Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.

  • 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 31st, 2023

help-circle



  • TLDR: the polio vaccine used to contain weakened versions of the three strains of poliovirus. When weakened live virus vaccines are used, the people inoculated with them shed copies of those viruses, which is usually no big deal… except that one of those weakened polio strains would, very rarely, mutate back into its full-strength form and sicken unvaccinated people living around those who were being vaccinated.

    Eight years ago, the decision was made to remove the problematic strain of polio from the vaccine, because it was thought low wild infection rates meant that the risk of vaccination-derived infection had become higher than catching it from the environment. Regrettably, it seems that decision was made in error – type 2 polio outbreaks have soared since then.




  • With regard to this specific issue, you don’t even have to go looking for cases of young women being discouraged from reporting rape and sexual assault allegations against promising young athletes, because “think how you could hurt his future prospects” – examples are so plentiful that you can’t help but find them if you spend any time reviewing sports news. It’s really only been in the last decade or so that anybody has seriously pushed back against the idea that Johnny Sportsball’s ability to score points for the local team is more important than the safety and bodily autonomy of women.







  • My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.

    Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.


  • This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:

    1. either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or

    2. he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he’s quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.

    Prolonging the war doesn’t guarantee he won’t end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he’s running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don’t matter to him.






  • They’re flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you’re right up next to them – and once they’re past the front lines Russia doesn’t have many (if any) point defense installations.

    In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine’s reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine’s air force is to support efforts on the ground.