Thursday Throughput for 3/14
[ThTH1] This could really be a blog post of its own, but the latest massive study has shown no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. This is happening at a time when measles is breaking out all over and Oregon had its first tetanus case in thirty years.
Here’s the thing though: even if vaccines did cause autism, even if they caused other injuries (which they don’t, but many anti-vaxxers are moving away from the autism thing), it would still be worth it. Penn and Teller made this case beautifully over a decade ago. It’s still true (language warning)
[ThTh2] It turns out that blowing up an asteroid might be a lot harder than we think. The good news is that if we ever discover a doomsday rock that will hit the Earth, we don’t have to blow it up (terrible Bruce Willis movies notwithstanding). Nudge its orbit even a little bit early on and it will miss the Earth by millions of miles. We have the technology to land on asteroids. Developing a deflection mission should be one of NASA’s highest priorities.
[ThTh3] Trump’s budget proposal has basically zero chance of becoming law. But a fellow Siegel breaks down just how aggressively his budget proposal attacks basic science. One of the myths about Republicans — well, mostly a myth — is that they don’t like science. But having met Republican politicians and operatives, I have not found that to be the case. And science funding under Republican Presidents and Congresses has been just as good (or bad) as under Democratic ones. This is one area where I break with my conservative-libertarian brethren. Funding basic science, to me, is something government should do. It falls into the category that Adam Smith described as things that benefit the public generally but are too broad to benefit any business particularly.
[ThTh4] What killed the dinosaurs? Asteroids? Volcanos? How about both.
[ThTh5] We’re still a few millennia into this whole astronomy thing and we’re still just discovering the neighbors.
[ThTh6] I can never get enough of basic astronomy. Will absolutely have to check this out if I’m ever near the dam.
[ThTh7] Astronomy grad student Alysa Obertas put together this fantastic animation showing how we discover planets around other stars. To explain what you’re seeing: the upper left panel shows the orbit of the two bodies in the system seen from above. The lower left shows what they look like “edge on”, from the side. The bottom right panel shows a spectrum with the dark lines (absorption of the light by chemical elements in the star’s atmosphere) shifting red and blue as the star’s velocity changes. The top right shows how the radial velocity changes in the orbit as the star moves toward and away from us. The gravitational tug of a planet is tiny but we can measure it down to extremely high precision — a few parts in a million.
I made this gif for a talk last week because I couldn't find any existing radial velocity gifs that I liked. Please feel free to use it (but please attribute it to me/don't remove my name). 💫 pic.twitter.com/PPiNPo9Kxu
— Alysa Obertas (@AstroAlysa) March 10, 2019
[thTH1] Here in Philly, a whole group of Temple Univ. students have come down with the mumps. The university is now offering vaccinations through health services for any student whose anti-vaxx idiot parents left them unprotected. Also, planning to require proof of MMR for admission to main campus.
The only good thing I can say about anti-vaxxers is that they have given the next generation a healthy way to rebel (“F- you, mom! I’m getting vaccinated!”)Report
A dozen or so years ago when I went back to graduate school, all admissions at the University of Denver were contingent on the student showing proof that they met the school’s vaccination requirements. I was exempt because I was born before a certain year: 1957, IIRC. I met one student who had never been vaccinated as a child and had spent an unpleasant summer getting all of the necessary shots at the necessary intervals.Report
I had to get re-vaccinated for MMR back in…1991, I guess it was, when I started grad school for the second time. They said they had “insufficient proof” of vaccination records. (Even though my family all knew I had been through two rounds as a child: the normal round as a baby, but went through it again at age 6 or so, because the pediatrician we had at the time said he suspected the early-70s MMR vaccine wasn’t good (???). That doctor had died since then and we didn’t have complete records of vaccinations. (Also I was in a different state from where I grew up)
But whatever. I got the shot because they told me to. I also had to get a Tdap at the same time (I was due for a booster) and THAT was the bad one – I don’t know if it was the two vaccines at once or what but I had lots of swelling in that arm and actually had to wear a sling for a day or two to try to keep people from jostling me and making it hurt.
The only upside? Campus health didn’t charge me for the MMR shot because it was a “surprise” – I walked in there to get the TdaP and was told I needed MMR too.Report
TdaPs often hurt. I don’t know why. I get my routine shots with no side effects, but the last time I got a TdaP my arm hurt for three days. I am told that this is not unusual. Needing a sling seems excessive, but my guess it is merely the “excessive” end of the range of reactions.Report
I’m from an era (and area) where immunization to childhood diseases was obtained via “measles sleep-overs”, organized by moms as soon as someone in the grade-school class caught one of those diseases. I’m a rarity — I had mumps twice, about a year apart.
I vaguely recall being told by DU that the 1957 cut-off was based on statistical studies that showed people born earlier had, as a population, a higher level of immunity from having had the diseases than the younger population whose immunity was from vaccines.Report
Chicken Pox for me. Since mom ran a day care, it was a regular thing to have a Chicken Pox weekend. At least until the vaccine became available. Then mom just told everyone to get vaccinated (she was adamant about shots, if the kid wasn’t up to date on their shots, they weren’t going to her day care).Report
The early 70s MMR weren’t good, in that they were only partially effective. I had the second vaccination pre-kindergarten and got mumps anyway, but had a milder case than the boy next door who hadn’t been vaccinated yet.Report
If *I* were an asteroid looking for a place to hit the earth, I’d think that the caldera in Wyoming might be the best “bang for the buck” place to hit.
The stickiest part of the San Andreas was tempting for a few minutes, but that’s really only going to have an effect for… what? A couple of weeks before the new normal establishes?
The caldera could provide fun for decades.Report
ThTH1: I think it’s interesting that they found that unvaccinated kids had a higher rate of autism. I wonder if something like the following is going on: A couple has a kid, kid gets his shots, then kid is diagnosed with autism. Couple has another kid, blames autism of #1 on shots, kid #2 doesn’t get shots but is also diagnosed because genetics.
So there’s no relationship one way or the other between vaccination and autism, but there is some heritability. The mistaken notion of the anti-vax crowd results in the non-vax kids being a non-random sample biased towards families with a genetic predisposition to autism.Report
ThTh2: My takeaway here is that if we find an asteroid that’s going to hit earth in a few years it’s ok to go ahead and hit it with a nuke or three to alter its trajectory. The fear there has always been that you would just convert a bullet into a shotgun blast that may be even worse than the intact asteroid strike.Report
This is a very good point. There are a lot of people who think if an asteroid hit, we’d be better letting it come down in one piece than blowing it up. To take the example of Deep Impact, if you blew it up that close, the energy has to go somewhere. And instead of going into the ground, it goes into the air. You’d be talking about global warming on steroids.Report
You don’t hit it with the nuke, you detonate the nuke above the asteroid. The radiation from the explosion causes the surface on that side of the asteroid to vaporize and vent, giving it a push away from the explosion.Report
Or just paint one side white and let the sun push the thing out of the way. I’m guessing there will never be a movie with a rag tag team of scruffy rebels and a giant can of spray paint.Report
I’m envisioning the worlds biggest paintball gun…Report
Hmm…could call it Spaceballs!….I might have to workshop that title a bit.Report
Mel Brooks might let you have it, just for the giggles.Report