Covid-19 (Coronavirus) - Please stay safe, y'all

[levi]

String theory is at the cutting edge of physics. It's basically the maths nerds taking the equations and running with them. That's worked in the past, for example that's how Einstein came up with general relativity, but very few people believed that until it was experimentally proven, and I've absolutely no idea how they're ever going to be able to prove string theory experimentally.

Edit: And I've no idea how this or the entire field of gender studies related to covid-19, but eh.

 

[JDTAY]

Edit: And I've no idea how this or the entire field of gender studies related to covid-19, but eh.

You said education is needed. He's saying education has been compromised. Basically most of the stuff we grew up learning has been thrown out.

I gotta admit though, I was never a fan of string theory. It isn't based on anything we've observed. Just cool math shit, like you said. Also why I don't believe in alternate universes or even aliens. No confirmed observations of either one.

I mean, I mentioned in another thread though that I have trouble even believing in death, because no-one's observed it. So yeah, the whole observation thing can get absurd. If you believe in things without observation though, you can believe in literally anything, like a giant purple dick-eating monster that's coming to eat all our dicks. I mean, no-one's disproved that one yet, right?

 

[Robert Taylor]

Einstein was around 26 when he published most of his work. One guy, no internet, some reading of some papers and a bunch of math. His predictions are still being tested as holding true (from what I can tell anyway).

String theorists have not published a single testable theory in the last 45 years (since the beginning of the idea) that now consumes 100s of researchers (maybe more?) and consumes vast sums of government funding.

You could literally throw away 100% of all of the string theory research and researches out and have EXACTLY the same state of the art in physics today. Nothing would be lost.

If you can throw away 45 years of research and not loose anything of value, what worth does the field have?

It's pretty close to 0. It has basically turned out to be woo. At least that is the claim by some in that field anyway.

You can even say that physicists that don't dabble in woo have problems justifying their claims:


The link from gender studies to string theory to the chinese virus is the reliability of the people pushing this stuff. It is all turning out to be highly suspect. The rot is all through the system.

I post Sabine mostly because she has the balls to call people out on their shit publicly. Everyone else in that field is too chicken to say anything. Sabine her self suffers from a self hatred and subscribes to a bunch of post modernist nonsnese, but like anything, she is only human.

 

[JDTAY]

Meh, we're getting close to derailing the thread.

String theory was always a solution in search of a problem. I guess it's an attempt to explain where matter comes from. If you believe that matter has to come from somewhere though, don't the strings also have to come from somewhere? It's a never-ending rabbit hole.

Edit: Reminds me of an xkcd comic I saw once. What's a fundamental particle? Whatever's smaller than the previous fundamental particle.

NDEs are cool in that they all claim love is the fundamental particle. They're all dodgy on an exact definition for love though. Closest I've seen is, "Love is life's longing for itself."

 

[JDTAY]

My state's COVID-19 page is late updating today. I'll cut them slack since it's a Sunday. I've just got this sinking feeling we're in for a bad update though.

 

[levi]

Here at least you can't trust weekend reports. That extends to monday or maybe tuesday as well, as they're still catching up with misreported cases over the weekend.

 

[JDTAY]

So, the update happened. New daily record for new cases for the third time in four days, but the hospitalizations barely budged, even if they're also at a record.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Are America's Hospitals Becoming Overwhelmed? - Slashdot

New Mexico's governor announced plans to allow hospitals "to ration care depending on a patient's likelihood of surviving," according to the Washington Post. But in fact, many of America's hospitals are now "overwhelmed," reports CBS News, adding "A record-breaking 227,00 new cases were...

science.slashdot.org

Let the idiot use CAPS LOCK :^)

 

[Phlyra]

Are America's Hospitals Becoming Overwhelmed? - Slashdot

New Mexico's governor announced plans to allow hospitals "to ration care depending on a patient's likelihood of surviving," according to the Washington Post. But in fact, many of America's hospitals are now "overwhelmed," reports CBS News, adding "A record-breaking 227,00 new cases were...

science.slashdot.org

Let the idiot use CAPS LOCK :^)

Give a man enough rope...

 

[Linux-SWAT]

X^D True, but he's here to stay anyway...

I've heard from someone that the mRNA vaccine from Pfizer doesn't prevent people from being infected and contagious, it just kinda mitigates the effects of the virus.
I had no sources, I don't know if it's true. Does someone have info on this ?

 

[levi]

Nobody knows. Nobody's going to be exposing people who've taken the vaccine with live virus just to prove it works. So we need to wait until enough people have been vaccinated and see what happens.

In other news, Rudy Giuliani has caught Covid-19 and is being treated for it.

 

[pyrat]

I've heard from someone that the mRNA vaccine from Pfizer doesn't prevent people from being infected and contagious, it just kinda mitigates the effects of the virus.
I had no sources, I don't know if it's true. Does someone have info on this ?

