dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

so, is autism environmental then?

well, you're blurring the question.

but, we're more likely to get autism rates down by addressing air pollution than we are in solving this via gene editing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737505/

i'll take a step back - is it possible to go at this from the whole "personalized medicine" slant? well, if you can determine that a specific individual is displaying autistic spectrum behaviour because they lack the ability to properly regulate a specific hormone because of a broken genome, then you could in theory develop drugs that get into the dna and correct for it. ok.

but, due to the randomness of the condition, this would only work for one person at a time and you really wouldn't be able to take that medicine and apply it to anybody else unless they have exactly the same mutation, independently - a potentiality so rare as to be discarded.

so, every single autistic person would need personalized drugs designed specifically for only them.

further, if you can understand the delivery mechanism well enough to know the hormone the person needs, it would certainly make more sense to just inject them with the hormone, so long as you can get through the blood-brain barrier (a problem, regardless). and, for some people that develop autistic spectrum behaviour, it may be as simple as just pumping them up with a neuro-transmitter or other hormone that undoes the broken genome. but, due to the compounding nature of the disease, that is probably too simple of a concept to take seriously - i mean, it would only be the very lucky ones where this is actually a cure. if you pump a 35 year-old autistic person up with choline or something then you might give them the opportunity to think more clearly, but you're not undoing 35 years of choline-deficiency and the compounding effect it's had. the result of waking up at 35 to the reality that you're autistic may actually be worse than not really knowing it. you'd have to start off by treating them like toddlers, and watch them go through adolescence in their 40s and 50s; they'll probably actually learn slower at that age, as kids learn way faster. so, you'd have to figure that out essentially immediately, and start them on hormone treatment for their entire lives.

is that a cure? it's a treatment, i'll give you that. but, why bother with the genetics, then? why not just start injecting neurotransmitters into autistic people and see what happens?

autism rates have gone up dramatically, and you can only assign so much of that to overdiagnosis. it's just a hunch, but it's an educated one, and i really think that getting the pollution down is going to have a much bigger effect on reducing the actual effects of autism than anything we can do with personalized medicine, to offset or mitigate it.

to put it another way: it's a band-aid. i want to get to root causes, and that would appear to be pollution-related...

ok, jess, get up and do something.

now.

i mean, give it 20 years and you're actually likely to get something like this in terms of precedence for the surname "clinton".

1. bill
2. george
3. hillary

and, george could give bill a run, after a while.

why do i always say hillary instead of clinton?

well....i don't. i will often revert to a plain old "clinton", after i've established i mean hillary and not bill.

but, you realize that her husband (if they're still technically married) was president for eight years, right? and in an important eight years at that. so, in the long run, when people say "clinton", they're going to mean bill and not hillary. i'm maybe fast-forwarding a bit, but give it a few years and that will in fact be the norm. her time window on that has passed. and, i'm sure she realizes that - that if you mean hill and not bill, you're gonna need to point that out, because people will justifiably assume you mean bill when you talk of a clinton, for good reason.

so, it seems like the coffee is working extra well tonight, after smoking pot all month.

jittery. alert. awake. a little fidgety, even.

that's fine...

she's a complete fucking idiot.

i remember watching an interview with cenk uygur, and i don't remember the context, but he explained rather clearly that he just couldn't vote for bush, because he was obviously a fucking idiot. and, this was right after clinton, so you can hardly accuse the man of swinging to the more moral choice or something.

i don't think that cenk ever really moved left; he's still a conservative, still a republican - a dino, to co-opt a term, which takes on an interesting double entendre that i didn't intend, but is still interesting.

i'm having that moment with a biden-harris ticket. i don't like susan rice's politics, but i'm at least confident that she's not a fucking moron like harris is.

and, like cenk, i may find myself supporting a party that i don't like in order to block the stupid from coming in.

kamala harris is stupid.

deal with it.

given that biden is not likely to make it through the term, i cannot in good conscience suggest voting for somebody as mentally deficient as kamala harris.

i'm sorry.

the reason she ran for president is that she knows she's going to lose her senate seat and end up working at mcdonald's.

no. listen.

autistic people do not have bad copies of specific genes. that is not what autism is. that is what down's syndrome is, an extra chromosome, but that's something else entirely.

i understand that people don't realize that. that's why i'm trying very hard to correct the point and educate people about it.

autistic people actually have perfectly good genes. however, they have deeply malfunctioning genomes.

