Friday, December 30, 2022
Thursday, December 29, 2022
◄ AGE of UNIVERSE ► TIME in perspective ⏱️
https://youtu.be/Zb5qTdb6LbM
Study Finds Large Gap in Excess Deaths Along Partisan Lines After COVID-19 Vaccines Introduced < Yale School of Public Health
The study found that overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 5.4 percentage points, or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters. After COVID-19 vaccines became widely available, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 percentage points to 10.4 percentage points.
"The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates"
"The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates"
Does COVID-19 vaccination cause excess deaths?
How was the situation in the United States? From the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System co-managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, we obtained the number of deaths within 7 days after COVID-19 vaccination in the United States from December 2020 to May 2021.4 The demographic structure of the United States was available from CDC Wonder online database,5 and the COVID-19 vaccine coverage rate from CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.6 These data were used to calculate the proportion of deaths within 7 days after receiving COVID-19 vaccination per 100 1000 vaccinated persons, stratified by gender and age group. It was found that the mortality rate within 7 days after COVID-19 vaccination was higher for males than females and increased with age. But it was still much lower than the background mortality rate
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Mortality Study Reinforces Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations | Kaiser Permanente
"Despite numerous studies showing the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, some people have remained hesitant to get vaccinated," said lead author Stanley Xu, PhD, of the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation. "This study provides reassurance that the vaccines are very safe, and, in fact, people who received COVID-19 vaccines in the United States had a lower death rate than those who didn't, even if you don't count COVID deaths."
Scary Reports of Deaths Following COVID-19 Vaccination Aren’t What They Seem
The misinformation strategy.
Opponents of vaccination use the VAERS numbers in statements that suggest cause-and-effect conclusions. This misinformation then influences some people not to be vaccinated.
In this case, the numbers are correct, but the presumed conclusions are not.
Stevan Whitt, MD, an infectious disease doctor and chief medical officer at MU Health Care, gets questions about these claims regularly, and he wants people to have the right information.
"This intentional misrepresentation is a powerful tactic to sow confusion among large groups of people," Whitt said.
To address the misinformation about VAERS, the CDC shares context around adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines and emphasizes that reports of deaths (and other adverse events) do not necessarily mean the vaccines are to blame. "
Opponents of vaccination use the VAERS numbers in statements that suggest cause-and-effect conclusions. This misinformation then influences some people not to be vaccinated.
In this case, the numbers are correct, but the presumed conclusions are not.
Stevan Whitt, MD, an infectious disease doctor and chief medical officer at MU Health Care, gets questions about these claims regularly, and he wants people to have the right information.
"This intentional misrepresentation is a powerful tactic to sow confusion among large groups of people," Whitt said.
To address the misinformation about VAERS, the CDC shares context around adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines and emphasizes that reports of deaths (and other adverse events) do not necessarily mean the vaccines are to blame. "
Frontiers | Mortality Rate and Characteristics of Deaths Following COVID-19 Vaccination
"Results: As of January 8, 2021, 55 deaths were reported, and the mortality rate of COVID-19 vaccination was 8.2 per million population. A total of 37 deaths were reported among long-term care facility residents, and the mortality rate was 53.4 per million population. Top reported comorbidities associated with deaths included hypertension, dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, and heart failure. In addition, dementia was more likely to be associated with deaths vaccinated at long-term care facilities than at other locations.
Conclusion: The benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh the potential risks in older frail populations, and our findings do not support actions to exclude older adults from being vaccinated. However, continued monitoring of COVID-19 vaccination is still warranted."
Conclusion: The benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh the potential risks in older frail populations, and our findings do not support actions to exclude older adults from being vaccinated. However, continued monitoring of COVID-19 vaccination is still warranted."
Monday, December 26, 2022
What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Meat and Dairy Every Day?
But after analyzing the available data, Murray and his team found that the association between meat consumption and health outcomes was inconsistent. "These effects are not big, and the evidence is not strong," he said.
Many of these studies are based on small sample sizes, and the results are often biased by numerous confounding variables. For example, it is difficult to untangle whether it is the lack of meat in a vegetarian's diet that reduces their association with poor heart health or whether it is their increased intake of vegetables.
Many of these studies are based on small sample sizes, and the results are often biased by numerous confounding variables. For example, it is difficult to untangle whether it is the lack of meat in a vegetarian's diet that reduces their association with poor heart health or whether it is their increased intake of vegetables.
Saturday, December 24, 2022
Friday, December 23, 2022
Could Global Warming Start A New Ice Age?
I had a misconception that countries in Europe that have similar climates to the United States, such as England and all of western Europe, would be at the same latitude as the United States. However, if you head straight east from the eastern coast of the United States, you mostly hit Africa. The northeast United States is the same latitude as Spain.
If you travel straight west from England, you hit either Greenland or Newfoundland which is in northern Canada.
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Myocarditis after Covid-19 Vaccination in a Large Health Care Organization | NEJM
Among patients in a large Israeli health care system who had received at least one dose of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine, the estimated incidence of myocarditis was 2.13 cases per 100,000 persons; the highest incidence was among male patients between the ages of 16 and 29 years. Most cases of myocarditis were mild or moderate in severity.
