It’s a very nice award. It recognizes a book that promotes individual freedom or the right to ‘vote with one’s feet’ when it comes to choosing your allies and your government. Intelligence and foresight matter. Which is something AR is about.
Jane & I won the Prometheus Award for Alliance Rising
by CJ | Jul 16, 2020 | Journal | 153 comments
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And once again, hurricane season is upon us. This is evidenced by Douglas bearing down on the Hawaiian Islands; I shall make every effort to not get blown or washed out to sea this weekend. 😛
How much of the fury reaches to top of Haleakala, where PanSTARRS and the other observatories are?
Actually, I’m not sure. I believe a great deal of the storm is at lower elevations, but I’m sure the astronomers and techs will be battening the hatches by Saturday. I should check in with our tame astrophysicist to see how the observatories are faring. Haleakala will be a great shield against the worst of the storm, as we are in its rain shadow. Hurricane vs. volcano; volcano wins!
p.s. Saw the comet Tuesday night. I spotted it at the end of our street, walking home from the library at 8 p.m., then came back with binocs. Cute little wisp!
In the short-run perhaps, but Lao Tsu observed the indomitable power of unresisting water. Look at Waimea Canyon on Kauai, or what’s left of French Frigate Shoals!
Short run (next few decades) in this case is what matters to me 😀
I grew up in LA, so I’ve experienced shakey ground, (’71 Sylmar, ’86 Palm Springs), and I’m now living right close to a couple active volcanoes and the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’d ever feel quite relaxed on the islands. It’s not that I was in Hilo October ’14 when Pu’u O’o (took the “doors-off” chopper ride to see, we did!) was running toward Pahoa, nor that Mauna Kea is actually the tallest mountain in the world, but that it’s incredibly “spikey”, and I’ve seen decent maps of the ocean floor off the north shore of Molokai! It’d be like living on top of an obelisk in earthquake country!
Congratulations! Well-deserved
Any progress in audio book for Resurgence.?
Not yet. Apparently there’s been some office-shuffling at Audible and things have gotten a little distracted.
My daughters called this morning and want me to get to my Virginia daughter’s house ASAP. I was scheduled to leave midAugust, now I’m leaving next week. Supposed to stay till it’s safe to leave, which could be many months away; fortunately her house has a lot of room and a separate two bedroom and bath floor for guests. It’s going to be an adjustment, though.
Why the hurry, Nighthawk?
Spence, my daughters saw this article:
https://www.salon.com/2020/07/21/whats-the-matter-with-iowa-gov-kim-reynolds-turns-hawkeye-state-into-trumps-petri-dish/?fbclid=IwAR2hpdSmRz4mLWVKJQ-maoGEBFF2jYyooj-CrA-cDMlTUz–PmqWpTOpgqE
Hopefully things will be more secure here in Virginia. Safe travels.
Aja Jin, you are in Virginia? My daughter is in Reston, a couple blocks from Lake Anne. I’ll come on the train, in a bedroom with private bath; takes longer than flying but it feels safer. Sleeping car attendant will bring my meals, they will be limited (no dining car during the pandemic) and I’ll have almost no contact with other passengers except for boarding and leaving the train.
Yep, I’m in Harrisonburg, maybe 2 hours from Reston
Ah yes, I saw the Amtrak “roomette” travel offers but really don’t have the desire/need
to travel right now save from Boston to NH (Durham) to visit my Mom. Amtrak’s Downeaster is back running 4 trips a day; I may risk it in a week as I haven’t seen my Mom since January (I was going to go visit her the week after COVID really hit Massachusetts in March).
Be safe. Wise move.
I was shaking my head at that article, too, Nighthawk. The pig poop statistics were amazing.
If you want to be utterly safe on the train, avoid the attendant and bring your food in a bag or cooler.
good luck, Nighthawk. Here in Vegas, we’re starting school, at a distance. I’ll be teaching my classes from my library here at home.
