at the first sign of illness could be available by the end of the year, CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC on Tuesday.
  • The drug is part of a class of medicines called protease inhibitors and works by inhibiting an enzyme that the virus needs to replicate in human cells.
  • Protease inhibitors are used to treat other viral pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis C.


Biden Has Screwed The Pooch On Covid

I really enjoyed the first 13 minutes.

https://youtu.be/hgbyPaz7xAs

World War Xi: Inside China's cold war with the West

4:52 to 7:10 and the rest of the video indicates that China wants to invade Taiwan by the year 2027.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri4NBy_PrGI&t=292s

2021-04-24

The Failure of Imperial College Modeling Is Far Worse than We Knew – AIER

In 2020 Climate Science Needs To Hit The Reset Button, Part One

Ready Player One life apartments built in salt lake with containers

Why Billions of Cicadas Are About to Emerge After 17 years

How Did 6 Boys Survive for 15 Months on This Remote Island?

This is an interesting story.

How a Physicist Became a Climate Truth Teller

This One Thing Is Poisoning All Of Us

2021-04-18

Beirut Explosion Analysis and Discoveries - Here's What We've Learned

The Evil Business of Soda

This guy takes cynicism to a whole new level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ni6C2g4Az0

Kroger closes 2 Southern California stores over $4 per hour 'hero pay' ordinance | Fox Business

Refugee caps

Biden found himself in hot water with members of his own party on Friday, when he signed an emergency presidential determination to keep the number of refugees for Fiscal Year 2021 capped at 15,000 while changing the regional allocation of who is brought in. It is the same level set by the Trump administration.

Biden had said in February that he would increase the cap to 125,000 for FY 2022 which begins in October. He also said he would work with Congress to make a "down payment" on that number. In the meantime, Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed to Congress lifting the cap to 62,000 for this fiscal year.

Immigration activists and left-wing Democrats were furious at the move. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, calling it "completely and utterly unacceptable."

Biden describes border surge as a 'crisis' as he defends refugee moves | Fox News


2021-04-14

Fwd: Chinese Air Force Tawain

Twenty-five Chinese air force aircraft entered Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Monday, including 18 fighter jets and four bombers, the island's defence ministry said.

That was the largest daily incursion since Taiwan's defence ministry started to report Chinese Air Force activities in Taiwan's ADIZ last year.

Taiwan reports largest incursion yet by Chinese air force (msn.com)


Biden's latest Wile-e-Coyote scheme to fix border crisis: Paying would-be illegals to stay home - American Thinker

Fired over insisting on Due Process for woman police officer

Brooklyn Center City Manager Curt Boganey was fired on Monday evening, hours after he publicly disagreed with Mayor Mike Elliott's assertion that the police officer who fatally shot a Black man in the Minneapolis suburb should be immediately fired in response to the incident.

Before leaving the podium, Elliott noted that Boganey, as city manager, had the authority to determine whether the officer would be fired. Boganey noted that he would not take immediate action to remove the officer.

"All employees working for the city of Brooklyn Center are entitled to due process with respect to discipline," Boganey said. "This employee will receive due process and that's really all that I can say today."

When pressed on whether he personally felt the officer should be fired, Boganey again called for due process.

"If I were to answer that question, I'd be contradicting what I said a moment ago -- which is to say that all employees are entitled to due process and after that due process, discipline will be determined," Boganey said. "If I were to say anything else, I would actually be contradicting the idea of due process."

Daunte Wright shooting: Brooklyn Center city manager fired after call for due process for police officer | Fox News


The Brooklyn Center City Council voted to fire Boganey, a longtime city employee, during an emergency meeting, the Star Tribune reported. At the same meeting, the council voted to give the mayor command authority over the city's police department.

During a virtual workshop after the meeting, Council Member Kris Lawrence-Anderson said she voted to fire Boganey out of fear of potential reprisals from protestors if she did not, according to the newspaper.

"He was doing a great job. I respect him dearly," Lawrence-Anderson said. "I didn't want repercussions at a personal level."

Both Elliott and Boganey addressed potential disciplinary action toward the officer during a press conference earlier in the day. At the time, Elliott called for the officer to be fired.

"Let me be very clear – my position is that we cannot afford to make mistakes that lead to the loss of life of other people in our profession," Elliott said. "I do fully support releasing the officer of her duties."

Domestic energy as a villain

Let's have a grown-up discussion on energy policy. The U.S. is going to continue to use oil and gas for decades to come. Today, only 10.7% of our energy comes from wind and solar power. Approximately 2% of the cars on the road are electric vehicles. Even if that were to rise by tenfold over the next decade, we will still have 80% of cars using good old gasoline. If we don't produce the oil and gas here, we are going to fill our tanks with oil and gas from the Middle East or Russia.

Biden must put jobs first and stop treating our domestic oil and gas producers as the enemies of progress. Oil and natural gas power our computers, our cars and trucks, our factories, our furnaces, our cellphones -- and all that our $22 trillion industrial economy encompasses. To "build back better," let those producers be part of an "all-of-the-above" clean, cheap and reliable all-America energy policy.