Incidence of Myocarditis/Pericarditis Following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination Among Children and Younger Adults in the United States | Annals of Internal Medicine
In this population-based surveillance, we found that myocarditis/pericarditis 0 to 7 days after mRNA vaccination in persons aged 5 to 39 years occurred in approximately 1 in 200 000 doses after the first dose and 1 in 30 000 doses after second dose of the primary series, and 1 in 50 000 doses after the first booster. The incidence varied markedly by age and sex, however, with a disproportionate number of cases occurring in male persons, notably among adolescents after dose 2 and first boosters.
What It's Like To be a Computer: An Interview with GPT-3
There is this thing called the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing seventy years ago. The idea is to see if a computer could become smart enough to fool a human into thinking he is talking to a real person. We have crossed a threshold where computers have almost reached this point.
The AI appears to understand more than it actually does. It has studied human conversation and a mountain of raw information so that it can imitate a human conversation.
However, having a conversational computer isn't the only threshold the machines have crossed recently. Computer AI has become much more useful, performing all kinds of new tasks, such as surgery or writing computer code. By the end of the decade, machines will be performing many more jobs. It is very likely that in the next couple of decades, or even in this one, we will have general-purpose robots that could perform any task that we want them to do.
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Friday, December 16, 2022
Thursday, December 15, 2022
Monday, December 12, 2022
Sunday, December 11, 2022
Saturday, December 10, 2022
Friday, December 9, 2022
Thursday, December 8, 2022
Global Warming: An Inconvenient History
It has taken 140 years for the average atmospheric temperature to go up 1 degree Celsius. It is going to take 5,000 more years for the polar ice caps to melt, but by the year 2100 we will run out of most fossil fuels, at which point a 2 to 3-degree increase in temperature might be mildly inconvenient for some, but it is not a global disaster. Humans are adaptable, and the proposed solutions are far more damaging. Getting rid of fossil fuels now, as some have proposed, will have a huge negative economic impact, especially on the poor. So-called renewables are inefficient and have huge environmental impacts of their own. By the time we run out of fossil fuels, we probably will have nuclear fusion which will solve most of our energy problems.
Something funny happens with the climate roughly every 100,000 years. Due to the Milankovich cycles which affect Earth's orbit, we get an 8 to 15-degree spike in temperature followed by a 10 to 15-thousand-year warm period, which is then followed by a rapid decline in temperature and at least 85,000 years of mass glaciation. New York gets covered by a mile of ice. The "normal" state is very cold and all of human civilization arose during a brief 12,000-year warm period since the last cold period. During these 12,000 years, the planet Earth has gone from its maximum tilt, which melts glaciers, to halfway toward its minimum tilt, which will produce the next period of glaciation. We should already be in the cool-down cycle, except for those pesky humans who have warmed the planet a little bit. The preindustrial period from 1500 to 1850 was unusually cold and is labeled "the little ice age."
Atmospheric CO2 has been in a steep decline for about 40 million years. Calcifying marine organisms are sequestering the carbon at the bottom of the sea. It got so low during the last period of glaciation that it was close to the level where all terrestrial plants would die from CO2 starvation. Sometime in the distant future, we are going to have to put CO2 back into the atmosphere to either prevent the next mass glaciation or to support plant life. We can do this with lime.
"We are not the enemy of Nature, but its Salvation.." - Patrick Moore.
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
To End Climate Lunacy, Stop Treating Warming & C02 Hysterically
'To win this argument, it is necessary to focus on the scientific facts.
A warming planet saves lives. Analyses of millions of deaths in recent decades in numerous countries, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, show that cooler temperatures killed nine times (July 2021 study) to seventeen times (In May 2015 study) more people than warmer temperatures. The planet's recent modest warming (by 1.00 degree Celsius on average since 1880, as calculated by NASA) thus has been saving millions of lives.
CO2 emissions do not pollute and instead are environmentally beneficial. In 2017, over 300 scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT and William Happer of Princeton, signed a statement that made this point: "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison." Every one of us, indeed, also exhales carbon dioxide with every breath.
Since 1920, deaths each year from natural disasters have decreased by over 90 percent. And this happened, data from EM-DAT - The International Disaster Database presented by The University of Oxford show, not only as the planet has warmed, but as world population has quadrupled.
Global warming has not increased hurricanes. A NOAA report, updated on November 28, 2022, states that "there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s."'
A warming planet saves lives. Analyses of millions of deaths in recent decades in numerous countries, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, show that cooler temperatures killed nine times (July 2021 study) to seventeen times (In May 2015 study) more people than warmer temperatures. The planet's recent modest warming (by 1.00 degree Celsius on average since 1880, as calculated by NASA) thus has been saving millions of lives.
CO2 emissions do not pollute and instead are environmentally beneficial. In 2017, over 300 scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT and William Happer of Princeton, signed a statement that made this point: "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison." Every one of us, indeed, also exhales carbon dioxide with every breath.
Since 1920, deaths each year from natural disasters have decreased by over 90 percent. And this happened, data from EM-DAT - The International Disaster Database presented by The University of Oxford show, not only as the planet has warmed, but as world population has quadrupled.
Global warming has not increased hurricanes. A NOAA report, updated on November 28, 2022, states that "there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s."'
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Sunday, December 4, 2022
Saturday, December 3, 2022
"We May Have A Problem Here" | CoD: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered
This is not realistic in terms of physics, but amusing to watch...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d77wSm9Ih14
The blast spreads too fast. BTW, if the blast is in a vacuum then there is no blast wave.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d77wSm9Ih14
The blast spreads too fast. BTW, if the blast is in a vacuum then there is no blast wave.
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