The adjustment from being the boss of your own home is awkward. Maybe one of these for that second bedroom, plus a mini fridge and microwave would help.
https://www.google.com/search?q=americana-by-elite-3-in-1-xl-breakfast-station&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS776US776&sxsrf=ALeKk00ck1KrgLiWuizuJUnOL25dB7eVfw:1595655385888&source=lnms&tbm=shop&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwilstbD1-fqAhVEmeAKHbVBBb4Q_AUoAXoECAwQAw&biw=911&bih=417&dpr=1.5
nice that your daughters care try to stay 6 feet away from people, and wear a face mask if you have GOT to mingle in shops etc.
the wife and niece have been running their lessons from our front room they are both psychologists turned teachers. now they are both updating lessons for the next year about 12 hours a day still in our front room I’ve turned our motorhome into a “den” I have my guitars and computer in it otherwise I have to be quiet lol
Kyran
Kyran, it’s definitely a changed world. It’s nice that you have a place to escape and not observe all-day quiet hours. And like your daughters and niece, I was a psychologist, but now I’m joyfully retired.
I wear a mask and a face shield; my doctor told me the mask is to protect others, the shield is to protect me. Since she wears a shield herself, I’m sure she believes this.
Best of luck to you, your family, and everyone else in this group. I hope we all remain healthy through the coming months.
Kyran, “wife and niece”–sorry, guess I was thinking about my daughters while typing!
Regarding kids being sent back to school in the USA, in states where Covid-19 infections aren’t under control.
Two research results regarding Covid risks, reported in the Netherlands, are that people with blood type A are more susceptible (see for example https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200618/Blood-types-and-COVID-19-risk-confirmed.aspx), and that people with a problem in one specific gene (TLR7) on the X-chromosome have a much greater chance of a very bad outcome when they get Covid-19.
The gene codes for Interferon, which is part of the immune response to the virus.
If the gene is faulty or mistranscribed, the people with that faulty version cannot make the interferon which is necessary for your body to fight the virus. As girls and women have 2 X-chromosomes, they have two chances of having an undamaged version of the gene; as boys and men have only one, if they inherit a faulty version from their mom, that’s it. This could explain why the number of bad outcomes from Covid-19 skews somewhat towards men.
It’s not the only explanation for why some people get so much sicker than others, but it clearly increases the risk for young people of dying from Covid-19 if they get infected.
At least now this has been discovered, they can test for it when someone is diagnosed with Covid, and help treat them with pharmaceutical interferon medicine before they become deathly ill, I hope. Unless the medical system gets overwhelmed, or (in the US) you don’t have the right kind of insurance, I fear.
If your kids are being sent back to school, in an area where Covid-19 infections are still endemic, it might be wise to check their blood type and if possible check for a clean version of that TLR7 gene before letting them go to school. I wonder if it’s on the list of genes that are checked by firms like 23-and-me?
The link to my source, which is the Dutch national news organisation:
https://nos.nl/artikel/2341733-onderzoekers-radboudumc-vinden-defect-gen-dat-corona-verergert.html
(Sorry, the article is in Dutch, use Google translate).
That’s very interesting information, Hanneke. Unfortunately, I doubt many school age children in the US have been tested for their blood type, let alone that gene. Blood tests are easy; genetic screening, not so much.
That’s true. I didn’t find out mine until I made a point of asking in my 40’s. I was told I didn’t need to know because they’d mix a bit of my blood with what was in the bag to check for a reaction before any transfusion–what ever it is, it would be matched at the time, no matter what the records said.
Guess you’re still standing?
Chondrite, I do recall when I was a school age child, we all got to test ourselves for our blood type in class. Course I don’t remember what it is now 🙂
Some genetic screening is done these days in the US at birth, to check for things like PKU. So in the future that could be expanded.
I saw the blood type info before. The article I read had a little more detail. Type O had better results with COVID; Type A had worse results; B and AB were about the same, average. Of course, the genotype of O is OO and AB is AB. It wasn’t clear from the article whether different results came from AA vs. AO or BB vs. BO.
All of my kids were blood tested at birth, from the 1980s on.
I found out mine the first time I donated blood. O positive.
A negative. I was tested when I was first pregnant, in 1962. Back then, there was no preventive treatment for RH incompatible parents (mom RH negative and dad positive) so this was important information. I was sensitized enough by the third pregnancy that it was recommended that we stop our family at that point. Three healthy children was more than some people got.
