@Robusto Odd.

@Mitch lava?

@Robusto Sometimes I think I'll never keep track of which lusophone puts what clitics where. For what the Spanish express as me estoy acostumbrando (or sometimes estoy acostumbrándome though the me estoy... form is probably the more common approach in the dialect I'm most familiar with), on the one hand the Brasilians say estou me habituando smacking it in the middle while on the other the Portuguese say estou a habituar-me smacking it on the end.

> Three people have died, three are in critical condition, and one is permanently blind after ingesting hand sanitizer that contained methanol, the New Mexico Department of Health announced Friday.

Ouch.

To be cynical: that's three votes less for Trump.

New Mexico won't vote for him.

Oh.

That state's just a bunch of Indians and Mexicans to him.

They have a Democratic governor (who's one or more of the above) and lieutenant governor, two Democratic U.S. Senators, and all three of the state's U.S. Representatives are Democrats, one whose first name is Xochitl and another whose surname is Luján.

New Mexico won't be voting for him.

Which is also the governor's maiden name, which she retains as part of her surname.

Heh.

Demographics are against Trump anyway.

Can you imagine him trying to say Xochitl?

I can't imagine him saying anything coherent.

It's pronounced /ʃo̞ˈt͡ʃi.t͡l/, and is a girl's first name in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.

I presume when he said it, it would come out closer to "so shit".

Perhaps without the quotation marks, even.

I wonder what the Republican party will look like in twenty years' time.

Or two.

Four especially.

Remdesivir isn't a wonder drug you know. It seems to reduce the length of time the sickest spend at the hospital by a modest but important amount. It's unclear what effect it has in reducing deaths. Part of the problem is that it really hasn't been tried on people early on into their infections.

Eventually we'll likely have a "confectionary cocktail" of drugs to treat this with. It's a very weird virus.

nytimes.com/2020/06/26/health/coronavirus-immune-system.html

We heard rumors of this a month ago out of Thailand.

And a month before that from China and the U.S..

But when I say "it's a weird virus", that's merely one element of the constellation of weirdness. There's much more but I'm too tired now.

Oh, I read something about this depletion in the papers.

Yes, it is a weird virus.

We'll find a cocktail and/or a vaccine.

Quite possibly several vaccines. We may need them.

I heard 100+ are being developed.

It's fundamentally different from HIV in that "most" young people's bodies learn to clear it. Eventually.

Let's hope several potent ones emerge.

Yes, these have to be given to people who aren't sick. It's not like medicine.

Yeah.

We want to have both a medicine and a vaccine.

Several potent vaccines and several potent medicines would be nice.

Teasing out real data on safety and efficacy across a demographically wide variety of individuals takes real time.

And very large numbers.

The Americas are providing us with large numbers at the moment...

We are.

I don't know that we even know what all is going on throughout Africa.

Yeah.

We don't.

> Ordinarily, IP10 levels are only briefly elevated while T cells are dispatched. But in Covid-19 patients — as was the case in patients with SARS and MERS, also caused by coronaviruses — IP10 levels go up and stay up.

So I'm wondering whether all these special features of the virus we are discovering are unique to this variant, or whether they apply to all three dangerous Corona viruses.

Perhaps we are looking at the present virus much more closely.

It's true that when you have a vast number of cases, you notice things you wouldn't otherwise. During bad flu seasons, there's increased critical care needs amongst cardiac patients, just as now.

But this coronavirus is very unlike any of the others we've studied. For one thing, we've never seen asymtomatic, presymtomatic, or oligosymptomatic transmission before in them.

For another, this virus attacks many other systems in the body than just the respiratory system.

For oligo-, think pauci- if you have no Greek only Latin like me. :)

@tchrist I wonder whether that could be because we haven't seen enough cases of SARS, and haven't spent as much resources researching it?

@tchrist But are we sure SARS didn't?

There were some reports of lingering longer-term after-effects among survivors. But nothing like this.

People with this can clear the virus and still spend many months recovering, if ever.

SARS infected only, what, 8,000 people in total, that we know?

Yes. Then it seemed to have been snuffed out.

So what if there were a handful of SARS patient who infected others without symptoms. They could have been missed.

And what if some SARS patients did experience certain symptoms affecting other systems.

China was much poorer then, with a much less developed medical system.

