Kliment

I'll try. I'm no expert but I read a lot about this and people keep asking me to explain it to them. First of all, there is no way to entirely prevent infections and transmission of something that replicates in poorly perfused (low blood flow in the area) upper airways. The immune system works by carrying stuff to infection sites via blood, and so you need enough blood at the place where the virus is before it can be attacked. That's why nobody is claiming total protection from infection and transmission. However, this is highly misleading - the number of replication cycles before immune response stops further spread is dramatically reduced in a vaccinated person, and therefore both their chances of developing disease, and their chances of passing it on, are severely diminished, and the window of transmission is shortened from days/weeks to hours. So yes, you can theoretically spread it, but once vaccinated you're about as effective at spreading it as a doorknob someone sneezed on, rather than being a walking virus manufacturing factory.

Now, about HIV - HIV is extremely difficult to spread from a single contact (it's got very low virulence) and can be managed very well with treatment, making transmission effectively stop from people in state-of-the-art treatment. However, said treatment is expensive and inconvenient, and has risks of its own, and you need to use it all your life, and it's not available to many people, especially risk groups. By vaccinating people at risk, or large parts of the population, HIV could be eliminated, or dramatically reduced at least, saving the people who would get infected from a life of being medication-dependent, assuming they have access to treatment. So for HIV, a vaccination program won't stop needle sharing and unprotected sex, but will stop people getting even more severe consequences from that. There's a similar vaccination program for hepatitis which has shown excellent results.

Cables with power delivery have a single wire for power negotiation (CC) and a single pair of power/ground. The connector, on the other hand, has two CC pins (one of which is connected to the CC wire, and the other is not) and two pairs of power/ground. It also has a few other things - a pair of wires for weird low speed uses (SBU) and an additional pin for supplying power to the cable in case the cable itself has a chip in it.

chapter 4 of https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9

I have a dedicated device for wechat. I recently put whatsapp on it (with a burner phone number) because my parents refuse to use anything else and would attempt to reach me via nearby people who happen to have whatsapp. I will likely remove it again rather when it forces me to "consent" to data sharing. I am extremely uncomfortable with whatsapp, much more so than wechat even.

Sorry, but you do sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. I suspect the reasoning for this measure is to prevent everyone calling them all the time to try and arrange a vaccination while there isn't enough vaccine available. Here in Germany they're doing the same thing (don't call us we'll call you) but are saying this is likely to change as more vaccine becomes available.

Half-dose group was unplanned and they switched everyone to full dose when they found out. It was in the beginning of the trial and they had only administered it to young healthy UK people by then.

I've travelled with valuable (to me, not in commercial terms) art in inconvenient packaging and nearly forgotten it on the baggage scanner. Airport stress is real and Düsseldorf is particularly bad (permanently understaffed for its volume, leading to long delays at checkin and insecurity control if anyone calls in sick).

There is actually a plan to gradually offer all placebo group patients the vaccine. This will be done in small groups at a time, in order to not inform all remaining participants which group they are in. The plan is to have all placebo group participants be offered a vaccine before the end of the trial. This doesn't break the trial, because there is already a good confidence level for the efficacy results, and the side effects investigation can always use additional participants. This also enables in-patient control, where you can compare the placebo condition and the treatment condition within the same patient.

I wait for backups because I do an incremental backup before I go to bed every night and I want it to be done quick so I can shut things down.

I'm sure it's possible, but that means effectively that said person is now an undocumented trial participant. They have gotten injected with an unapproved medical product. That's a risk they've taken in order to get in early. The physician that administered it has also committed a crime that can cost them their license to practice.

There are easier ways for people in power to get vaccines. In China, the government has granted exceptional permissions to vaccinate a number of people with a vaccine that has not yet completed phase 3 trials. The list of people who qualify for that vaccine is said to be several million people long. It's much easier to get on said list in China than it is anywhere else. A number of other governments have also made exceptions for political leaders and such, treating them with non-approved medication or vaccines. For example, the sheikh of Dubai has been vaccinated with the Sinopharm vaccine before approval (in a very public display of faith in said vaccine, in order to promote vaccination to the population). Some countries are saying they won't bother waiting for phase 3 trials to end on some products and will make vaccines generally available based on current data. This is the case for Russia (with Sputnik-V) and Morocco (with the Sinopharm vaccine). I consider it highly likely that their heads of state are vaccinated under an exceptional authorization.

No vaccine can entirely prevent transmission of an airborne pathogen that replicates in the upper airways - there's not enough blood flow there, so some replication will always happen before the immune system reacts sufficiently, and during that time transmission is possible. However, all available data suggests that the vaccine-initiated immune response would dramatically reduce the transmission probability by both reducing viral load and reducing the time window for successful transmission. This effect has not been measured with this particular vaccine because it can only be measured for a very short period immediately after infection. It's very hard to do this unless you intentionally trigger an infection and that's why we have no data. (This is called a "challenge study" and it's been done with animals but not humans. There's a plan to do one with volunteers in January.)

Lots of anti-vaccine fuckers have latched onto the "it can't prevent transmission" part of this and are using it to discredit vaccines. Lots of people with insufficient information are repeating this statement because they don't know better.

They typically need to go for much longer for two reasons:

1. You normally don't expose so many people to an untested medicine, so trials tend to be smaller than this. In this case there was no shortage of volunteers, and the larger the trial the faster it can reach a certain level of confidence in a result.

2. Normally, with vaccines, you need to wait a very long time for enough people to contract the disease and measure how effective it actually is. In this case, there are so many people infected in the general population, that reaching the required number of participants infected happened much faster than usual. In fact, when the trial was planned in the spring, it was expected that it wouldn't reach its required 164 infected participants until sometime in late summer 2021. The reason this happened so quick is that the number of infections in the general population exploded, and so the required data was available much earlier.