Biden's Green Energy Plan Declares War on American Energy | RealClearPolitics

100 CEOs meet to discuss opposing voter ID laws

"The president has also repeated the lie that "this is Jim Crow in the 21st century." Democrats have clearly realized this is a potential fundraising tactic regardless of the impact on voter confidence. It is no small wonder how a law, which election experts agree expands voting access to all Georgians, could be compared to the vast historical effort to disenfranchise and oppress Black Americans."



From: Larry Trout 

More than 100 CEOs and senior leaders on Saturday met on a Zoom call to map out how businesses should respond to new voting restrictions that are set to be enacted in Texas and other states across the country.

The executives discussed ways to oppose the voting laws, which were first enacted in Georgia.

This included halting donations to politicians who support the bills and postponing investments in US states that pass the legislation, four people who were on the call told the Washington Post on Sunday, including one of the organizers, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding Georgia's new voting law, SB 202, with Major League Baseball pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from the state and companies like Coca-Cola and Delta pushing back against restrictive voting provisions, this effort would represent a significant development in the corporate sector weighing in on voting rights.

100 CEOs Discuss Halting Donations to Oppose New Voting Laws (businessinsider.com)

(9) They're Not The "Resistance," They're The Powerful | Ep. 1233 - YouTube


Dark Matter's Last Stand - Scientific American

Scientists are fond of saying negative results are just as important as positive results, but after several decades of not finding something, researchers can be forgiven for feeling impatient. Back in the 1990s, experiments began trying to detect the particles that make up dark matter, the ubiquitous yet untouchable invisible material that apparently fills the cosmos. Since then, physicists have found more and more evidence that dark matter is real but not a single sign of the stuff itself.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-matters-last-stand/

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated - Common Sense with Bari Weiss

Tucker Carlson: The truth about demographic change and why Democrats want it | Fox News

No Charges Against Officer Who Shot Ashli Babbitt: DOJ

"I find it to be baffling given the circumstances that it's a clear case of shooting an unarmed person without any legal justification, but I have no idea what went into their decision," Roberts said.


It is my understanding that the officer shot an unarmed woman crawling through a window.  I think that it would be quite different if he was confronting an armed mob.

Semantic debate? in what world?

Since the Biden administration released its infrastructure proposal, a semantic debate has arisen around a specific provision: the $400 billion in spending for at-home care for the elderly and disabled.

The conceptualization of visiting nurses as infrastructure—definitionally, the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society—has struck some as cynical, even offensive—an attempt to use a politically popular label to smuggle through a much broader agenda. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted a graphic that featured the $400 billion figure in an ugly black-and-yellow scheme, set against an ominously blurry legislative document. "President Biden's proposal is about anything but infrastructure." Even some prominent allies of the president, such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, stopped short of defending care work as infrastructure. "There's this semantic debate that's opening up," Buttigieg said on MSNBC. "To me it's a little bit besides the point … If it's a good policy, vote for it and call it whatever you like."

Once marginal, the idea that care work is infrastructure has been embraced by feminists across the political spectrum. The Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici advanced the notion...




Gov Ricketts declares Nebraska a 'Second Amendment Sanctuary State' | TheHill

Biden wants to give anti-violence groups $5 billion. Here's how it could be spent.

Is Communism Moral? | PragerU

2021-04-10

The sneaky liberalism of Joe Biden's first few months in office - CNNPolitics

Add it up and you get this: A man in Biden who believes that the moment demands radical and bold change -- whether or not Republicans are willing to come along for the ride.

Which isn't the Joe Biden most people (including Democrats) likely thought they were getting. But it's the Joe Biden we have -- at least for now.

2021-04-08

The Prosecution Against Derek Chauvin Is Collapsing

1st Cases Of Brazil Variant, More Contagious S. African Variant In L.A. – Deadline

Public Health Officials in Los Angeles reported on Wednesday that the county had detected the first cases of the Coronavirus variants originally seen in Brazil and South Africa. While only three instances of the virus strain from Brazil — also known as P.1 — and one instance of the variant from South Africa — known as B.1.351 — were detected, they are likely far from the only cases in the county.

Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer noted that, due to the expense, "Very few of our specimens are genetically tested in this way." Statewide, only 5% of tests are run through genomic sequencing, according to California's top health officer. The rate is even less at the county level.




According to the other article I posted, the Pfizer vaccine is 2/3 less effective against the South African Variant and the Moderna Vaccine is 6.4 times less effective.

2021-04-06

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light


CPU? GPU? This new ARM chip is BOTH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXhlDt2SD8o

This video is over a year old.  Cutting to the chase, some of the features of this advanced chip can be found in Apple's more recent M1 chip that is a bit of a technological revolution:  Put CPU cores, GPU cores, and ultra-fast RAM onto a single chip, along with specialized compute sections for things like video rendering, and the result is a single chip that uses much less power while delivering more performance.  In the near term, this is probably the future of computing.

One of the advantages of being one of the richest companies in the world is that you can spend more on R&D.

Apple's low-end computers, like the M1 Macbook Air or the M1 Mac Mini, deliver a lot of computer power for the money.



