Thursday Throughput: Next Gen Vaccine Edition
[ThTh1] Despite what you may have heard, the COVID-19 vaccines were and are a success story. They dramatically cut infection rates for up to six months. And they provide long-term reduction of hospitalization and mortality, even as new variants have emerged.
But they are not perfect. Vaccine immunity, as noted, wanes over time (although so does “natural” immunity). Indeed, the best immunity seems to be among people who’ve had COVID and been vaccinated.1 And while having boosters every six months or a year isn’t the worst thing in the world, the ideal situation would be something like a smallpox or measles vaccine, that gives lifetime immunity. Or at least something like Tetanus, which gives many years of protection. And we want a vaccine that deals with variants in the same way that the measles vaccine does.
There are those who think this isn’t possible with a coronavirus. But that’s stopping the tech industry from trying. And we may be a step closer to that hope. Moderna’s early results on their “bivalent” vaccine, which uses two different spike proteins, is showing promise for much more comprehensive protection. I won’t pretend to understand the immunology in depth, but if I grok correctly, the idea is that the more versions of the spike protein your body is exposed to, the better it becomes at recognizing variants. It’s like seeing Bozo the Clown, Ronald McDonald and Krusty the Clown and becoming so wary of clowns that you have no problem beating the crap out of Pennywise the second you see him.
The first vaccine race — to get something that would bring immediate relief — was won by AstraZeneca, Modern, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. There is a second vaccine race going on right now, with various technologies trying to get a longer-term fix. We have the enemy on the run, but we still need the A-bomb if we’re going to get all the way back to normal. Moderna’s results might be another key step in that direction.
[ThTh2] And speaking of vaccines — new results strongly suggest that surges in flu and COVID-19 are associated with surges in cardiovascular deaths. In other words, if you have heart problems, a flu/COVID exposure may put enough stress on your system to kill you.
On other words, dying “with COVID” may, in fact, be dying “of COVID” in a lot of cases.
[ThTh3] This news broke a little too late to include in my John Carter video, but you can now watch an eclipse … on Mars.
[ThTh4] Should we take Russia’s threats to leave the Space Station seriously? Yeah. But we shouldn’t freak out about them.
[ThTh5] Geniuses walk amongst us:
Every time I have a programming question and I rly need help, I post it on Reddit and then log into another account and reply to it with an obscenely incorrect answer. Ppl don’t care about helping others but they LOVE correcting others. Works 100% of the time
— annie (@soychotic) April 29, 2022
[ThTh6] What it was like the day the dinosaurs died.
[ThTh7] Who’s gonna clean that mess up, that’s what I want to know.
[ThTh8] Andrew said he head this in my voice.
— Jon (@minogully) April 27, 2022
[ThTh9] One of the (false) claims of COVID-19 vaccine skeptics is that the vaccines are driving the development of variants. This isn’t true in the case of COVID because the variants are emerging from unvaccinated populations. But it may be true of polio. The oral vaccine being used to try to eradicate polio is a weak version of the virus. But the polio vaccine, unlike the COVID-19 vaccines, sheds. Live versions of the virus are in people’s poop. Normally, this is not a bad thing because it potentially exposed unvaccinated people to the weakened virus, spreading immunity. But sometimes, it can mutate into the more dangerous versions.
Don’t be too alarmed, though. Just as with COVID, the main danger is to the unvaccinated, who will be exposed to a fully armed-and-operational virus rather than a weakened one. Polio immunity protects against such variants; that’s why we use it.
We have been this close to eradicating polio for a couple of decades now. But that last 1% seems to be the hardest.
[ThTh10] I love these kind of visualizations. The universe really is on an unimaginable scale.
Celestial objects to scale in size, rotation speed and tilt 🪐 pic.twitter.com/KCfjHDABdF
— Dr. James O'Donoghue (@physicsJ) April 26, 2022
[ThTh11] NASA has unveiled their plans for the Gateway, a space station in lunar orbit that will grant access to the surface and deep space. Will it happen? That depends mostly upon Congress. Nothing in it strikes me as technically unsound.
[ThTh12] Pluto’s orbit is a bit unstable.
[ThTh13] There is an ongoing debate about whether broadcasting our presence to the cosmos is a good idea or a bad idea. Would it bring alien contact or alien invasion? Personally, I think interstellar distances are so vast that it doesn’t really matter.
[ThTh13] Why is Sri Lanka in big trouble right now, having to refinance its debt with China? Partially because they banned chemical fertilizers. And the results was utterly predictable.
[ThTh14] We’ve gotten so used to exoplanet breakthroughs that 60 new planets and a possible exomoon is just another Tuesday.
[ThTh15] One day I may write about how the fate of our universe hinges upon the nature of Dark Energy — the mysterious force that is currently accelerating the expansion of the universe. One of the possibilities for Dark Energy is quintessence, a force that could change over time and even reverse the expansion so that the universe ends in a Big Crunch. (H/T: fillyjonk)
Here’s an interesting article from the before times about a leaky vaccine that has caused some pretty serious long term consequences: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerousReport
ThTh1: Second sentence of the third paragraph seems to be missing a “not”.Report
ThTh4 and ThTh11: The bigger problem in the near future seems to me to be Russia taking away access to Soyuz rockets. Soyuz and SpaceX’s Falcon 9/Heavy are the real workhouse heavy lifters right now, and Soyuz is off the table for countries participating in the sanctions on Russia. Delta IV and Atlas V are effectively MD’ed and the remaining flights are booked. Ariane 6, Vulcan, and New Glenn have yet to fly and no one knows what their launch tempos will actually be. We already know SLS is going to be limited to a launch every year or two.