In that case, please be extra careful with yourself! We don’t like salads getting ill!
I had the chance in grade school to test for my blood type, but couldn’t bring myself to stab my finger.
O pos. All of Mama’s five children are positive. Mama is O neg. When I was born they only expected the first positive child of a negative mother to survive, even with a total blood replacement.
Tommie, that’s amazing! If you don’t mind sharing, where were you in the birth order?
I am eldest, and an Irish twin.
What’s an Irish Twin?
Two children born less than a year apart. BTW, all of us are O pos.
Of course you were, given that’s strong evidence to suggest your father was O+, no genes for A or B antigens. Your mother has neither genes to produce A, B, nor Rh+ antigens. Also assuming your ethnicity is European, the gene frequency of Rh+ is about 60%, meaning (binomial theorm here!) 36% homozygous Rh+, 16% Rh- (Mom), and the rest, 48%, heterozygotes. Knowing Dad can’t be Rh-, his chance of being a homozygote, suggested by all Rh+ kids, is one of the 36 in 84 of 100, 43%, i.e. not unlikely.
I raised pigeons since I was a kid, and an Aspie, so I was pretty handy with genetics before graduating HS, and while a senior in college in dire need of a “Mick” class, chose an upper-division Genetics class. By that time I had my own library of genetics texts, and basically knew as much practical genetics as the TA, maybe more in that aspect. One of the texts I sometimes carried around was “Systems of Mating, and other papers” by Sewall Wright. It got some titters, but it was a very tough mathematical text!
I did that mathematical population genetics analysis for one of the girls in a biology class who was Rh-, probabilities of an homozygous or heterozygous Rh husband, and then Rh- kids one after another until stopping with the first Rh one. I’d taken over the board before class, and when the Prof walked in and saw the lecture in progress, let me finish! Gave her the probabilities she could safely have 1, 2, 3,… kids. Hopefully some reassurance it wasn’t as bad as it may have seemed.
Yeah, that’s what Aspies do! 😉
Neat-o, Paul! I would also be interested to hear the odds of an Rh negative woman having five Rh positive babies with no blue babies and no medical intervention to prevent that result. From what little I have read, that should not be able to happen.
It’s not hard to calculate, but very tedious! I’ll leave it “to the interested student”.
But just to take the two end-cases: if the father is one of the 36% homozygotes, then all will have the potential, but it doesn’t always happen that the placenta leaks. If he were a heterozygote, then there’s essentially a 50-50 chance each baby will be Rh- or Rh [plus] (it won’t take the sign there). So the odds of 5 in a row is 1/(2*2*2*2*2), 1/2^5, 1/32, or 3%.
With Rh sensitization at 1/20 per pregnancy, and Mama having miscarried once, the odds of her having five healthy children who are all Rh positive appears to be 1/160,000. Math is my weak suit, though, and I never took statistics.
I think you’re right, appearances can be deceiving. I get 77%. With the chance of you coming out OK, 19/20, your Irish twin 19/20, so for all five, (19/20)^5 is .773.
Paul, doesn’t your 77% ignore the consequence for the rest of the babies after it goes wrong once? It looks like you give each baby the same chance, but if mom’s immune system gets triggered by number 2 (that 1/20 chance you figured out), numbers 3-5 won’t have a 19/20 chance. They’ll be fighting a hostile immune system from the start.
That looks, to my non-mathematical eye, as if their chances should get worse the farther along the line you get.
Or is this incorporated in how that maths formula works, despite it looking like all kids get the 19/20 chance?
Your reasoning presumes Mom is going for 5 babies, come hell or high water, rather at the time medical advice would be to stop (as much as possible) with the first Rh reaction. So the results are conditional. I’m not accounting for all the ways 5 babies might come out after a Rh reaction as if it were more likely. We know Mom was successful with each baby, and with a 95% chance of avoiding the reaction with each prior baby, then taking each as it comes with no prior reaction each still has the original probability.
It’s called a “Markov Chain”: a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event.
Thanks for explaining, Paul. I’m not good at math, but can occasionally understand it a bit better than when I was a student, when someone explains it to me.
As I like understanding stuff, I always like it when people explain things!
