CharonY

Gotcha, I seem to have misinterpreted your post, my apologies. Based on OP I assumed the question was targeted at a singular infection event. That being said, unless there are some immune issues and assuming that there is not a different variant going around, typically after an infection (or after immunity has built up after vaccination) you have a high antibody titer that clears out new encountered viruses fairly efficiently. It takes a while until this protection drops.

Note that if you are tested negative, it basically means that your viral titer has fallen to a level where it is unlikely that you are also infectious or present acute symptoms (excluding long-haul symptoms that is). A relapse happens if the virus regains a foothold again before being cleared entirely. It is not quite clear why this happened. In all documented cases I read folks also had antiviral treatment, but that could also be a coincidence as they were also the only folks being isolated and tested long enough to establishing a relapse.

As iNow mentioned, there could be weird issues, especially in folks with immune system problems, resulting in re-emergence of the disease. There was recently a of Ebola, where a person recovered but presented symptoms 6 months after. I do not recall having read something as long for COVID-19, but there were studies where folks where folks tested positive again after over 20 days of discharge. The issue is that one can really only distinguish between relapse and re-infection if the patients have been isolated but tested for that time frame.

It is more like discussing someone who makes ridiculous claims but you have to take time off your schedule explaining folks something obvious because some demagogue has stirre up honsense. Folks demanded a bigger platform and the actuall experts had to join in. It is a bit like having to share stage with a YouTube personality to explain why vaccines don't make you magnetic and then have to engage in insane arguments why it might be. You do it but do not have to be happy about it.

So, where is the evidence then? Identical laws have been in effect in provinces for several years already and as far as I can tell there is not a single case where anyone was forced by law to use random pronouns. You should watch the provided video there it is explained how courts assess whether something is reasonable. And just that you fear it might somehow magically happen (without evidence) does not make it so. And I will repeat again that you have made claims regarding jobs and livelihoods lost related to it and again failed to substantiate it. If we use your slippery slope argument we should not have any laws as in some magic way they could be abused. Also I will re-iterate: the law basically covers hate speech and discrimination. Do you want to repeal all anti-discrimination laws while we are at it?

While it is not entirely unknown in birds, it is still interesting to see examples. As in this case, Californian Condors were found to reproduce without input from males, though one was present. https://academic.oup.com/jhered/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jhered/esab052/6412509