the condition is about properly copying those genomes, not about whether the individual genes themselves are damaged; in most cases, they actually aren't, and if they are, it's due to something else.

so, you end up in a situation where the autistic person has great genes, but is unable to copy those great genes, which leads to a poor expression of them.

and, you have to understand as a basic starting point that these errors are just random and consequently unique to the individual, and not something that exists out there to be inherited.

and, they shut me down again.

lol.

fucking idiots.

oh, and it's hilarious that the canadian media is happy to harp on about rising cases in texas, but has a virtual media blackout on california.

it says a lot about how the canadian media operates....

i'll correct for that obvious bias, which appears to be necessary, it seems.

so, this is apparently official, now.

“Though some other parts of the world have released mortality data almost in real time, official death numbers from Ontario’s vital-statistics office are not expected for another year or more,”

so, that's why i'm not bothering.

yes, i live here. yes, i'd be all over it, if i could be. but, it's pointless - the data simply doesn't reflect reality.

and, we consequently don't actually know if toronto got hit like montreal or new york did and can look forward to an easier reopening, or if it's still highly vulnerable like vancouver is, and is likely subject to a resumption of the first wave, like spain is seeing, once things get off the ground again.

cases are coming up, but it's still relatively slow going. but, we won't know until...well, the timelines suggest the shit should hit the fan about labour day, if it's going to.

there are no genes that code for autism.

rather, autism is what happens when your genes get corrupted during copy operations, and stop working properly, and that could happen anywhere in the sequence, and involve any genes at all.

i just want to clarify a point though.

“Many of the genes linked to [these] repeats [were] never thought to be involved in autism before.”

that's because it's not individual genes that are involved with autism, but the errors in translation, themselves. so, it's not the specific genes in these errors in translation that are important, but the errors in translation themselves.

granted, there are going to be a lot of places in the genome where these kinds of sequencing errors aren't important. but, what the research on autism says is that you will get symptoms of autism by introducing these errors in all kinds of different places in the genome, and that the symptoms will arise as a consequence of these errors jumping up all over the place.

i'm sure that the quote is unfortunate, and reflects more on the poor understanding of the journalist than the poor understanding of the scientist. what's important to me is that the conceptual error is corrected.

autism is not caused by any specific genes, or any specific number of genes, but by random errors in translation across the entire genome. for that reason, every expression of autism is genetically distinct - it's not the genes themselves that are causing the problem, it's the reproduction of those genes that is causing the problem.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/breakthrough-in-autism-spectrum-research-finds-genetic-wrinkles-in-dna-could-be-a-cause-1.5041584

we're actually way better off with kenney out in alberta than we are with him in ottawa.

i'd be just perfectly happy if he stays exactly where is, for a very long time.

let's hope he uses this as his election campaign slogan.

jason kenney, for a have-not alberta.

vote jason kenney to erase 55 more years of wealth in just 4!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-net-receiver-financial-transfers-1.5666387

it would be nice if biden would announce his vp pick already. he must know who it is, and my read on it is that it's almost certainly to be susan rice, even if what he really wants is a senator.

let's be honest here - when biden promised to pick a black woman (and he said that. explicitly.), that was a gaffe, the kind biden is known for. it seems like he would be truly comfortable with susan rice, granted. but, let's be real - he stuck his foot in his mouth, and he's not going to get the candidate he really wants, because of it. so, he's dragging that foot that's stuck in his mouth, and he's going to come out of the promise with a head wound.

right now, it seems like just about the only way he can lose is to pick kamala harris (who, if this happens, will go down in history as the black sarah palin. somebody ask her if europe is a country.), which probably means that's what the apparatchiks are pushing for.

so, i'm premature, and i will be premature until he announces.

but, i'm going to say this right now, anyways.

back in 2016, my deduction, after months of analysis, was that clinton would win if the election was fair but that the information i was receiving from media, in total, suggested to me that it had already been decided that trump would win, and the election was essentially a sham. that is (and i know that there are dissenters, but when you gather enough data, you can pull whatever trends you want out of it), that while the data seemed to point to a decisive clinton victory, the media coverage suggested to me that this data was essentially irrelevant.

you may have forgotten, but trump was the media's darling over the last election. admit it: either trump himself, or kellyanne conway, were pretty much on the news 24/7. they dominated the coverage, even when it was negative. it was absolutely obvious that something was pulling strings in the background, in trump's favour, and that the thing had already been determined.

