If you’d like to have nightmares, Christopher Stolarski has written up an account of his month of treatment for COVID-19. He was young and healthy, so he survived, but it sounds hellish.
Get vaccinated.
I’d also say, “wear a mask,” but I guess that ship has sailed. We require them at the university and in the hospital, but outside of those places, I never see anyone else wearing them anymore. Does anyone know how to read a graph?
Curious. I got up at a ridiculous hour again this morning, and cautiously walked into the kitchen. Why cautiously? Because our cat likes to leave us little presents, like a puddle of puke or a dead mouse. I flicked on the light and saw…onions. Onions on the floor, onions on the countertop, onions on the stove, onions in pots. The source was obvious — we had a mesh bag of onions hanging from a hook — and the material cause was clear — the mesh was slit wide open, from the knot at the top to the bottom of the bag. It was no longer a bag, but more of a useless mesh sheet. But how? Who, or what, committed the act of bagicide that liberated all these onions?
My first suspect is the evil cat, except that she has heretofore exhibited an irrational fear of the stove and the kitchen counters. The criminal mind is a superstitious mind, and she is definitely the kind of super-villain you’d find in a Batman comic book. But the bag was neatly slit, not raggedly torn, as a beast would do.
Also near the bag was a butcher block of knives that I’d sharpened to a razor edge yesterday. They must have played a role, somehow.
My keen deductive mind is forced to conclude that the cat, while practicing to overcome her fear of kitchen appliances, has learned to wield a knife and slash viciously at objects in her environment. That may seem unlikely, but when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth*. I’m going to have to keep a closer eye on her now. First the onions, then the master, you know.
*By the way, I detest that dictum — it’s typical Holmesian illogical BS. You can never eliminate all the impossibilities, you can never even know all the alternatives. What if it’s something I didn’t even think of?
It never is.
Today I
Tomorrow, Spring semester advising continues on top of the usual workload.
Hey, this week is busy, but next week is only a half week, and there’ll be no lab! I’m going to need that to make it to the end of the term.
Once upon a time, I thought David Silverman was a good guy — a bit aggressive, maybe, with a few weird ideas, but heck, he was going on Fox News to fight the good fight, and he proudly declared himself a feminist. Then he got caught coercing sex from young women, was fired, and now…
Rittenhouse is innocent, and everyone who isn't depending on CNN for their news knows I'm right. This was a travesty.
His assailants were violent armed thugs and I'm Glad they're dead. We are better off with dead thugs, even if they're Leftists.
Bye dead thugs. :)
— David Silverman fights bigotry in all directions (@MrAtheistPants) November 13, 2021
I look at him now and wonder how bad a judge of character am I? How did I miss the warning signs? He’s an object lesson in how vulnerable we all are to believing what we want to believe.
By the way, on just the objective facts of the case, Rittenhouse is a gun freak who traveled out-of-state to drop in on a protest and murder a couple of people with a high-powered rifle. He is a murderer. He killed with intent. He’s also probably going to walk because our justice system is a joke, and he got a lunatic as a judge.
This afternoon at 4pm my time (central time), the FtB gang is going to have a conversation about video games.
We know where it’s going to go. You can’t talk about social justice and video games without the horror that is #gamergate rising up. Maybe we’ll get trolls!
Who knows, though, maybe we’ll just get into how much fun a game can be.
Who else remembers watching the western TV series, Death Valley Days, with their grandparents back in the 1960s? It was hosted by Ronald Reagan, and sponsored by 20 Mule Team Borax, a company that sold cleaning products based on sodium tetraborate, which used to be mined in Death Valley, and hauled out by wagons drawn by — you guessed it — 20 mule teams. If only I’d known then what glorious fate the future held for Reagan, and now borax.
Borax is a caustic substance that you can use for cleaning, but also as an insecticide and for unclogging pipes. I haven’t heard of it being used as a floor wax or a dessert topping, at least not yet, but it does have a novel new utility here in the 21st Century…oh god, I also remember watching a show called The 21st Century, hosted by Walter Cronkite, every Sunday at my grandparents’ after church. Walter would tell us all about the technological wonders we’ll see in the 21st century, you know, now, but he missed this one.
A “Dr” Carrie Madej is promoting borax as a method for “undoing” a vaccination.
In a TikTok video that has garnered hundreds of thousands of views, Dr. Carrie Madej outlined the ingredients for a bath she said will “detox the vaxx” for people who have given into Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
The ingredients in the bath are mostly not harmful, although the supposed benefits attached to them are entirely fictional. Baking soda and epsom salts, she falsely claims, will provide a “radiation detox” to remove radiation Madej falsely believes is activated by the vaccine. Bentonite clay will add a “major pull of poison,” she says, based on a mistaken idea in anti-vaccine communities that toxins can be removed from the body with certain therapies.