Much of the statistics we’re used to is based on combinatorics, or how many ways can something happen. For example how many ways can a handful of docecahedral dice be thrown (or in some games, any of the Platonic solids), maybe before getting a particular result.
But this is not a combinatoric case, because of its inherently sequential nature, and the consequences of adverse Rh reactions dictating making separate decisions, the probability for each baby is the same. It essentially amounts to flipping 5 heads in a row with a VERY biased, in our favor, coin.
I am told that after the first unfortunate reaction all others will be unfortunate. Sensitization is permanent without medical intervention.
Hi – hope everyone is safe and sane. Both of my daughters were put under the growlux bulb. There was a lady visiting her newborn grandchild who told me that she had lost a baby due to the RH incomparability. It just was not known then.
My wife and I don’t have the Rh problem, but we have ABO incompatibility, which is lesser-known and not quite as dangerous. Her first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage and sensitized her to A blood, which all of the succeeding kids have. The oldest living child had the worst case and needed a transfusion on his second day; they all spent time under the bili lights.
I leave for Virginia tomorrow, to wait out the pandemic; so if I don’t respond to any relevant comments, please don’t assume the virus got me! I have lots of precautions in place for the trip.
safe travels!
May it be an easy trip and a glad arrival!
Fair winds and following seas!
Be safe, Nighthawk!
Safe Travels to Nighthawk, a good way to travel and a loving family waiting at the end of your journey. Here, we are slogging slowly through hubby’s weeks of non-weight bearing broken ankle/broken leg bones. Bones healing well, but 6 weeks was really 12 weeks; 2 doctors disagreed, with a horrid rash, unhealed bits of incision. New boot, antibiotics and healing back on track but frustration is showing; he’s angry, tired and not sleeping, sigh. Yesterday’s adventure was the KitchenAid mixer flying off the counter to hit the wall while mixing bread dough. Missed both of us, hubby decided to help me clean up, fell off his knee scooter (onto his bum thank gods), took me down too. Glued to the floor by bread dough, remove outer garments to get unstuck, crawl to the stairs to get up. Tylenol solved all else. Need to review that new bread dough recipe though! I too am the oldest of 4 children to a positive Mom, and RH negative Dad. No blue babies, but a lot of worry with each pregnancy. Apologies if I’m a wee over 10 lines. Stay well all!
Your kitchen bread dough tumble would make a good sit-com scene… but I rather suspect it was not so funny during occurrence.
I hope all is alright at your home now Cathy.
Sure you don’t have a poltergeist? Not familiar with such implements myself, but the physics of a mixer flinging itself afar is, errm, curious.
Rh moms don’t have “blue babies”. Rh- dads and their Rh- children don’t produce antigens.
With an unbalanced load, a mixer can move rapidly across the counter top, fall on the floor, and bounce off the wall.
@Cathy Your series of unfortunate events (sympathies!) reminded me of a scene with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, where he gets stuck to a chair with glue, among a number of other cascading mishaps, and has to remove his pants to get free.
Inspector Clouseau – Telephone engineer
Take care, Lynn!
Regretably, I’ve rather lost track of the pond fishies of late. Some years ago there were some newbies I saw in bags, but I’m wondering how they all look now. I took a quick, confused turn around Jane’s site, but found no recent slideshows.
Thanks all! Mixer was my fault + the dough. KitchenAid dough hook is a power to reckon with. All quiet today. Yesterday NO. Guy got angry Friday, when asked to wear a mask or wait outside for curbside delivery at cigar store 30 min. away, took a couple shots at but missed manager, and fled. Seems he lived a few blocks from us. Yesterday morning, while stakeout LE watched his house waiting for crisis team backup, he got in truck and drove away, with them in pursuit of “armed & dangerous”. A block from my house, he pulled over, jumped out, opened fire with AK47 + handgun, lost the shootout, got a chopper ride to hospital, and to jail in a few days, attempted murder charges and more. Well known to LE for priors. I heard shots but didn’t recognize, saw nothing, took 6 hours for LE and bomb squad (the truck AND house), and reporters to leave. I’m still afraid of the mixer LOL.
At least you can unplug the mixer.
Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.
—Friedrich Schiller (Asimov after Schiller.)
Though, a question in my mind is lead poisoning from too much firearms use. It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? But, no data that I know of.
(Hm. Editing point: the original capitalized Themselves, but the rule I learned is you don’t capitalize for polytheistic gods. Even many of them, though individual names—Thor, Mercury, Madam Pele—just like any other proper name.)
Walt, if you don’t Capitalize for Polytheism, why would you Capitalize for Monotheism?
Like spelling anything with a particular sequence of letters, it’s just custom when you come down to it. The monotheistic God is capitalized, as are pronouns or other words referring to the Creator.
That’s why old computer and pre-computer equipment are UPPER CASE ONLY. Even though it was known then that lower case only would be easier to read because of ascenders, descenders, and tittles, GOD was okay, but god referred to one of many gods instead of the one and only singular God.
It’s only in recent years that the National Weather Service and the US military has started using mixed case more uniformly.
Nice try, wrong answer. The reasons early computers used uppercase only were: 1) they were built of discrete parts, vacuum tubes or transistors, resistors, “condensers”, and itty-bitty ferrite donut memory “cores”, so every thing was small & short, 2) they were seen as numerical calculators, text was not processed, 3) many had variable-length architectures and did decimal arithmetic with 4 bits and extra bits for “field marks”, etc., 4) many had 36-bit “words” lending itself to 6 6-bit BCD-encoded characters, 5) 6 bits has 64 combinations, the minimum necessary for encoding a useful text, 26 letters, 10 digits (that’s 36, already too many for a 5-bit encoding), add a handful of punctuation, another handful or two of common special characters, $ ( ) & , and you can do what’s necessary in 6 bits, 6) going to 7-bits, an odd number in an essentially binary environment, to allow 26 more letters was impractical. It wasn’t until IBM made the revolutionary (no exaggeration) introduction of 32-bit words & 8-bit bytes in 1964 with System/360, which unified the previous generation of different decimal and binary architectures, that Extended BCD Interchange Code (EBCDIC) made lower case a standard, but other manufacturers revolted and got the American National Standard for Information Interchange (ANSI) most use now, still based on System/360’s 8-bit bytes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal
For an introduction to the first computer I learned to program while cutting classes in 1966 (dangerous in those days!), see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620#External_links
Alas, the page I did on my old website is no longer on the Wayback Machine. 🙁
Looms were controlled by punched cards from 1725, leading up to the Jacquard loom in 1804. These encoded pure data: how to weave fabric, thread up or thread down. Other uses were sporadic until…
In the 1870s, the Baudot code (qv) encoded telegraph messages using 5 bits. Teletypes (teleprinters) were used for telegraph messages. They used 5 bit paper tape for recording. Usually you worked with letters, but you could shift to figures/numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
Sixbit was an enhancement of that, avoiding the shifting, and suited to more numerical work. In any case, the decision to use just upper case or just lower case is arbitrary; each is 26 letters. Upper case was picked because of God. The lower number of characters simplified electro-mechanical teleprinters, and typewriters.
Hollerith punched cards and card sorters were used for the 1890 US census. They greatly predate any electro-mechanical computer. Like paper tape, punch cards greatly predate core memory.
There’s a manual version of a card sorter, actually. You index a card with UooUo-like cuts in the edge of a card. If you stick a spindle (stiff wire) in a position, U cut cards will be left behind while o punches will be selected by the spindle. You can use logical operations to retrieve arbitrarily punched/cut cards.
Congrats on the award! It was well deserved, the book was awesome and I’m sitting here in lockdown eagerly awaiting the next one!
I was re-reading Fortress of Eagles last night. I told myself I could stop any time I liked. Just one more scene….
I like the Fortress series
Me too! I’d love to read more in the Fortress of Time series—hint, hint, hi…. oh yeah, I’d love to read more in lots of the series. I think we need to provide our hostess, C. J. with the gift of bending time herself! Anybody know how to do this?
I am adept at bending sixty seconds into a minute or a minute into sixty seconds. I can also call spirits from the vasty deep, especially when we’re talking the vasty deep behind a bar!
Well, so can I, so can anyone!