so, that's why i said what i said: the data pointed to clinton, but the media suggested trump would win. and, i derisively suggested that they'd tell us trump will win pennsylvania, and we'll all be baffled by it. what happened was predictable - by watching cnn, not by reading the polls.

so, it was my media analyst hat that was more predictive than my data analyst hat, here.

let's stop for a moment and be clear about what i'm saying, because when you juxtapose "donald trump" and "deep state", you get to this messaging that the cia is out to get the donald. this is just a projection. i mean, i don't know - maybe they got something on him and they forced him into it. but, whatever the deep state's perception of donald trump really was in 2015/2016, there is considerably less uncertainty about what it thought about hillary clinton, and that is that it feared and loathed her. the vast right-wing conspiracy is a far more real construct, and represents reality far better, than any kind of deep state plot against donald trump; rather, what i'm suggesting is that donald trump seems to have been the prime actor in a deep state conspiracy to block hillary from office.

if you've been following clinton's career for any depth, you know this goes back. they've been blocking her path since the 90s, and i've been pointing this out for almost as long. but, if you look at what happened in the election - the emails just being a small part of it - it's rather obvious what side they put their thumb on.

so, i do argue for a deep state conspiracy involving donald trump, but it's the opposite of the projection that trump himself projects; i've been arguing for years that they're out to get clinton, and i argued through most of the election that trump was just a pawn of the intelligence apparatus. and, frankly, very little of what i've seen since has disrupted that perception. in the end, he seems to always do what he's told, doesn't he?

but, why did the media align with this? because, in the end, they cared about ratings, and all that the scandals that clinton generated managed to do was convince the media that a trump presidency would be more profitable than a clinton presidency - which they were no doubt correct about. fox is different, but, in the end, cnn and msnbc and ... are just corporations, and their single purpose is to maximize profit for shareholders. they don't care about policy; they care about ratings.

and, where are we today?

well, if you thought clinton was boring, meet sleepy joe.

so, we'll see what direction the coverage takes over the next few months.

but, i'm getting deja vu.

if you truly understand what autism is, you should immediately become an atheist.

now.

do it.

or, i'll state it again in a clinical way that is intentionally designed to offend crusty conservatives:

autism is a category of genetic disorder that is the consequence of random and unpredictable errors in dna translation.

to put it in a way that christians and other religionists can understand....

autism happens after conception. strictly.

you can't predict it....

and, it's one of the strongest arguments against design that i know of.

i want to be clear if you're not following this.

what is autism? is it genetic? like, what is it?

autism is random error in dna translation.

is autism even curable in theory?

we could imagine a scenario where we have an embryo in a test tube and are able to document every time it reproduces a new cell. using crispr-like technology, we could in theory go in and edit every single cell in real-time, as each error develops.

but, we can't know what those errors are until they happen - they don't come from your parents, they are the result of random errors occurring in the embryo. so, we won't know which embryos to monitor for errors as they are developing.

and, of course, this is a somewhat dystopic way to envision reproduction.

i have a better idea: let's ask ourselves if environmental causes (like introducing toxic chemicals into the environment) may have an effect on that error rate, and focus on that, instead.

is it possible that obesity might be caused by genes fucking up?

sure. that's called diabetes.

but, the conservation of energy still holds.

that is, it doesn't matter.

this isn't actually a new result. i actually believe that this is currently seen as the leading hypothesis into the cause of autism.

the article is not very well written, which is generally the case when english majors in the msm try to write about science, but what they're referencing is the broadly accepted idea that autism is essentially caused by replication errors. that is, every person with autism has a unique genetic error. therefore, it shouldn't be seen as a disease that can be cured or that even has a specific cause but rather as a condition that is the result of unique errors in translation that cannot be predicted in advance.

if they wish to hold on to some pretense of science in their nonsense, the intelligent design people would essentially have to deduce one of the following

(1) that autism is an error by the creator, and that their imaginary creator is in truth subject to massive amounts of error. that is, their god is indeed quite fallible, isn't t?
(2) that their creator has a sadistic streak, and is essentially carrying out nazi experiments on us as some kind of cruel game. hey, what happens if i put this fragment here...?

but, i just wanted to post to point out the big, big difference between genes doing what they're supposed to do and genes randomly fucking up and in some cases doing exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to do. autism is not inheritable, for that reason; obesity would be, if it could be established as genetic with any coherency of thought.