First of all that is a red herring. There is no big movement to further novel pronouns, rather there is a discussion whether that should be a thing. And if there were enough folks in favour of it would be unlikely to be implemented randomly, as it would undermine the whole purpose. Whether it would actually hold would be seen over time, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least because many languages are more gendered than English and given a large immigrant population in the US/Canada especially there it would be difficult to find broad appeal. Also you are re-casting much of the discussion. While Peterson did object to alternative pronouns, that is not all he does. He still objects to Bill C-16 (a) as he sees a more or less direct line between the use of preferred traditional pronouns (b) to these novel ones (c). I.e. it is a tactic to make it seem that there is a direct line from a to c. As c is the by far most controversial whereas a) and b) are more socially acceptable, he attacks the former by playing up c). By framing that as an attack on free speech (which, again, does not exist), he basically renders the issues of transgender people, embedded in a and b as illegitimate. And again, if you talk about "your subjective version", I would like to see what exactly you mean. It seems that self-determination of transgendered folks is fine in your view, at which point I wonder what the whole issue here is. Peterson's assessment of C-16 was wrong and it could have been ended there. Do you object that there are some folks who seemingly do not understand the issue and then make silly demands? If so, why should that be a reason to limit the rights and freedom of the vast majority of transgender folks who have reasonable demands? You are aware that very similar arguments were used regarding same-sex marriage? "Where does it end?", was the argument, "folks might want to marry their pets!" I will also note that the original argument was specifically about the enforcement by law (another side aspect was his misuse of animal models to explain human behaviour but let's leave that aside). You also made the assertion that: But then there were no real examples made how this actually happened in reality. As I mentioned repeatedly, the only dynamic in play here is a social one. And historically all the claims of forcing a norm or reality on other folks was brought by the majority (or at least those elements with the largest influence). A part of this reality was the assumption that being gay is abnormal, likewise being transgendered. Or that non-white (and male) folks have a number of irredeemable flaws which explains their place in society. Many of these assertions are now under scrutiny. Realistically speaking (keeping the actual power dynamics in mind) it is not that there is a broad authoritarian wave clashing over folks. It is the fact that now other parts of society want to be part of creating the new reality and folks that are used to be catered for are afraid that it will negatively impact them. I always found it funny that often folks just do not want to have race issues shoved into their faces, yet many visible minorities have not choice but to maneuver it on a constant basis. I am pretty sure that this "trigger" some folks but that is what some refer to as privilege. The ability not to think about certain issue because it simply does not apply to them or is force upon them. This is probably why there is always a huge resistance in shifts of social norms. Edit: I should add, that I get it. It is exhausting having to deal with it. But think about it from the other side. You might be annoyed at the issue, but unless you encounter a transgender person in your work you do not actually need to deal with it. But if you are the transgender person (or other minority) you have to deal with it whether you like it or not. These protections are intended to give those folks some protection and potentially ease of on said exhaustion (whether it works is another issue). I still remember back when my parents immigrated to Germany and lived in an immigrant-heavy area. There were basically a bunch of overworked foreigners and the only outlet there was was bitching about Germans. Funny bit is that folks had many different native languages (Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Vietnames etc.) and the only language they could all talk with each other was of course in broken German. But out of that community, it was mask on, play nice, never complain and be happy if someone tells you that you are "one of the good ones". This does not meant that folks like college students will get the balance right. Of course they barely get anything right, they are freaking students. But the idea is that they learn and think about it. Most are lazy like everybody and go right for slogans. But occasionally there are those few who think really deep about it and perhaps they will do something lasting. Since apparently all discussions about that needs youtube videos I am going to leave this one here Also this article about gender-neutral pronouns, which shows that this discussion is actually kind of old. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/06/gender-neutral-pronouns-arent-new/619092/

And simply refutes rebuttals. He had the law explained to him but several law experts and yes, he did not throw a tantrum but it does not make him right (and he continued to continue to spread the falsehood). But here I think we have to come to yet another issue, which basically means that apparently now you are more hung up on style than on substance. Your original argument followed Peterson's argument, i.e. that laws could lead to arrests for using wrong pronouns. It has at times eroded to an assumed but never substantiated massive loss of livelihoods. Now were not talking about the use of wrong pronouns or even the objection to transgender folks wanting being addressed using any of the traditional pronouns (i.e. he/she) but now it is actually about resistance against the introduction of new pronouns. The latter obviously is tricky as language often changes in the weirdest ways and is not easily controlled either way, but again, it looks weird to me to make such a big fuss about it as it does not appear to have made a big splash (it looks a bit like that satanic panic in the 80s). I mean some folks are discussing it, but in practice it is very much an oddity and the panic around it far surpasses its actual presence. On Peterson's side we have drifted from discussing his actual expertise in the topic to oh well but the others are so mean to him and he is so respectful. Which is fine, but it still signifies a rather lousy expertise to noise ratio. But certainly none of the substantiates the initial claim of and outrage regarding limiting ones freedom by law.

! Moderator Note It seems obvious that OP keeps ignoring the explanation provided to them. As such there is no apparent way forward for a proper discussion. Thread locked.

How is that related to Assuming that it actually happened as described, are you saying that because members of a given community behaved badly one should be free to discriminate against them? Or what is the argument here?

Come on, why make things up now. IIRC there were two examples. One from the USA, but it did not involve job loss, just a reprimand, and the person was sueing (and seemingly winning) to have the reprimand stricken. The second example was because the person violated a court order to not openly discuss a case involving a minor and medical records. Again, not prosecution because of pronouns. This, btw was exactly the point of many folks here that people cannot find actual examples of what they fear is happening. Just repeating it does not make it reality. And I fear that is why the discussion will go nowhere.

