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• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: '... the latest in vaccine research?' Since you asked ... :) When I read this article I thought that this is fantastic research and hope it gets validated/tested soon because in my layman's imagination this finding (approach to parsing...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: '... to correct for the fact that late 19th century cities were fire hazards and built to easily transmit disease (Spanish Flu).' I've been wondering what changes might come about re: multi-residence housing design/building standards post-COVID. While there's already...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: 'Most new construction is either new suburban housing, ...' House prices have been going up since COVID in my neck of the woods. If this is also happening in the UK, it's going to make it even tougher for...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Scam emails ... Anyone here noticing a bump in scam emails recently? None for about a month, followed by handful within a 24-hr period. (Decided to forward the most recent to the company that supposedly sent it - haven't heard...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: ' ... but they're also pumping billions into basic research and development ' 'R&D Intensity' (how much of the gov't budget goes into R&D) places the US 10th globally. Private/corp R&D spending in the US has also dropped off....
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: ' ... people mentioned in the Economist article, who live in new-build Barratt homes' Sorry - I couldn't read it (paywalled) but thanks for the summary! About the only explanations that jump to mind: a) They're aspiring their way...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: ' [exhaustion] but it's definitely a part of the problem.' I've been wondering how the COVID-19 hybrid office/work-from-home is going to play out long term - specifically whether workers/employees are going to end up with more or less time...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: 'So, are these people "exhausted, have zero learning opportunity/access nor adequate psychosocioeconomic support", or just people who happen to disagree with you?' Not clear to me which 'people' you mean. My take-away from the post I commented on re:...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: 'And why are they so "idle"? Because they think they have better things to do.' Or ... they're exhausted, have zero learning opportunity/access nor adequate psychosocioeconomic support. Sheep - don't recall any stories where sheep don't need to constantly...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Celebrity & culture Just based on general media coverage that I can recall, it seems that the UK and US are the most celebrity-obsessed*. And celebrities are outside one's immediate family. As to what this signifies about these cultures re:...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: 'And, as examples of her genuine care, influence and courage, she shook hands with AIDS patients in 1987 and walked into a minefield that was being cleaned up in 1997.' Agree. BTW - the Queen wasn't keen about these...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: '... died in a car crashed by a drunken driver losing control while careering through a city at 100mph, just like teenage joyriders only with more fame and money.' Very different from what I most recall about Diana which...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Re: 'Losing a spouse after more than 70 years of marriage is like suffering an amputation of the soul, according to my mother, after a similar bereavement.' Yeah - I was wondering how the Queen is going to cope now...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: 'For all the noise they [China] make in the media, they don't really dominate much.' They do in manufacturing and increasingly in consumer spending - core components of the GDP. They've also demonstrated that they have a very solid...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: China-Philippines - 'previous posters' My apologies - that was my screw-up. I read too quickly and followed/searched a bunch of comments/phrases through the interweb media rabbit-hole. The 'correct' reference is: https://globalnation.inquirer.net/36057/china-tv-claims-philippines-as-chinese-territory 'When commenting on territorial disputes and separatist movements...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: China - Century of Humiliation (navy) The Wikipedia entry (Paul @ 314) mentioned that most of China's losses were as a consequence of insufficient (no) naval power. A search immediately turned up info that China now has the largest...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: 'Also, in the Pentateuch ... swine' I wonder whether there was some sort of disease that affected swine and humans and the authorities made a cause-effect guess. Pigs have shown up several times through history as likely organ/tissue transplant...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Sign-in issues! Got logged out/off the comment section automatically after my last comment post and tried to re-log into comments several times - no go. Closed the window, opened a new window, came back to antipope.org, re-logged into the Commenting...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: 'The fungi are not intercepting an unduly large proportion of the gamma radiation; what they are doing that's interesting is making constructive use of the energy from the minor proportion that does interact with them.' Thanks - really appreciate...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: 'Haidt's principles are ...' I only watched the TED Talk but my impression is that these are labels of convenience for identifying discernible (i.e., statistically different) groups of related/similarly responding variables between - in this case - two artificially...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re:' ... but I'm cautiously hopeful that we'll perhaps discover that after a year or two of 'boosters', we don't really need them any more as our immune systems will have adapted ' That would work for the 1-50 year...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: 'There is a fungus growing under Chernobyl that actually eats gammas using a melanin-based mechanism.' Yes - he mentioned exactly this. Re: Uncle Stinky I'm guessing that the European Space Agency feels there's some merit to this. Also: Expertise...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Spaceship - fungal protection against radiation Don't think I've ever read about this here or in any recentish SF novels but apparently this info goes back to 2007-2008: some fungus including the stuff that's currently growing inside the ISS can...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: '... to tease out the effects of extremely ...' Haven't seen the questionnaire but seems that the respondents were explicitly told to project their personal political stereotypes and so they did. What the article might suggest is that the...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Re: 'If you thin the herd sufficiently, the survivors might get "herd immunity" a few months sooner.' That's a lot of on-going 'herd thinning': anyone getting a cancer diagnosis and needing treatment, any babies entering the world, anyone getting older...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  Hedge funds & banks ... Thought that this might interest folks. The financial sector's news is looking more and more like a bad case of pandemic virus minus the financial sector equivalent of 'PPE', isolation protocols, ERs/ICUs or vaccines. FYI...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  Anti-vaxer boot camp ... I think folks here might be interested in learning about the tactics being taught to 'persuade' fence-sitters into becoming anti-vaxers. Probably can be applied equally well to religion and politics. https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/marketplace-covid-conspiracy-boot-camp-1.5963503 IMO, the people promoting these...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  Re: '... how much does the history of an institution tell us about it?' Yes - the history especially the bits that are tacitly 'understood' are key. Because only once you've demonstrated the tacit shared meaning attached to a phrase...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  Re: 'IIRC, the one thing the RC did not want at any price was the education of people & children especially in Comparative Religion.' Depends on the school and era (societal background). I had an RC education starting with elementary...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  Re: '... racism is a convergence of a few factors' Agree - and these factors vary in strength by society/culture which makes me think that they can be addressed. I've never seen any research that associates any statistical weightings of...