Pse. I've read something similar, but not quite the same. It's not that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine doesn't prevent infection, it's that it is not currently known whether it prevents infection, because the trials were designed to test for symptoms, not infection.
It seems they didn't test the test participants every week or so with a PCR, they just waited until someone complained of symptoms and then made PCR test, looked at everything and made diagnostics. Then (after a prefixed number of complaints) they counted how many of them had had placebo and how many vaccine. So they can deduce that those with the vaccine complained less of symptoms, but they can't know if they had the virus or they passed it away.
I read it in forbes, i think it was here, but I lack the expertise to evaluate how much sense it makes.

Nobody knows. Nobody's going to be exposing people who've taken the vaccine with live virus just to prove it works. So we need to wait until enough people have been vaccinated and see what happens.

Somebody who worked at Pfizer warned others wanted to do just that, I don't know if they're yet going to do it. I've heard the WHO is going to discuss it in some meeting. It doesn't sound right to me.

That's part of the reason they didn't PCR-test test participants systematically. If you can't infect healthy vaccinated people because you don't know the vaccine works yet, and you don't know how to cure them, then you can only wait for they to get infected naturally and compare numbers between control group and test group. But if you do so, then you want to test in regions with a high natural spread of the virus, so that you get significant numbers of naturally infected participants sooner. I guess in those regions they have enough of a problem already
with coping with the pandemic to have them testing test participants each week and determining infection. So they wait for symptoms. Although I've read a subgroup of AstraZeneca/Oxford participants were tested for infection too.

 

[JDTAY]

Check out this headline from the Washington Post: "Covid-19 hospitalization rates are dropping. That’s terrible news."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/07/covid-hospitalization-rates-dropping/

Fortunately, the actual article is behind a paywall, so I'm safe from the terrible news.

 

[levi]

You can usually internet search a title of a blocked news story, and find it syndicated elsewhere, at least for US news:

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[JDTAY]

Some guy posted on Facebook that my county has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths since October, out of 100 counties, despite being tenth in population.

I wonder why he picked October as his arbitrary start date though. You could probably pick any month from March to December and get a different county. Means my county is on a list of the worst counties, but not necessarily the worst itself, which is what you would expect from the tenth most populated county.

 

[JDTAY]

I mean, I'd hate to use this thread for a rant about critical thinking itself, but I see too many people, even in the media, posting single data points as proof of their arguments.

At least I don't have to tell you guys what "cherry-picking" means, right?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

The information is a well-organized chaos, a pure jewel of social engineering.

An article (french national press) about the Pfizer/moderna gene therapy (it's not a vaccine) who doesn't seem to prevent people from being infected, then contagious:

Le vaccin ne serait pas totalement efficace contre la transmission du virus

Élaboré pour lutter contre l’infection des poumons, le vaccin contre le Covid 19 pourrait ne pas être totalement efficace contre la transmission du virus. C’est ce qu’estiment les scientifiques.

www.ladepeche.fr

A short video (french FM radio station, filmed interview) where a professor specialized in emerging infectious diseases explains (in french) the three types of vaccines (classic, adenovirus/coronavirus mix, gene therapy).
He also explains why it's a bad idea to take the gene therapy (untested, possibility of people's DNA modification, possibility to pass this modification to children), and why governments allow this shit (spoiler: money):

 

[Robert Taylor]

WOW. Now THAT is a great link. Thank you!

That is far worse than I imagined.

 

[Robert Taylor]

Weird, the numbers quoted below are in the summary paragraph at the end of each report:

In 2015, a total of 2,712,630 resident deaths were registered in the United States:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db267.pdf

In 2016, a total of 2,744,248 resident deaths were registered in the United States:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db293.pdf

In 2017, a total of 2,813,503 resident deaths were registered in the United States:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db328-h.pdf

In 2018, a total of 2,839,205 resident deaths were registered in the United States:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db355-h.pdf

2019, January - December month ending number of deaths, 2,855,000:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/provisional-tables.htm

2020 number of deaths (all causes) through 11/28/2020, 2,654,825:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19

EDIT; The 2020 report is for 11 months so if you divide by 11 and add 1 months of expected deaths, we should get 2896172 by the end of 2020.

I don't see any bump in the numbers at all for this year through 11/28/2020. There may be other cdc numbers or context that could provide insight into the above.

 

[ElPoco]

A short video (french FM radio station, filmed interview) where a professor specialized in emerging infectious diseases explains (in french) the three types of vaccines (classic, adenovirus/coronavirus mix, gene therapy).
He also explains why it's a bad idea to take the gene therapy (untested, possibility of people's DNA modification, possibility to pass this modification to children), and why governments allow this shit (spoiler: money):

Christian Perronne is not an expert of the topic. His specialty is Lyme disease, which has little to do with SARS viruses. He's also repeated many complotists talking points. He was a supporter of hydroxychloroquinine and back in October he said that there wasn't any second wave.
So I'll take what he says with a grain of salt.