To add perhaps a final thought as the same objections keep getting rehashed without any actual evidence for the key assumptions (such as legal repercussions). It seems to me that folks do not actually have an issue with being courteous to each other but for some reasons have to build up the non-existent legal threat to bolster their argument. This is often indicative of an attempt of justifying their respective worldview, even if it requires reconstructing facts. I suspect one underlying factor is the assumption that the issues of especially transgender folks are not real or merely delusions. Thus, by engaging in inclusive social norms, one is somehow validating something that one is deeply convinced to be fake. The issue here is that this is basically an ideological stance and as Arete and others have shown, it runs counter our current knowledge in biology and psychology. As the objection is ideological in nature, and therefore not amenable to facts or scientific understanding, the key argument against using simple preferred pronouns or names (and let’s focus on he/she; I find that novel pronouns are too frequently used as a distraction and may be part of a different discussion) basically boil down to “I don’t want to”, but also “I do not want to suffer any consequences to my behaviour, because I am actually doing the right thing”. This is quite a tricky stance, as society has always penalized non-conforming behaviour. In the past, for example taking a hard stance against mixed marriage was seen as good thing (virtue signaling?) whereas engaging in that behaviour was ostracized (and in the US, there were actual, not imaginary laws against that). Moving away from this thought model took a long time, and many are still not over it. I suspect something similar is going on with regard to our understanding of gender and sex. With more information it will become more normalized, but at the same time there will be a hard push to prevent that from happening.

Except there is no legal basis for that. The test is evidence of discrimination, of which pronoun use could be supporting evidence but in isolation has no standing. Of course if you can provide a shred of evidence that this is the case, please let me know. All the articles from legal scholars clearly indicate that it is not the case. Here is the other thing, though. If Netflix thinks that Chappelle has become too controversial and therefore do not order a new special do you think Netflix is violating his right to become rich(er)? Conversely if Chappelle is a office manager and starts his days with rants regarding transgender folks, and there are complaints at the HR, what would be the correct action in your case? I.e. what would be the balance between the need to create non-toxic work environment vs the right to express yourself whenever you want? Or do you think you should have the right to insult customers or the CEO without repercussions? If not, It appears that we are back to the non-existent legal challenge which gets a bit boring by now (well a couple of pages back).

Some folks seem to want that, yet I do not see his special being pulled. This, again is not a new thing. A lot of folks wanted to have movies pulled or censored due to violence, blasphemy, sex or whatever folks did not like at that point. It depends a lot on the outlet whether folks are successful in doing so. TV tends to self-censor a fair bit and the rating systems of movies are a similar mechanism. That all being said as many others I am in favour of having that available and, as you suggested to have discussions about it. While I think Dave's message was way clumsier than his usual and a bit overshadowed by somewhat excessive complaining, it is in itself not just an outright tirade of insults as others have made. I think it would have played better if his jokes were, well, better. To paraphrase Seinfeld: you can make very offensive jokes and get away with it. The important bit is that your jokes (the craft) has to be so much better to pull it off. And here, I think he fell a bit short. That being said, I get some of Dave's complaints although he kind of brushed over issues of intersectionality (in my memory his bit with trans black folks were rather clumsy additions and could have been so much better) it is interesting to see some folks are (from his perspective) more willing to accommodate non-binary folks (implicitly white trans folks) than (straight, non-binary) black folks. I think his view is a bit skewed, but considering how poorly black folks are treated, one can kind of get it. But of course looking at history, there is also the observation that black men were allowed to vote before women. And during the civil rights movement there were quite a bit of clashes between those fighting for equal rights for black men and those for women, whereas especially black women were getting all the short ends of various sticks. In all honesty I think Chappelle really only caused a controversy because, a) he is considered one of the greats in comedy and b) his bits have been very vocal about issues of black experiences (where some folks accuse him of race-baiting, which is missing the point entirely).