When you jack the case numbers by four orders of magnitude and ever-growing, it does provide a myriadfold more patients to study.

Yeah.

It has wonderfully concentrated the collective mind of the worldwide medical community, just like the mind of Johnson's man who learns he's to be hanged in a fortnight.

I can think of no other crisis in our race's written history that has so simultaneously afflicted the whole world with its tribulations as this has.

Simulatenously: because of aeroplane travel.

It is possible that the impact that created the Younger Dryas boundary 12,800 years ago came closer. And the Youngest Toba eruption of 70,000 years ago may have forced us through a genetic eye-of-the-needle in which no more than 10,000 humans survived. But we have no history of those times.

Air travel is swift.

But compared with the speed of electrons, it is nothing. A coronal mass ejection that hit us with the force of the 1859 one, or greater, would immediately throw us down into global darkness as all electronics fried and died. But except for those in conveyances doomed to fail, or under guard of such systems, most of us would "be fine", just cold and dark and hungry. We would recover.

Yeah.

And this virus is also relatively mild.

We'll get through this.

Many of us will not.

Our civilization will.

And in all likelihood, our nations.

And the very large majority of people.

We have already shown that we can control outbreaks without doing much that otherwise endangers lives.

Numbers don't matter when it's ones you hold dear, or you yourself.

Of course.

But you were comparing it to cataclysmic events in the past.

@tchrist We all had a hard time. > A hard time was had by all. :-)

But now I must go to bed.

You, too?

Yes, please.

So many fireworks shooting off in the night.

Bothers the kitties.

Fireworks?

Well, that is for tomorrow.

Yes.

Good-bye.

Night.

@tchrist We have a cocktail for everything, so why not

Simple hypertension, humankind's illness since the dawn of humankind, and you don't have a cure-all medicine for it, so why should a complicated novel virus?

@Cerberus I think a prediction of managing the disease eventually is not even optimistic, it's simply realistic.

Whenever have humans needed something and hadn't sort it out?

Except world peace

And a bunch of social equality standards

Maybe everything related to politics.

Let's abolish social order and go live in a tent

@M.A.R. Probably true, but we can never be certain.

@M.A.R. On a global scale, those things are probably a lot better than, say, fifty years ago.

It is a wave that goes up and down, and there are large differences between places.

But the general trend is up.

@M.A.R. ACE inhibitors seem to work very well

What's interesting, they also affect dopaminergic transmission in the brain.

And in psychosis, the levels of ACE seem to be decreased.

It's curious how everything is interlinked in the body.

@CowperKettle They work well at treating a potentially severe symptom, but they don't "cure" the cause

We probably need more advances in genetics for that.

I'm reading a news report on the discovery of the pathological action of ApoE4 on the brain.

Every day some discovery is made.

It took several decades to get close to the reason why ApoE4 increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

@CowperKettle What are those red and purple things? Are they those ancient 'digital camera', which nobody has has been using for decades?

People are jerks

Probably

Oh wait, it has the shutter button

So scratch that I guess

@Cerberus Give the artist a break. It says Copyright 2012, the world was busy ending and stuff back then

@M.A.R. I felt like being mean back at the arrogant digital cameras.

I had a great film camera called Yashica in 1997

And a great digital camera called Lumia, which died in 2018 after a long bicycle ride under the rain.

OOps. Not Lumia but Lumix.

Lumix sounds familiar.

I had a Lumia phone at the same time.

I Think Nokia had a number of phones by that name.

Which was a nice phone. Lumia 520, with Windows OS

Which had good camerae.

And the camera on that phone died after I took a bicycle ride in late January when it was minus 25 C.

It became all hazy.

I love taking shots while riding or jogging.

Now I take shots with an ancient iPhone

@CowperKettle don't step on the grass

> “In memory of the “most brilliant soldier” of the Continental Army who was desperately wounded on this spot the sally port of BORGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT 7th October, 1777 winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major General.”

Filed under damnatio memoriae.

That's the monument to Benedict Arnold.

atlasobscura.com/places/boot-monument

Now that I think about it, I don't remember many traitors in our history

Such a whitewashed version has been sold to us, then

@Robusto So I watched this last night.

And then rewatched it again today.

And there's quite a few things about it that rub me all the wrong way (Jesus fucking Christ).

But yeah. Overall.

It's Bach.

We're currently rehearsing the grand finale, BTW.