Then, she recommends adding in one cup of borax, a cleaning agent that’s been banned as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration, to “take nanotechnologies out of you.”
You know this doesn’t work, right? It’s not going to affect the action of a vaccine, it’s not going extract anything, and it’s not going to “melt” nanotechnologies that aren’t even present in the vaccine. It is going to act as a skin and eye irritant, it could produce unpleasant rashes (that’s a sign that it’s working
, I can imagine the quacks saying), and borax exposure has been linked to infertility (See? I told you the vax would make you infertile — I got the jab and then bathed in borax, and now I can’t have babies
).
And that’s not all. Now that a majority of the population has been vaccinated, and the dire consequences predicted by the quacks have not come to pass, they are rushing to invent new problems that don’t exist, like vaccine toxins, that they can not cure with bizarre new treatments that don’t work.
Now, some anti-vaccine groups are recommending that people who have been vaccinated should immediately self-administer cupping therapy (an ancient form of alternative medicine that involves creating suction on the skin) to speed up the “removal of the vax content” including first making small incisions on the injection site with a razor. Other memes give instructions on how to “un-inject” shots using syringes.
Any day now we’ll hear that they’re going to be treating vaccination non-problems with black salve or psychic surgery. Mark my words, this is going to be a growth market, given the abundance of stupidity in the population.
Uncle Walter, I am so disappointed in you. You never told us about this future awaiting us.
The TWO MILLIONTH comment on Pharyngula (caveat: we lost many comments in various moves, so really it’s the two millionth surviving comment — we practice natural selection on our commenters here) has been made. It’s here, and was made by the esteemed Lynna, OM in the Infinite Thread. Congratulations! Good work! Keep it up!
Sorry, I don’t have any prizes. Maybe I can save up for the 3 millionth comment.
Aww, this is such a sweet story. An anonymous Australian donor gave up a beautiful pet in order to save lives.
The arachnid has been named Megaspider, and the park says she is roughly twice the size of a typical funnel web spider, more comparable to a tarantula.
The 8cm funnel web spider’s 2cm fangs will be milked for venom that can be turned into antivenom.
The Australian Reptile Park on the New South Wales Central Coast is the only funnel web spider venom milking facility in the country and the antivenom produced there saves up to 300 lives a year, the park says.
Australian Reptile Park’s education officer, Michael Tate, has “never seen a funnel web spider this big”.
“She is unusually large and if we can get the public to hand in more spiders like her, it will only result in more lives being saved due to the huge amount of venom they can produce,” he said.
Call me selfish, but if I found a spider like that I’d be tempted to keep her and coddle her and hug her — OK, maybe no hugging — and keep her forever.
I know all of you want to see this gorgeous beast, so I’ll include a photo below the fold.
I don’t think we got a lot of snow last night, but I can’t tell, because these fierce winter winds scour everything bare. Most of the snow that might have fallen in my front yard is probably in the next county.
It might still be snowing, or the wind could just be pushing it around in the air, I don’t know. I’ve been entertained by watching the birds pumping their wings frantically to try and reach this birdfeeder and essentially hovering in place until they tire and the wind whisks them away. Poor birds.
They seem to be appallingly slow to respond to accusations of scientific fraud. Last February I wrote about the scandal involving Jonathan Pruitt, a prolific scientist studying spider social behavior, whose collaborators (and there were many) who discovered that the data he contributed to their papers was in some substantial part fabricated. This is a big deal. I’ve been seeing papers cited in the popular press that are tainted by his work. There was a wave of retractions, and the guy hired lawyers to block them, which is just weird, since going to court would have provided more exposure to the evidence — I guess he was just hoping publishers would be too lazy or disinterested in validating the integrity of the research they publish.
Well, now another major strike has been made against Jonathan Pruitt: his Ph.D. has been retracted.
Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist and Canada 150 Research Chair who has had a dozen papers retracted following allegations of data fraud, now appears to have had his doctoral dissertation withdrawn.
The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.
Ouch. that implies that his untrustworthy behavior goes all the way back to the earliest days of his career. It also implies that he is unqualified to hold his professorship at McMaster University.
Which he still does! He’s still listed as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior, and he still has a lab web page which lists 9 post-docs and graduate students. Oh, man, I feel for those students — I hope they’ve since landed in better labs. This is the kind of association that can ruin careers.
But now I’m wondering why McMaster isn’t cleaning up this mess. Has Pruitt sicced lawyers on them? This is the kind of thing most universities would be quick to condemn, or at the very least, sweep under the rug. Yet there he still is, virtually at least (physically, he seems to be in Florida), even with a page advertising for new grad students to join his lab. Something is going on. I hope we find out someday. Until then, I’m just going to skip over any papers authored by Pruitt, J.