INSANE: Teenage Girls Charged With Murder Get Lenient Plea Deal

A third of Covid-19 survivors suffer 'brain disease,' study shows - CNN

(CNN) As many as one in three people infected with Covid-19 have longer-term mental health or neurological symptoms, researchers reported Tuesday.

They found 34% of Covid-19 survivors received a diagnosis for a neurological or psychological condition within six months of their infection, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Lancet Psychiatry.

The most common diagnosis was anxiety, found in 17% of those treated for Covid-19, followed by mood disorders, found in 14% of patients.

And while the neurological effects are more severe in hospitalized patients, they are still common in those who were only treated in an outpatient setting, the researchers note.

"That rate increased progressively as the severity of the Covid-19 illness increased. If we look at patients who were hospitalized that rate increased to 39%," said Maxime Taquet, an academic clinical fellow in psychiatry at the University of Oxford, and a co-author of the new study.

The results help light the way for how the healthcare system ought to continue helping Covid-19 survivors, the researchers said.

2021-04-04

How Many Strains of the Coronavirus Are There? About New Variants

Will the COVID-19 vaccines offer protection against the new strains?
You may be wondering if the coronavirus variants have an impact on the effectiveness of our current vaccines.

From what we know so far, it appears that the current vaccines may be less effective for B.1.351, the variant first identified in South Africa. This is currently an area of ongoing, intense research.

Let's look at a snapshot of what some of the data says so far.

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine
Large-scale clinical trials of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine found a vaccine effectiveness of 95 percent against the original version of the new coronavirus.

This vaccine is currently authorized for emergency use in the United States.

A recent study investigated the effectiveness of this vaccine for test viruses containing the mutations found in B.1.351. To do this, serum from individuals who had been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was used.

Researchers found that this serum, which contains antibodies, was less effective against B.1.351. In fact, neutralization of test viruses containing all of the mutations present in B.1.351 was reduced by two-thirds.

What about B.1.1.7, the variant first seen in the U.K.?

A study similar to the one we've discussed above found that neutralization of test viruses with the spike protein of B.1.1.7 was only slightly lower than it was for earlier versions of the coronavirus.

Moderna vaccine
The large-scale clinical trials on the Moderna vaccine determined that vaccine effectiveness was 94.1 percent against the original version of the new coronavirus.

Like the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the Moderna vaccine has been authorized for emergency use in the United States.

A recent study looked into the effectiveness of the Moderna vaccine for the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants. In order to do this, researchers used serum from individuals who had received the Moderna vaccine and test viruses containing the spike proteins from the variants.

It was found that test viruses with the B.1.1.7 spike protein were neutralized in a similar manner to earlier versions of the coronavirus.

However, neutralization of test viruses with the spike protein of B.1.351 was 6.4-fold lower.

Johnson & Johnson vaccine
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is the third COVID-19 vaccine to be authorized for emergency use in the United States.

Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, it only requires one dose.

This vaccine has yet to be tested against specific variants. However, large-scale clinical trials were performed in places where variants are circulating, such as South Africa and South America.

According to the data released from clinical trialsTrusted Source, the effectiveness of this vaccine 28 days after vaccination is:

66 percent effective overall
72 percent in the United States
66 percent effective in South America, where the P.1 variant is circulating
57 percent effective in South Africa, where the B.1.351 variant is circulating
85 percent effective at preventing severe COVID-19 symptoms across all geographical regions

Dogs being relatable for a minute

Biden Makes Easter Plea; U.K. Plans Vaccine Passes: Virus Update - Bloomberg

President Joe Biden issued an Easter message casting vaccinations as a "moral obligation, one that can save your life and the lives of others." Republican opposition to vaccine passports grew as Mississippi's governor said they were not "a good thing to do in America."

The U.S. added almost 65,000 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday and remains on pace for the most weekly infections since the end of February. North Dakota has gone nine days without a Covid-19 fatality, the longest stretch since the first death there.

United States Covid-19 deaths were about 4K per day at the beginning of this year. Now it is about 1K per day. Still, for most of last year, people were complaining when it was 1K per day.



Infections with ‘U.K Variant’ B.1.1.7 Have Greater Risk of Mortality – NIH Director's Blog

Based on this evidence, the researchers calculated the risk of death associated with B.1.1.7 infection. Their estimates suggest that B.1.1.7 infection was associated with 55 percent greater mortality compared to other SARS-CoV-2 variants over this time period.

Why TVs Are SO CHEAP

AMAZING INVENTIONS THAT ARE NEXT LEVEL!

Not sure how many of these are useful.   Some inventions can be cool but not cost-effective.  This reminds me of looking at magazines in the 1970s where they predicted that we would have nuclear-powered cars by the year 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9jRhq21hVg


Paris Jackson gives rare details about Michael's parenting

When Campbell suggested that Paris was too famous to show up for model castings, she insisted that she is "a full believer that I should earn everything."  

"I need to … I go to auditions, I work hard, I study scripts, I do my thing," she added.

Paris has certainly been doing her thing. Earlier this month, she starred in Stella McCartney's ad campaign for her new collection, featuring eco-conscious vegan-leather pieces.