Before we moved to southern VA last year, I was lobbying for a house very close to that location, maybe 3 miles away. From the front yard you could see maybe 60-70 miles out to sea, from about 3700 feet elevation. It is beautiful, when the volcano isn't blocking the view with an ash cloud. I couldn't sell it.

Oh, and they are flying their daughter over next week to attend university at Yale...

First they came for the cruft. But I was not cruft, so I said nothing....

I need to smoke a joint and watch that again...

Thats funny! (I assume it is a joke, but somebody will probably make one after seeing this)

My first thought was: That's so nice, it would be a sin to eat it. Then I thought, eating is similar to killing. Three minutes later: [image: 1608562262476-x1-resized.jpg] And then, another two minutes later: [image: 1608562319541-x2-resized.jpg] The recursive gingerbread trolley problem!

BBC has a pretty good write up about this new strain: New coronavirus variant: What do we know? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55388846 Will the vaccines work against the new variant? Almost certainly yes, or at least for now. Hope it stays that way.

@klaus said in Who here has flown since Covid?: Virtual Duke visits? How does that work? No physical examinations to be done? I assume lab work can be done locally... Yeah. I do labs locally and home spirometry. They usually don’t trust the accuracy of home spirometers in any absolute sense, but they do capture trends. The only thing I’ve been missing is chest X-rays, but I did a local CT scan in August. Had I been more recently transplanted, or were I not stable, they would have wanted me to come in for a broncoscopy also. So basically they’ve been ok with it because they know I’ve been stable and because they know it’s temporary.

I am aware that zero cost distancing measures employed by businesses are of some positive epidemiological value. I am also aware that if that stuff starts costing business, it gets more interesting making a distinction between signal vs non signal.

@george-k said in Operation Bodyguard: I was familiar with the story, I'd never actually seen film of the "equipment." Wasn't Patton in charge of this "army?" Absolutely. It took many in German command roughly eight days to fully come to grips with the fact that D-Day was actually the invasion. This was due to a multitude of factors, like the amazing counter-intelligence operations out of Bletchley Park, but a big one was that the Germans just refused to believe that we would ever sideline Patton in the initial invasion.

@george-k said in What the HELL is it with these people?: Was she wrong to do this? I really don't know. What I do think is that it looks terrible and privileged. Yes, she was wrong. And yes it looks terrible. Boo!

Thanks for sharing!!

There's also the unspoken message in the first picture. 90% of the line is made up of minorities and most look to be hispanic. One of the most underreported parts of this whole pandemic is how it's torn through minorities at a much higher rate.

Is it even true? I mean, if they can do deep fakes...

Damn, Jon has a lot to worry about, doesn't he!

@mik said in i have found my future.: A rock choir for geezers. This is too much fun. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/songs-from-the-young-at-heart/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab6i&linkId=107551239&fbclid=IwAR2EbKo1wsOtY9uZF-M2cdHJbVuc2RRkMLPsFq_l86L6o9VqvRJ1dJjRzZ0 There's a movie about this, Mik. See if you can find it. We really enjoyed it! (Yes, we are old farts. )

I didn’t watch it all the way through, but he really didn’t seem to want to sell you a property in Montana...

A quarter of six is 1.5. It's a quarter to six.

@doctor-phibes said in I liked science: I guess my gift of "Advanced Quantum Mechanics" arrived a few days early I tried to lick it...

@loki said in Seroprevalence for select countries: Waiting on that vaccine is going to cause an extra million+ in deaths in the US alone? That’s someone’s dissertation on safety and the cost of it. I think my post wasn't clear. I'm talking about the number of deaths we would have had sans vaccine, if it just ripped through the population until ~70% had become infected (70% a typical number thrown around for what it takes to reach herd immunity. With the vaccine we won't come anywhere near that.