so, when i say that what genes do is regulate hormones and that things that are not regulated by hormones are not genetic, that is still very much true. yet, that assumes a relatively healthy underlying genome. sometimes, our genomes end up transmitted to us in a distorted or malfunctioning manner, or they end up breaking in the process of human reproduction. in that case, a person may have a genetic condition, but it's not being caused by what the genes actually do, it's being caused by the system not functioning properly, in itself.

autism is consequently not like tay-sachs, for example. tay-sachs is a real genetic disease, and we can identify the gene responsible for it. undoing it is a question of deleting the bad gene, and we should all look forward to the day that the bad gene is gone, forever. you can't expect an outcome like that with autism, because it's a result of errors that occur during reproduction, rather than an error that is written into a more or less correct reproduction process (translation is never 100% correct. not even close, actually. you're full of genetic mistakes yourself, too - just not in ways that have impeded your development so dramatically).

that is to say that there will never be a cure to autism and understanding that you can't cure it is intrinsically tied into understanding what it actually is.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/breakthrough-in-autism-spectrum-research-finds-genetic-wrinkles-in-dna-could-be-a-cause-1.5041584

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

and, again, what are these fruit bowls?

- 1 kiwi
- 1 banana
- 5-6 strawberries
- 20 blueberries
- 10 raspberries

with

- 1-1.5 scoops of cherry ice cream on the top (which was probably my single greatest source of vitamin a before i switched to the red peppers, and probably remains the single biggest source of much needed animal fats in my diet).
- about 300 ml of the most fortified soy milk i can find

together, i should get enough vitamins and minerals from this to get me through the day.

my struggle is trying to make sure i actually sit down to eat it every day. i know that your body doesn't store a lot of this stuff, so catching up doesn't really work right.

If California were a country, it would rank fifth in the world for total COVID-19 cases behind only the United States, Brazil, India and Russia.

6th is south africa.

so, there's the c in the new brics - it's california.

brazil
russia
india
california
south africa

how many days did i skip meals this summer?

first, let's note that my eating schedule only calls for one meal per day, although it's sort of like eating a big brunch everyday. so, i'll eat a bowl of fruit as an appetizer (or, you could call it breakfast.) and then eat one of the following:

1) half of a large plate of pasta, which i may double up on if i skipped the previous day or if i'm just extra hungry. like the day i got back from 120 km of biking. i ate an entire plate, that day. usually, i will eat half the plate.

2) eggs, which is four eggs on rye bread, with cheese and salami.

these are not small meals, and if you didn't understand what i was doing you'd miss the point. while they are not small meals, they are roughly the size of what a lot of people eat just for supper. if you want to interpret the fruit as breakfast and the pasta as lunch, then i don't eat supper at all; if you want to interpret the fruit as breakfast and the pasta as supper, then i don't eat lunch - and it's actually half of what most people eat for supper.

so is that clear?

after having three bowls of fruit and half the eggs i normally would this morning, i'm now four days behind on the fruit (that includes today). i've also had some nachos over the period being examined, which i used to substitute for some skipped meals.

the legend then is as follows:

f = fruit skipped
f = fruit initially skipped, but caught up on
m = meal (that is, eggs or pasta) skipped
m = meal skipped, but nachos were eaten as replacement

june:
~~18 - f m~~
~~19 - f m~~
~~21 - f m~~
~~22 - f m~~
~~25 - f m~~
~~26 - f m~~

july:
~~01 - f m~~
~~02 - f m~~
03 - f m
04 - f m
07 - f m
08 - f m
10 - f m
11 - f m
12 - f m
13 - f m
21 - f m
22 - f m
23 - f m
24 - f m
25 - f m
26 - f m
27 - f m
~~28 - f m~~
29 - f m
30 - f m
31 - f m

the red dates are what i've eaten over the last few 48 hours, and given that i've got three days to get through 7 bowls of fruit, it's not likely that i'll be eating anything else for the rest of the month.

in those 44 days, then, i've only had 14 meals - and skipped 30, although i caught up to eight of them with nachos. so, i've skipped 22 meals this summer. that's about $50 in the bank, and i assure you my health is better off for it.

that is normal for me, in the summer - the heat keeps my appetite way down, allowing me to lose weight without even trying. it's the best part of the summer - you don't get hungry, and therefore don't have to eat.