! Moderator Note The topic does not seem to follow mainstream biology and has been moved to speculations. Please take some time to familiarize with associated rules. Specifically you are requested to back up claims, and frame your hypotheses in way that is at least accessible to science (i.e. one needs to be able to test those claims).

Well, the question is a typical exam/assignment question you would be asked in class. But that being said, thinking about distant effects of gene mutations in terms of signalling is a good start. You could also think in developmental terms (though often related to signalling).

We are not providing answers to homework questions, rather we would like to see how much effort you have made in these questions. What have you learned in class that you might be able to apply to this question.

I see we have been going through yet another turn of the same false claims. The big issue I see is that folks need to make up the threat of legal pressure in order to place themselves in the position of a victim rather than a perpetrator. Otherwise the argument is simply I want to express myself any way I want but I do not want to be on the receiving end of social pressure. But rather obviously you cannot forbid anyone thinking you might be an arse if you break social rules. (How about queuing up in the UK compared to, say, Italy?). In the end the demand is about repercussion-free behaviour, but in order to make it reasonable it needs to be expressed in a way that appears that one is the one being oppressed. This is funny as most minorities can tell you that many keep their heads down and do not express themselves too much as it would result in said pressure from the majority for the longest time. Now that they now claim the same right it feels like a threat on the majority (there is even a term for that). Thus for the argument of free expression to actually make sense, folks need to wobble between the argument of legal and social pressures (which they seemingly feel the first time). I.e. non-existent legal threats must be presented as a kind of governmental policing of behaviour and then at the same time the claim must be made that social pressures directed at them are uniquely new threat and entirely reasonable. All it takes is to ignore the actual consequences of laws as well as ignoring all the normal social dynamics. The one thing that I will claim is different is the rise of social media, but strangely that is not the point being brought up at all. Honestly, I understand that. Any threat that even theoretically could be raised against oneself is always seen as a much bigger issue than issues that mostly affect other folks. That is why certain drug laws are so draconian and had huge support (until a much broader swath of the population was affected). Or why men are much more worried about false rape allegations or women are far more worried about abortion laws. That all being said, we still should try to look at real data to contextualize these fears. E.g. are there actually folks being arrested for pronoun usage? What is the impact of anti-discrimination laws? Does it make our society better or are there indeed far-reaching unfair loss of jobs? These are things that folks are studying and it would be a good practice to look into those and other data rather than extrapolating from gut feeling (as folks like Peterson keep doing in order to keep the outrage-to-fact-ratio high).

It already does. Unfortunately it means that psychopaths have increasingly being in charge in the GOP. Moreover, according to an article https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/exclusive-jan-6-organizers-met-congress-white-house-1245289/ GOP lawmakers were coordinating with Jan. 6th protestors to coordinate efforts to contest the elections.