I saw recently that one of the high-ups at SpaceX gently berated NASA in public, effectively saying, “You’ve bet your Artemis schedule on Starship, and then limited your thinking to a ton or two of payload per mission, not the 50-100 tons Starship can carry.”Report
ThTh13: There is an argument to be made about fertilizer over-use and improper use, such that run off becomes a serious problem. But a ban is killing a mouse with a cannon.Report
Yep. There’s that huge dead zone in the Caribbean we get every year. So I understand the concern. but like you said, the cure is worse than the disease.Report
I’ve been trying to post a comment on this thread, and it keeps getting blackholed. I don’t get the usual “Your comment is in moderation” link. There’s just nothing there. I did get a comment in the URL after posting: 3726514. I don’t know whether that helps. I’ve posted about four slightly different versions now, so if you only fish one out, I’d prefer that it be the second-newest one, with the ID above. I tried removing the link in the last version I submitted.Report
I’m not seeing anything in there… I went down the first two pages of spam and didn’t see anything that wasn’t obvious spam.Report
I had one completely disappear this morning, so you’re not alone. Only thing that was unusual about it was that the embedded link had some special characters in it. And it’s WordPress, which sometimes does unexpected things. For a while this morning, the commenter-archive portion of State of the Discussion was suppressing a year’s worth of my comments, but has now returned to its normal behavior.Report
Oh, cool. I had no idea that State of the Discussion was back. I thought all that stuff was disabled to save resources.Report
It was. More web crawlers had discovered the site, and Bad Things happened when the crawlers started traversing the insane implicit tree of links SotD provides (multiple ways to get to every comment in the database). I’m sure I put up some sort of announcement about SotD being back after we solved that problem. Said solution being no more than warning the crawlers away from SotD. I check from time to time and somewhat to my surprise all of the many crawlers out there honor the warning. Guess I should do another little post about SotD.Report
ThTh13:
“The humans we’ve been monitoring have discovered sculpture.”
“Oh, good! Art is a very important development!”
“They’re mostly making statues of naked humans.”
“Oh.”
(later)
“The humans we’ve been monitoring have discovered pottery.”
“Oh, good! Food storage is a very important development!”
“They’re painting naked humans on the side of the pottery.”
“Oh.”
(later)
“The humans we’ve been monitoring have figured out how to take photographs.”
“Oh, good! That’s a huge step in mass communication!”
“They’re taking pictures of naked humans.”
“Oh.”
(later)
“The humans we’ve been monitoring have figured out how to broadcast on an interstellar basis.”
“Oh, good! That’s a giant step on the way to actually figuring out how to talk to us! What are the first broadcasts?”
“Naked pictures of themselves.”
“Oh.”Report
Long ago at Bell Labs I attended a talk by a renowned “psychology of communications” specialist. His general thesis was that broad acceptance of a new communications medium was always based initially on some form of sex or violence. When questioned by some of the audience about the telephone, his example was that early local telephony volume was driven by its use as a substitute for back-fence gossip, which invariably included who was sleeping with whom. Professional boxing and wrestling were immensely popular in the early days of over-the-air television. (College and professional football, both quite violent sports, continue to draw enormous audiences.) When video-on-demand service experiments started, it was widely known that cable providers hoped that they could break even on mainstream movies, but the content that actually supported the service was pornography.
We have international readers here. I’d be interested in hearing what they think about their locales, and whether this is a US-centric phenomenon.Report
It’s a truism that what drover improvement in internet perfomance was porn. If we just wanted to exchange text message, it was fine in 1988.Report
I was beginning to be involved with image and video compression at the time. A surprising amount of work was driven by alt.sex.binaries.pictures, with subject lines that included “1 of 13”. And alt.sex.binaries.videos, with subject lines that included “1 of 137”.Report
Dear Ordinary Times readers-
I never thought this would happen to me, but I just had to share it:
In the early days of the internet, people persisted in aping the old customs of making everything into a hard copy.
So like I knew a company where the secretary had to print out every email and file it away in a cabinet.
So it wasn’t surprising that one guy got caught printing out Penthouse pictures to make his own skin magazine.Report
Lena is the most often used test case in image compression. It’s cropped from a Playboy centerfold. Playboy was notorious for pursuing copyright infringement cases involving its models’ images. They decided to make an exception for Lena once they realized it had become a standard.
Note: The image does actually satisfy all of the conditions to be a good test case.Report
a few years ago, our campus Title IX admin gave a talk; one of the issues apparently then was guys e-mailing d*ck pics to women. Title IX guy said “in some circles, this is now how a guy asks for a date” (I don’t even want to know).
Anyway, apparently the women (mostly students) would bring him printouts of said pictures as “evidence.” Apparently he kept them in a file cabinet just in case (for example, if the guy was a repeat offender).
My stupid brain immediately went “some people have a junk drawer, he has an entire “junk” cabinet” and then I had to bite the inside of my mouth because laughing then would have been so, so inappropriate and I didn’t want to have to explain my intrusive thought.
But yeah, those poor women, some of whom were still-fairly-innocent 17 and 18 year olds. I’ve never received that kind of “junk” mail and I hope I never do.Report
Just imagine when he has enough to need a trunk to store it all.Report
And when he retires to a monastery.Report
Is it true that VHS beat Beta-Max despite inferior tech because porn was on VHS?Report