but, i want to post this to demonstrate what a healthy person's diet actually looks like. i'm going to end up eating a grand total of two actual meals and a shitload of fruit over the last two weeks of july, and when i get tested they're going to tell me my stats are those of an olympic athlete, that i'm the healthiest person they've ever met. so, that's something to strive for, even if it seems impossible to accomplish right now.

you shouldn't be craving food two or three times a day, that's just going to make you obese, and you should take it as a sign that you need to change your lifestyle if you find yourself constantly hungry like that. whatever the intelligent design people want to tell you about genetics and hunger, the reality is that hunger is a feedback that happens when your stomach reaches a specific point of acidity, and not something that is genetically predetermined, so if you're hungry a lot it's because your stomach is physically too big. it may be uncomfortable for you to do so, but you basically need to starve yourself until it shrinks - and then you won't be hungry when you shouldn't be anymore.

this was when the broadcasting shut down, right here:

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020_05_18_archive.html

draw your own conclusions.

what do i think happened?

i seem to have hurt somebody's feelings back in ~~june~~ may, and the cops seem to have stepped in to stop that person from crying too hard.

the person i was insulting before this shut down was actually the prime minister.

awwwww. did i huwt youw feewings justin?

awww.

i like chocolate in my coffee, but i'm really not a chocolate person, and i'd much rather eat a fruity gummy.

fruit >>> chocolate.

so, my posts are broadcasting, again.

fucking pigs....

what about the edibles, though?

i have mentioned here a few times that if i can get used to the edibles then i'll have no reason to smoke anything in the future. and i've been looking forward to that.

i believe that the edibles only recently went on sale. i don't recall seeing edibles listed at the store back in march, and i haven't looked into it at all since; i just looked into it for the first time right now.

so, apparently 10 mg is a good dose for edibles. i have taken edibles in the past, without knowing the dosage, and it's tended to knock me out hard, but it's been in the context of drinking and smoking other things, so i don't have a control. i know i've eaten some things people have handed me, and it generally hasn't worked out well.

the pickings are still very slim and still relatively pricey so i'm going to wait for the variety to improve and the price to come down before i look again.

so, for example, i can buy a $10 mg gummy for $8. that seems like it's one dose. but, i can buy a gram of pot for $8 and roll 5-6 joints out of it. so, the gummy doesn't seem to be very economical, in context.

i'm not going to buy a little gummy and try to cut it into 6 pieces.

some of the chocolate bars seem to be a little more economical. they seem to split them into 2-2.5 mg pieces, which is probably on the low side, but it may be a good starting point to do some proper testing with.

there are no 30 degree days in the forecast right now for august :(.

so, i should be inside and sober and working, to the extent that i can find ways to fight off the a/c.

so, i took advantage of the last day of warm weather to actually get some sleep today before it cools down to some unsleepable overnight lows, chilly and sort of scary numbers like 16 degrees celsius. brrrrrrr.

it's a reminder: it can get very cold in canada, even in july.

i meant to do a review of the subway scientist in the last post, but i forgot halfway through. yeah, laugh it up.

the pot was a little weaker than the last few i've bought, and that was noticeable (it was 19%), but i got a good count out of it so it sort of balanced out. however, if the selling point was that the product was supposed to have a distinctly fruity hue, then it simply didn't - i got a sort of artificial grape odour (almost like it had been sprayed with grape flavouring) for a few hours when i opened the pack, and some buds that almost looked burnt by something (maybe even the artificial flavouring). i don't want to slam this too hard, because it actually got the job done relatively well, and i want to reiterate that the count was good (in general, the RIFF products seem to have the best counts of the products i've tried, so far). but, it wasn't really what i was hoping for.

ok, so, now i need to get to cleaning and eating.

fwiw, when i say "catch up on eating", what i mean is catch up on my daily fruit bowls, not on my actual meals. i'm not going to sit and eat a week's worth of skipped pasta - that's gone. but, i will sit down and eat three bowls of fruit at a time, to catch up, if i skip a lot of them. what i actually want is to ensure i'm getting the bowl in every day....it's just hard to sit down and eat a bowl of cold fruit when it's cold....

Genes contribute to the causes of obesity in many ways, by affecting ~~appetite, satiety (the sense of fullness),~~ metabolism, ~~food cravings~~, body-fat distribution, and ~~the tendency to use eating as a way to cope with stress.~~

i'll accept metabolism, primarily. body-fat distribution is a consequence of metabolism.

but, if you're going to tell me that you're fat because you have genetic factors that affect your appetite and there's nothing you can do to stop it, i'm going to laugh at you. yet, that seems to be what a lot of the argument is based on.