This is entirely nonsense. I have done actual research in these areas and the device, as presented, could not work without major breakthroughs in technologies that did not exist yet. I do not have all the details in my head anymore but the fundamental issue is that the device should work on a very limited volume of blood, have several types of analytics on the the platform and be in a specific compact format. Each of these issues is solvable, but together the problems your run into include dilution effects, which could be countered by using just a bit more blood, temperature issues, which could solved with a bigger platform to separate the reactions more and a couple of other things that I do not recall anymore. There are many, many articles at this point and I find it curious that you claim that you have a hard time finding those. Heck, there is even a book out there called Bad Blood. I have linked one more or less random article that you could have found by consulting google for a minute or two: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/20/9576501/theranos-elizabeth-holmes https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901#pq=Jd8MoW Both outline how the company made misleading claims and failed to adhere to standards that would have revealed that their tests just did not work. Some of the analyses that they made in order to pretend that their system worked were actually used on a different instrument from Siemens, which they hacked to run their cartridges. However, as the blood volume was too low, even those results were at best questionable. In other words, there is no conspiracy to be found here. The one thing that is odd is that for once someone is actually getting held accountable. This could be because in contrast e.g. tech startups, there are actually standards against which performance can be measured. You can easily oversell silly things like time-share offices, for example if you just hype it enough. But a blood tests actually needs to provide precise results in order to be useful. That being said, the only kind of conspiracy there is to talk about is the claim that Holmes is taken accountable because she is a woman. That, at least at first look hard to accept, considering the level of fraudulence being reported. However, some articles claimed that other, male CEOs in similar positions which were involved in at least similar ethical questionable behavior mostly escaped unscathed. However, I think the comparisons made in the article were mostly related to tech companies, which I think have different standers than med and biomed companies. So in the absence of actual statistics I am not sure how true it could be (would be interesting to take a look at least). There is the phenomenon of glass cliffs which has been investigated in studies such as by Ryan and Haslam (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2005.00433.x) https://www.vox.com/2018/10/31/17960156/what-is-the-glass-cliff-women-ceos But I don't think that really applies here. Overlooked that argument. This is of course silly. A proper test requires to reproducibly perform with a given level of accuracy and precision. There are gold standards in place, basically the best performance we can do (with whatever method) and if a test performs worse, they should have other benefits (price, speed) but still be good enough to allow clinical diagnosis. If we accept random errors without qualifiers we might as well just do dowsing.

An issue with just being brutally honest is that many actually do not like to be on the receiving end. This is especially true if a power imbalance is in play (and I suspect that some of the issues arising from anti-discrimination laws and similar measures is that it gives power to folks who, according to conventional wisdom, should be powerless which might be upsetting or at least confusing to some). That being said, there is also a cultural aspect. I found it that in North America folks tend to be a bit more polite of sorts and have on average more trouble to criticize things directly (I am talking in person, not the internet). Compared to that, Germans often appear brutally blunt. However, it is not uncommon in Germany that superiors bully their employees while not being particular receptive to criticism themselves. There is a bit of a change in society insofar that folks now talk more openly about discrimination and bullying.

So technically that is not considered fermentation as the larvae actively digested. While in common usage it may not appear very different, biologically they are distinct processes. Most specifically, fermentative pathways are used to recover reducing equivalents (which otherwise could be recovered by respiration). I do see some confusion of the term in the literature sometimes, though. Typically organisms with very effective anaerobic metabolic pathways are used for fermentation (so practically fungi and bacteria). While in other organisms there are residual pathways (say, lactic acid fermentation in muscles) but it is obviously difficult to utilize that to make yoghurt.

Viruses are typically not an issue, assuming that bottles are not shared. But it is fairly certain that after some time bacterial biofilms will form in bottles. The only way to get it out is the use of things like detergents or perhaps vinegar, soaking and vigorous scrubbing (or heating).

Oops. Corrected. Thanks for the catch!

Ken Fabian has addressed the major differences between yeasts and bacteria and as MigL mentioned, you can use different types of yeasts. Beside potentially different metabolites, which could affect flavour, they also have different alchohol tolerance and can result in different alcohol contents. Many bacteria in dairy products are used for lactic acid, but also acetic acid fermentation and different cultures can result in different products (there are whole books dedicated to that). There are many species including various Streptococcus, Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus species in use. But there are also products which uses yeast and bacteria, such as kefir. Here, the yeast species (e.g. Kluvyeromyces) are also fermenting lactose together with the bacterial consortium. That being said, historically these consortia were not specifically added individually. Rather, these bacteria and yeasts were found naturally in the product that were used for fermentation. Sourdough is something that many of us have been doing over the last year and is basically a mix of lactic acid bacteria and yeasts and most of these are already present in flour. Interestingly, some of those bacteria are also more specific to our hands, which indicates that the sourdough culture is a mix of predominantly bacterial contamination of flour plus additional bacteria we carry over on our skin.