Thursday Throughput: Moonwalking Rocket Edition

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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10 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    ThTh2: I like how GoldenEye is in the list of satellites near the beginning of the video.Report

  2. Oscar Gordon says:

    ThTh9: Gonna admit, that took a beat to spot.Report

  3. Saul Degraw says:

    When you can’t decide between a Michael Jackson reference and an Elton John reference, why not go for both?Report

  4. Michael Cain says:

    ThTh7: When we lived on the East Coast we had a still-organized tropical storm go right over us one afternoon. Hard to forget: raining sideways out of the east, then the blue sky and calm, then you could see the eyewall coming, then raining sideways out of the west.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Michael Cain says:

      We just got slammed by the remnants of Ida here in NJ. I don’t even know how much total rain we got but basements flooded, cars floated away, and water was coming up out of the storm drains.

      Then today was easily the most beautiful day we’ve had in two months.Report

  5. Greginak says:

    ThTh3 well if I’m gonna die from a plague I want it to sound cool and reference a great old movie. It would be the most me kind of death ever. Well my only death as far as I know.Report

  6. Brandon Berg says:

    ThTh3: Should have used Chinese characters.

    Alternatively, they can just keep incrementing the code point. After ω, we have ϊ, ϋ, ό, ύ, ώ, ϐ, ϑ, and it just goes on and on.Report

  7. Brandon Berg says:

    ThTh5: “Seven times more effective” is a bad way to phrase it, but the fact that people with prior infections are one seventh as likely to have breakthrough infections as people whose only exposure is via vaccine strikes me as kind of a big deal.

    A month or two ago, you posted a link to a detailed explanation of why vaccines provide better immunity than infection. It appears now that that was just plain wrong. I remember this because my initial intuition was that prior infection would provide better protection due to a) higher viral leading to a stronger antibody response, and b) formation of antibodies to a broader range of viral proteins.

    It’s true, of course, that vaccination is a much safer and more pleasant way of gaining some measure of immunity. Even a vaccine followed by a breakthrough infection is preferable to a naive infection. But I do worry that, having been exposed only to the spike protein, those of us who haven’t been infected are going to be much more vulnerable to a variant a few more mutations down the road.Report

    • Captain A in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      Groupthink in action, marvelous times!
      A breakthrough infection is surely preferable to a novel infection — but Antibody Dependent Enhancement is not preferable to a novel infection, and may lead to significantly more viral load.

      You should read about antigenic imprinting before taking a “booster shot.”Report