"well, sure i ate the entire cake. i was hungry! it's genetic!"

go take a holiday in africa and come back and tell me how you feel about that, now.

it's been the sporadic efficacy of the conversion process at the one drive site that's screwed me up over the last few days. i'd be done by now if i wasn't stuck waiting and trying over and over to get the server to convert the file properly.

it was yesterday morning that the third trimester file refused to convert properly from doc to pdf (the error is that they introduce a conversion step, from doc to docx, that breaks the formatting). so, i fell asleep waiting for it to work, and was up in the afternoon. it converted, eventually.

then, i was ready to post the 2013 combined (final) updates yesterday afternoon when the machine rebooted on me before i got the chance to save the downloaded pdfs anywhere (after trying to get the conversion to work several times), so i'll need to go back to the one drive site and hope it works. this is the chromebook, and it's designed with this in mind, but it's a process to set back up, and it threw me for the day. i was going to wait until i was done, but i ended up eating for the first time in a few days, and that just knocked me right out, in the end, after however many days without eating or sleeping (which is what i actually prefer, fwiw. fuck eating. fuck sleeping. but, i don't have an energy source to plug into. not yet, anyways.). the warm & humid temperatures finally overpowered the a/c down here yesterday as well, which was highly conducive to sleep after however many weeks of the frigid air from upstairs making it so hard to sleep. i sleep best when the temperature is in the high 20s, and can't sleep at all when i'm even a little bit cold in the summer - even at 22 or 23, it just feels like somebody is dumping cold water on me.

i was up a little after midnight, when it cooled down, and have mostly been focusing on catching up on eating this morning.

i uploaded the 2013 deathtokoalas file to smashwords yesterday, but i didn't get a chance to catch the conversion before the reboot.

that means i have the following left to do:

1) check the july-dec 2013 deathtokoalas file at smashwords. the formatting there is bad, i just need to check that the file actually updated.
2) there is no travel blog for january, so i will need to upload just the dtk update to the january bandcamp archive. i will need to upload that file to smashwords, as well.
3) i will need to get the full travel blog file up to smashwords
4) i will need to get the full travel blog file and the full deathtokoalas file both up at lulu
5) i'll need to update the google drive share as well.

these are minor edits and should take an afternoon, but i want to prioritize cleaning for today.

the 2014 run through should be much quicker because i've got the parameters better set, now. i won't be adding any new posts, but i will be likely removing a lot and maybe transferring quite a bit. the major change is that the politics blog is likely to become a little more focused, as specific concepts get moved entirely to dtk.

will i do a combined blog one day?

i might, in the end, but likely only as a total update. so, you might get it all thrown at you in one ridiculous 100,000 page file, in the end. for now, i'm not planning on that.

so, for the day, i'm doing a lot of cleaning (including of myself) and i'll get back to this when it's done.

and is it just natural variation?

no.

these people would be eaten instantly by lions. no chance at all.

so, do i think that weight regulation is determined by genetic factors? that is, do i think that obese people are "born that way"?

no. not at all.

well, not really.

what does the science actually say? it's not what the media wants you to think, but that's normal - the media almost never gets the science right. generally, when you read a report about science at the cbc or cnn, it's been so distorted by the obscene religious censors that you essentially have to run through every clause with a giant not operation. their journalistic integrity is beyond atrocious.

so, forget about the nonsense you've read in the news - it's just that. nonsense.

so, let's ask a question we've asked a few times, now. what is a gene? and the answer is that a gene is a protein that regulates the production of hormones. so, in order to demonstrate that an issue is genetic, you have to show that it's regulated entirely or at least dominantly by hormone production. so, is obesity determined solely or even dominantly by hormone production? if it is, then you've found a genetic defect that should be targeted for elimination from the genome. if it's not, then you can't blame obesity on genetics.

so, is weight determined by hormones? this is the actual debate here underlying the media obfuscation, and the answer is sort of. two people standing side by side can eat the same meal and metabolize it differently, and that difference in metabolism will be caused by different levels of hormonal regulation (which, remember, is all that genes do), but at the end of the day they consumed the same amount of mass, and it's conservation of energy that is going to predominate in the end.

