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Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/27/21 in all areas

  1. Yes, I'm aware of this. This is the reason behind "maybe" when I said "maybe crystals..." I find this hypothesis --perhaps in combination with the RNA world idea-- very promising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hazen#Origins_of_life This guy et al. did a re-run of the Miller-Urey experiment, but they added minerals, and found interesting results: Pyruvate and oxaloacetate are important intermediates in cellular respiration, so I guess they were trying to look for a primitive version of it in a convenient "chemical cauldron". Documentary (Life's Rocky Start): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA4w0b2WRvo Things like tardigrades and other resilient organisms I tend to see as shedding light on amazing phenomena as: How is it possible that multicellular organisms endured episodes as Snowball Earth, and the like? Kind of like a second-order mechanism providing plausible explanation of life taking hold in spite of these cataclysmic episodes.
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  2. Evil is a social construct, and, while social behaviour is an evolutionary effect, there is no evidence that its constructs have have an evolutionary cause or impact. Not everything has an evolutionary aspect; some of the sh*t, we just made up.
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  3. Polio is still endemic in Afghanistand and Pakistan and I believe there have been irregular detections elsewhere. To OP, at this point it is not clear. If vaccination was available early in the pandemic and/or if the infection levels where kept at a low level until now, and if everyone was getting vaccinated, then the answer would have been a yes. However, one should take a step back in understanding how eradication works. It is not necessarily just a matter of vaccination, but it is about creating a situation where an infected person is unable to infect enough folks to sustain pathogen spread. Herd immunity could be achieved by a combination of vaccination, immunity, as well as social measures (e.g. distancing) for example. But right now we have still over 14.8 million detected infections (and likely many more undetected) which is a huge reservoir for the virus and has a high risk of the creation of new variants. I have lost track of how many variants there are now in circulation, though only relatively few are classified to be of concern. Nonetheless, there is a big risk that for at least some of the variants, the vaccine will be less effective. We have already observed across the world that the UK variant (B.1.1.7) has displaced the wildtype. And this also affects how we should interpret vaccine efficacy data. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna efficacy data were generated earlier in the pandemic where mostly the wildtype was around. However, AstraZeneca already included data from patients with the B.1.351 (South African) strain, against which the vaccines might not work as well. Some smaller data sets indicate for example that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is about 89.5% effective against any infection with the B.1.1.7 variant and only 75% against B.1.351 in some groups (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2104974). However, they still protected with over 90% against severe diseases. The issue there is that while it prevents hospitalizations, it is still possible that folks get infected and may potentially transmit it to vulnerable persons. Aside from variants we got the issue that in many (most) populations we will not achieve anything close 100% compliance. Surveys in various countries, including the US, UK and Canada, indicate that up to 35% of those surveyed indicated that they won't get the vaccine. Another big issue is worldwide-timing. If vaccines are only provided in richer countries, then those who cannot afford it are basically a reservoir for the virus. If we take another year to vaccinate them, it will be a full year where new variants can rise. But even if just focus on local issues (and I want to emphasize that this would be really stupid to address a pandemic), we can do a little bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation here. Let's focus on vaccination as the sole measure and let's assume we need ~80% immunity in the population to reach herd immunity. Let us further assume that the vaccines have an effectiveness of 90%. In order to achieve 80% immunity, it would be necessary to vaccinate 89% of the population to reach the herd immunity target. Only few countries (according to polls) are at that level of theoretical compliance. If we use US polls as an estimate of vaccine willingness (~75%), we can estimate that with a 90% effective vaccine we will have ~68% immunity, lower than almost all current estimated requirement for herd immunity. If the vaccine effectiveness goes down to 80% (due to variants for example) we would need to vaccinate every single person. So even if there are no barriers to providing vaccines to folks, it is tricky to rely on it alone to push down viral numbers to a degree that there is no net transmission. So no, based on the current situation I actually do not think that the current rollout in practice is likely going to eradicate the virus completely. The more likely scenario (I believe) for now is that it will become endemic. However, the optimistic scenario is that it will be better controlled via regular vaccines (and treatments) and won't have the same horrible death toll in the future. It might indeed become something like a flu, which, I want to emphasize has regularly costed many lives and is not really harmless either (though compared to COVID-19 it is comparatively tame). And as a minor sidenote, I would like to emphasize how behavioral changes have affected flu-related deaths. In the years prior 20-50k folks are estimated to have died each year from influenza in the US. Last year it was a few hundred reported so far.
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  4. Just to see how wrong this is, here is a calculation using spherical triangles. This distance from Giza to St Petersburg is 4903 km and the circumference of the earth is 40075 km The longitude of the Giza pyramid is 31.1325oE and the longitude of StP is 30.3609oE a difference of 0.772 degrees. So if we let Giza be vertex A and StP be vertex C of a spherical triangle, and proceed in the direction of StP 0.772o W this gives us angle A of the spherical triangle. Now the perpendicular from C to the line due north through A strikes this line at B, giving angle B of 90o. Side AC is the distance from Giza to StP and subtends an angle to the centre b = 360 * 4903/40075 = 44.044o. So we have two angles and a side of the spherical triangle ABC, which is enough to solve it by the sine rule for spherical triangles. We only require side a = CB = the offset of C from the true north line (AB) through Giza (A). [math]\sin a = \frac{{\sin b\sin A}}{{\sin B}} = \frac{{\sin (44.044)\sin (0.772)}}{{\sin (90)}} = 0.0093670[/math] Hence a = 0.53669820 leading to distance BC = 59.74 km So St Petersburg is 60 kilometres off the north line through Giza.
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  5. stupid Special cases should be treated specially, did you expect me to enumerate all of them? Don't be obtuse. Being a fattie or a geezer are the most common risk factors.
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  6. What is dark matter? An incomprehensible substance evenly scattered throughout the Universe, or is it the border of the Universe behind the Oort cloud, from where the sunlight is simply not reflected? Astronomers Use New Data to Create Extraordinary Dark Matter Map The distance to the most distant galaxy is supposedly 13.4 billion light years. This means that the light travels all the distance without hindrance. This is supposedly a straight line, along which there are no objects: stars, galaxies, nebulae, dust, gas - nothing blocking light in a straight line 13.4 billion light years long ... This is hardly possible.
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  7. Yes Studiot there have been many investigations of Egyptian pyramids. Have you read them? What have you learned from these investigations? I have read as much as I have been able to find and am not impressed. You also ask - "So I ask you again which egyptologists ?". Having been warned that this thread will be closed down if I provide any outside links I am prevented from answering your question. Sorry Swansont, what point are you trying to make?
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