Challenge studies get performed on non-human (animal) test subjects (this was done for the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine), and there's a volunteer human challenge study planned in the UK for January. A challenge study is one where you intentionally give a live virus to your subjects.

Arguably, releasing your subjects into an environment full of live virus, such as the United States, is a kind of challenge study, which rapidly delivers efficacy data. This is why approval could happen so much faster than usual for these vaccines.

Outside clinical trials nobody in Germany or France has been vaccinated as there are no approved vaccines in those countries.

That's exactly what it is - an inflatable mattress, typically placed in a room not intended to be a bedroom, and therefore lacking privacy

Backups that complete in minutes rather than tens of minutes.

As I understand it the landing legs didn't deploy because velocity was too high and angle was wrong. All this stuff gets reported by telemetry because they know exactly how likely it is that a first attempt flight will fail catastrophically (very). So these test rockets are heavily instrumented and networked. Watching it the first time I also thought one of the engines had failed but then that engine had a successful relight and another did not, and the fuel mix ratio appeared to be wrong on one of the engines. This is all consistent with loss of propellant (there was a quite significant leak after the first fire in engine bay) and not consistent with "engines ate themselves alive".

Your greater point about it being better to land than not land stands, but these are experimental rockets. They're expected to fail catastrophically and you plan accordingly.

I think you misread the gp comment - it should be read as "move away from [...] non-electric transportation"

You don't have to run it at full power, and you run it when the sun shines.

To be clear, the complete dataset and approval application was not delivered to the EMA by Pfizer until Monday. You can't expect a regulatory approval in two days - it takes longer to even read the complete application.

Yeah, and given the political pressure they're likely to do it earlier (I believe they meet every 2 weeks, and they received the application documents with the complete data set on monday). Dec 28 is their "no later than" internal deadline. The EC has already said they'd hold an emergency meeting to formally approve immediately after.

This particular vaccine is literally just a bit of RNA in a blob of fat. The fat sticks to cell membranes, and the RNA pokes through. There's nothing more to it (this is also why it's possible to scale up production so quickly)

Innovation can be good, scamming other people into spending money on things that don't work, not so much. There's a whole lot of the latter masquerading as the former. There's also a whole lot of user/customer/community hostile innovation, like the entire advertising industry.

It's not too squishy. The important thing to understand here is that a plane is an infinite object in a given subspace - just like a line is. Two infinite objects intersecting give you an infinite object in the subspaces they share, and a zero-sized object in the subspaces they don't share. The shared subspace of two planes in 2D is obviously the same plane. The shared subspace of two planes in 3D is obviously either zero (two parallel nonincident planes), a line (the intersection that they share) or a plane (two incident planes). So you get a null, a one-dimensional subspace, or a two-dimensional subspace, depending on how many shared subspaces you have between the objects. So a pair of three-dimensional infinite objects, in four-dimensional space, may either be disjoint, resulting in a null, incident, resulting in an infinite volume, or intersecting, resulting in an infinite plane.

The source of confusion here is that we're mixing up (bounded) volumetric shapes, line segments, and planar polygons, with their infinite counterparts - the lines, points, planes, and infinite volumes. An infinite object has no shape - it is infinite in some dimensions and zero in all others - this is what gives us those clear well-defined intersection objects, which are either zero or infinite. A bounded object has a shape - it has a boundary that is not infinite. When you intersect such objects within their shared subspaces (two line segments on the same line, two polygons on the same plane, two volumes in the same space) you get either a null, or an object of the same type. This is obvious when you make one of the objects infinite - an intersection of a line segment with its line gives you the same line segment. So the reason you are having difficulty imagining two somethings that will intersect in a plane is that a plane is an infinite object, so only two infinite objects can intersect in a plane. So you need two infinite volumes, that pass through the same 4D space, but are not the same volume. These volumes share a two-dimensional subspace - the area of 4D space they intersect in is a plane. It's infinite in two dimensions, and zero-sized in two others.

No, they won't. They can't survive for long enough inside the body, and are even less durable outside.

Very very simplified: Basically, you have a blob of fat that the mRNA sits in. The fat sticks to the cell, merges with the cell membrane and the mRNA pokes into the cell. It's not a modified virus, it's a much simpler structure but it has a similar mechanism. It's much simpler in that it can't replicate itself or do much else. It's literally just the code for a protein that's found on the surface of the covid virus, in a blob of fat.

That's for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. Other vaccines, such as the Oxford/AstraZeneca one do use a modified virus.

You don't have to guess, this is published information. They have trays of 1000 doses, and up to 5 trays fit in a shipping box with the dry ice.

Yes, the geometric product ab = a.b + a^b and therefore you can combine those two into a single nablaF = J where J is the 4-current.

I have 3088 tabs right now. I don't see how this is horrifying at all. I have a tab open for every dependency of every project I do, including one for every component of every electronics project I maintain. I have a tab for every webcomic I follow, a tab for every news page, a tab for every package that's on its way to me. It's like searchable, zero-effort bookmarks with state (including page scroll location) saved. Of course this is on firefox, and total suspender makes it easy to keep resource usage low. I have many years worth of state here, and if I didn't have this I don't see why I would even bother using a browser. It's like a personal knowledge base. Related tabs are clustered together in the list, I know approximately where things are in the list, I have two different search tools (% search and Tab Center Redux' own search box). I don't get why people keep trying to tell others that their workflow is bad ("horrifying") and they should feel bad. I don't care, this works, and nothing else compares.

They're water-cooled.