so, these news reports (which are designed to ensure nobody has their feelings hurt, first and foremost, and not as the cold, rationalist scientific explorations that they should be designed as, to discard emotions as meaningless subjective opinions) constantly want to bring up genes as this kind of black box explanation. our understanding of genetics is slowly pushing past the point where you can get away with this kind of lazy journalism, but for right now you can still throw just about anything in this pile of magic called "genetics" using tricks like "studies suggest" or "scientists estimate", and get the answer you expected out of it by designing the question that way. to call that a perversion of science would be an understatement. but, if you want to understand this properly, you're better off starting not from the assumption (and that is still all it actually is) that genetics are paramount and unalterable (as though god decided, right?), but rather from the conservation of energy, which we can use newtonian approximations for, in context.

energy stored = energy consumed - energy burned

so, if you're fat it's because you eat more than you need, and it's the most basic physics in the world to understand it as much.

it is consequently the case that if your fancy genetic model contradicts that simple equation then you can throw it in the trash - it's garbage. genetic/hormonal complications may affect the amount of energy your body burns, but the issue of stored weight is ultimately determined by how much one consumes and not by how much one burns and you simply can't store more energy than you've consumed. that's not biology; that's physics. you can't gain weight by not eating, and if you burn calories you will always lose some weight, even if your hormonal regulation is particularly defective and prevents you from burning fat like a healthy person in a particularly invasive way.

given that truth, hormonal regulation brought on by gene expression can at most be an annoyance. it's friction. it's a complicating factor. but, to say that you can't lose weight because of your genes is wrong. rather, people with poor hormone regulation due to defective genes will simply need to work harder and eat less to maintain healthy vital statistics.

that means that the issue is not genetic, at it's core - and that people with defective genes should be paying more attention to lifestyle, not giving into fatalistic assumptions, or giving up on life because god.

as an aside, do we want to conclude that obesity is a genetic defect? because, i can tell you that i'll never accept it. the unavoidable conclusion of trying to clinicize an issue that is in actual truth almost entirely about lifestyle would be that we need to find a way to eliminate the genetic disease/defect of obesity from the genome. i mean, we can't be walking around talking about accepting inferiority as normal. actual diseases need to be targeted and expunged. so, this intelligent design recast as liberalism thing only gets the religious people to the end point they want if it's rooted in religious assumptions in the first place; if you find the fatalism of these religious arguments laughable, i'm talking about the "god made me the way i am" crowd, you're just going to take the knowledge as an argument for eugenics. the idea that being fat is a choice and can be reversed is consequently a lot better than the alternative, which is that fat people have a genetic disease that cannot be cured and should be prevented from breeding.

fat people have a genetic disease that cannot be cured.

therefore, they should be prevented from breeding in order to eliminate the disease from the genome.

discuss.

Monday, July 27, 2020

the december music journal package at bandcamp has been updated by updating the files for the deathtokoalas blog and also for the travel blog. the purpose of this update is solely to ensure that a level of consistency around certain types of posts is maintained throughout the blog.

as these updates are minor and to the travel blog and deathtokoalas blog only, it will not be documented in the notes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/12-2013-music-journal

the following posts were added to the travel blog at different places, with no relation to each other.

24) silly bros
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/12/its-always-so-hard-to-tell-when-bros.html

25) stalked by cats
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/12/we-need-stray-cat-cull.html

26) timezone
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/12/i-just-clued-in-that-distance-one-lives.html

the deathtokoalas blog was edited to remove a lecture and to add six cover art posts in order to ensure consistency of type across the blog:

~~12) delete this:~~
~~https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2013/12/this-is-balanced-and-informative-talk.html~~

13) weird wave form:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/very-fucking-weird-waveform.html

14) inrimixed cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inrimixed-cover-art.html

15) inridiculous cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inridiculous-cover-art.html

16) inricycled a cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inricycled-cover-art.html

17) inricycled b cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inricycled-b-cover-art.html

18) inrimake cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inrimake-cover-art.html

see, it's not just that the ice floes are melting.

it's also that the grizzlies are coming, and that they will thrive.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/grizzlies-move-north-1.5397274

i actually don't think the polar bears will go quietly into the night like you think.

let's rewind polar bear history back quite a ways, to the time before there were polar bears, when there was merely a common ancestor of polar bears and what we today call brown bears - a common ancestor that would have been remarkably similar to today's brown bears. grizzlies would also descend from recent common ancestors of polar and brown bears.

how far back is that? the answer is about 350,000 years ago - which is not that far back. when the anatomically modern homo sapiens evolved in africa about 300,000 years ago, it interbed with relatives that had split off much earlier, including neanderthals. and, indeed polar bears can mate with brown bears and with grizzly bears, if their behavioural contradictions with each other are not too great.

