grey413

Flight plans for Musk's jets are public information.

Most domesticated animals that I can think of do just fine when they're released into the wild. In fact, I don't think there's any domesticated animals out there that don't have a feral population running around somewhere.

I can't recommend Scott Sandwich's condensed, light-heated translation of the Kalevala enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZhf-AcnIyw

Additions like gypsum work in cases like this because they add permanent drainage to the soil. Adding organic matter also adds drainage, but microbial activity removes it over time and you end up with the same soil that you started with.

Anyone taking this should still develop an immune memory to covid. As I recall, even people who took monoclonal antibodies (that is to say, an antiviral where they literally inject functional anti-covid antibodies into your veins) developed some degree of natural immunity.

Agreed. The reports that VAERS provides can hint at rare adverse outcomes for vaccines, but it simply doesn't hold any significance compared to clinical trials. Comparing them is just outright false equivalence.

VAERS hasn't turned up anything like you're implying about the Pfizer vaccine.

My understanding is that other antivirals are much less effective after the first week or so of infection.

On the other hand, claiming that the vaccinated spread the disease 63% less even in close household situations is supported by the science.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v...

They're apples and oranges, really. The best course of action to get a vaccine for the preventative effects and an antiviral if one has a breakthrough infection.

Reddit does that... but also scrubbed pretty much all nude and sexual subreddits off their "all" and "popular" feeds to appease advertisers.

FYI, your dad would most likely already qualify to receive the antiviral antibody treatments that have been given emergency authorization by the FDA.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/ant...

Corner-related deaths probably had a hard time standing out as a major concern during a time when disease constantly stalked the land.

I fail to see how this is relevant. Obviously some set of people will test positive after they've been hospitalized for other causes, and another set will have mild cases that don't progress to the serious your-lungs-no-longer-work stage. The total cases and hospitalizations are still good general metrics to gauge the severity of the crisis and balance risks. If statistics didn't have nuances we wouldn't need statisticians.

Regardless, your objection is irrelevant to the comparison you've tried to make with VAERS. The COVID statistics are a sweeping accounting of common, obvious events that are easy to verify. VAERS, by contrast, is designed for hinting at the sort of literal one-in-a-millon range events that controlled medical trials can sometimes miss, where determining cause and effect is difficult. They're different tools for different jobs. Trying to apply standards from one to the other is simply spurious.

Comparing Covid statistics to VAERS is comparing apples to oranges.

I completely reject your premise that the covid statistics are shoddy. It's easy to confirm a covid case. You do a PCR test, and if you get a positive back it's covid, end of story. It's admittedly a bit trickier to attribute a covid death... but not really. If a covid patient dies of a heart attack, it could be bad luck, or it could be the disease that coagulates its victims' blood. But usually it's pretty obvious. Someone dying of pneumonia and/or a cytokine storm isn't exactly subtle. There's nothing in the overall death statistics that suggest that the obvious covid deaths are anything but the obvious.

By comparison, establishing a casual connection between a vaccine and any adverse side effects is incredibly difficult, simply because they're so rare. Of the 44000 people in the Pfizer trials, literally none of them died of covid OR the vaccine, vs 15 covid deaths in the unvaccinated control group. And VAERS is just a safety net in case something small-but serious slips through the statistical power of a full scientific study (as happened with the J&J vaccine).

VAERS reports can (and should) be done for any death following vaccination, whether or not anyone thinks that death was vaccine-related. There's no evidence that the "13k+ COVID-19 vaccine related deaths" are anything of the sort; VEARS is simply not the sort of scientific study that can provide that sort of evidence. VEARS can throw up red flags for safety halts and further study (as happened with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine), but that's it. It's definitely, definitely not some gotcha data-point for you to wave around to attack the vaccines as unsafe.

I agree, easy, free access to rapid tests would be fantastic. They're pretty prone to false results, though, and are no substitute for vaccination.

As for giving exemptions for prior infection, there's no real reason to. Prior infection gives decent immunity, but a vaccination on top of it gives great immunity. It's a small net positive, but anything helps.

Getting a vaccine after recovering from covid would be along the lines of getting a booster shot. You'd develop some new antibodies, and strengthen your immune memory for the disease. It'll offer you better protection no matter what.

mRNA vaccines deliver mRNA to the target cell, via merging a lipid bubble into the cell membrane and dumping the contents into the cytoplasm. The mRNA is then translated into a specially designed variant of the spike protein that is embedded facing out of the cell membrane. As it happens, the physical details of embedded protein translation means that the spike proteins never see the cytoplasm at all, being restricted to the endoplasmic reticulum.

Concord, obviously

A colleague on mine who once ran an ecological survey in the desert mentioned that her fluid of choice for extreme dry heat was V8. Pretty much anything else would cause horrible salt deprivation.

The amount of energy required for fast interstellar travel is mind-boggling. People do not comprehend the scale. Even with ridiculous things like massless fuel it would take multiple times the entire yearly energy expenditure of the earth for an ISS sized ship to travel 10 light years before the passengers died of old age.

I hate it when map apps spin. Just absolutely hampers any ability to develop a bigger picture idea of how you're navigating, and is terribly confusing when the app gets your heading wrong, as your friend found out.

Everyone else has had good answers, but I'm also going to note that we knew a ton about covid's general molecular biology well before it ever came into existence. Covid (more properly, SARS-CoV-2) is a cronovirus. Cronoviruses have been studied for some time since some of them cause common colds, and studied very intensely since 2002 when SARS showed pandemic potential. So when Covid showed up, there was a ton of prestablished information and expertise avaliable to help every element of the pandemic response.

We are really quite fortunate that there was a ton of work done on coronaviruses, mRNA vaccines, adenovirus vaccines, etc prior to the pandemic. It seems like a pandemic even a year or three prior would have made the vaccine rollout considerably slower.

Freeze drying is largely about removing water. No water means no bacterial action. Instant mummification, in effect.

Those are much, much simpler systems. Your average human microbiome has 30+ trillion cells in it, too say nothing of the intestinal cells. That's not getting into the underlying complexity of the cells themselves.

It's pretty normal to introduce springtails (small arthropods) to sealed terrariums. Their main purpose is to to eat mold, but they presumably also help with the carbon cycle.

There are specific varieties of grape that are grown to be turned into varieties of raisins.

Realistically, that sort of thing suffers. My wife keeps an early schedule and anything past 7 or 8 is iffy. She can usually do it, but there's a non trivial chance that she'll be too tired to function properly.