Monkeypox explained: How to protect yourself and what to watch out for | MPR News:
What exactly is monkeypox?
Besides the reference to wildlife, the only similarity between monkeypox and chickenpox is that they’re a virus. Instead, monkeypox is most similar to smallpox, which was eradicated through global vaccination efforts in 1980.The two viruses are from the orthopoxvirus family. Monkeypox is not as transmissible or fatal as smallpox. However, some researchers worry that monkeypox could mutate and become a greater threat to humans.
One study published in 2008 warned that if monkeypox were to be introduced to an unvaccinated population, the virus could capitalize on the situation and become an epidemic.
Learn you some for great win… Though it’s not like we as a nation can be bothered to moderate ourselves if it might be an inconvenience.
Herd immunity was never going to end the covid pandemic
July 25, 2022
Herd immunity was never going to end the covid pandemic:
In the early days of covid’s global march, when vaccines were still said to be well over a year away and social distancing was the only way to slow transmission, the country needed a goal, a way to conceptualize the pandemic’s end. Herd immunity became that finish line, as experts including Anthony Fauci, now President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, communicated a common refrain: Once enough people became immune — either via (catastrophic) mass infection or widespread vaccination — the virus would be starved of new hosts, its rampant spread would stop and normal life would resume.
The details of when and how this seemingly magical threshold would be crossed were fuzzy. Some scientists who study viruses thought only 20-some percent of the population needed to be immune; others estimated it’d be closer to 90. A minority of experts wanted to reach herd immunity as quickly as possible by letting the virus rip through the population rather than wait for vaccines to become available. But no matter the number or method, the concept of herd immunity represented a framework through which public officials and the media (including me) could understand what it would take for the threat to end.
It’s time to update that framework. For this virus, herd immunity was probably never a realistic end goal, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University. “Frankly, I wish it had not entered the public consciousness in the way that it has,” he said. “It’s a lot more complicated than people make it out to be.”
The Apple Store Time Machine
July 25, 2022
It’s where you bought your first iPod.
It’s where you camped at 5 a.m.
It’s where the iPhone came to life.
It’s where the magic of technology made your world glow a bit brighter, if only for a moment.
There is magic involved here, time travel… None of “my” stores are here, but they’re close enough to feel like home in a way I couldn’t have imagined.
via Daring Fireball
jwz: There Is No Constitutional Right to Eat Dinner
July 13, 2022
jwz: There Is No Constitutional Right to Eat Dinner:
Antonin Scalia relied upon this time period in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, as did Justice Samuel Alito in his majority opinion in Dobbs. There is surely no better way to decide the scope of rights enjoyed by Americans living in 2022 than by surveying the works of legal thinkers from a different country, most of whom died well before the first shot was fired at Lexington and Concord.
In medieval England, Parliament occasionally passed what are known as “sumptuary laws” to regulate private consumption of goods and services. […] “But, as to excess in diet, there still remains one ancient statute unrepealed, which ordains that no man shall be served at dinner or supper, with more than two courses; except upon some great holy days there specified, in which he may be served with three,” he wrote. Kavanaugh himself conceded that the supposed right to dinner did not extend to every course by allegedly skipping out on dessert.
Not linking to the original New Republic article – It’s read-count paywalled.
“I Love Ginni,” the classic sitcom about the wacky Thomas family | Boing Boing:
Sigh. The worst part of the current judges that I have to tag jokes abouty them as politics. If you don’t understand why that’s a problem, you’re part of the problem.
Pocket Realities 