so, we hear these horror stories about the polar bears losing all of the ice, indeed floating out to see on ice bergs, and just drowning in the ocean like forgotten sailors, dying stoically in a fight against an enemy they don't understand.

i don't want to say that you aren't going to see some emaciated polar bears withering away on melting ice floes, because you no doubt will. but, to get that as normal into your head is really to underestimate the ingenuity of the bears, some of which are even smarter than average, no doubt.

so, what's actually going to happen?

polar bears are going to need to try to adapt by invading south, and when they do they're going to come into contact with brown bears and grizzly bears that are actually going to be moving north to colder areas and their polar bear dna is going to introgress back into the general brown bear population. if a true hybrid colony develops on the border of the range, you could essentially see a grizzly type bear that is better adapted to the colder climate, and able to move a bit further north.

so, while the ice floes may be gone in future days, don't be surprised if terrestrial grizzly-looking bears start to develop a strange taste for the seals they can catch from shore.

while the polar bear itself may die out in the face of climate change, the broader bear species will adapt to the new climate.

and, i want to see this happen to observe hybridization on a large scale in a terrestrial mammal, to understand how evolution actually works when climate change sets two daughter species back on each other's niche.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7209591/bleak-future-polar-bears-canada-arctic/

november went through quickly without any hiccups, so it's already done.

the november music journal package at bandcamp has been updated by updating the files for the deathtokoalas blog. the purpose of this update is solely to ensure that a level of consistency around certain types of posts is maintained throughout the blog.

as these updates are minor and to the deathtokoalas blog only, it will not be documented in the notes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/11-2013-music-journal

five cover art posts were added to the deathtokoalas blog to ensure consistency of type across the blog:

7) demo #2 cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/demo-2-cover-art.html

8) inrisampled cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inrisampled-cover-art.html

9) inriched cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inriched-cover-art.html

10) inrijected cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inrijected-cover-art.html

11) warning cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/warning-cover-art.html

ok, i got my september file converted from microsoft servers. great.

the november update is just a series of cover art posts to the deathtokoalas blog. there's no travel blog update. so, that should move quick.

the october music journal package at bandcamp has been updated by updating the files for the travel blog and also by updating the files for the deathtokoalas blog. while these are minimal updates that add little to the narrative, they ensure that a level of consistency around certain types of posts is maintained throughout the blog.

as these updates are minor and to the travel & deathtokoalas blogs, it will not be documented in the notes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/10-2013-music-journal

the following four posts were added to the travel blog, all isolated from one another, and relevant in their different ways:

20) deleting facebook friends
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/deleting-95-of-my-facebook-friends.html

21) victoria death hysteria:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/you-can-imagine-that-this-isnt-what-i.html

22) blender
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/i-picked-up-this-little-one-person.html

23) article
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/part-of-reason-i-just-moved-to-area-is.html

the following edits were made to the deathtokoalas blog to ensure consistency of type across the blog:

3) kimmel post:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/note-that-26-states-so-far-have-opted.html

~~4) delete this:~~
~~https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2013/10/google-account-password-changed.html~~

5) demo #1 cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/10/blog-post_14.html

6) profile pic:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/10/blog-post.html

there are reasons why i'd rather use the word site, but i can't sit around and wait for the server to start working all night. these are relatively small files, so i went back to use one of the free sites, for now.

that means that the september music journal package at bandcamp has been updated by updating the files for the travel blog and also by updating the files for the deathtokoalas blog. while these are minimal updates that add little to the narrative, they ensure that a level of consistency around certain types of posts is maintained throughout the blog .

as these updates are minor and to the travel & deathtokoalas blogs, it will not be documented in the notes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/09-2013-music-journal

the following three posts were added to the travel blog, each documenting a time i went out to interact with the world in windsor:

16) new kitchen items
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-kitchen-items.html

17) new facecloth holder:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-facecloth-holder.html

18) so, i've been to...
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/09/ok-so-ive-been-going-to-same-handful-of.html

the following two posts were added to the deathtokoalas blog to ensure consistency of type across the blog:

1) profile picture update:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/i-got-little-lazy-or-was-that.html

2) potential cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/death-valley-in-bloom-good-potential.html

and, now i can get to updating october.

i'll check back later, and if i can get the file to process at the microsoft site, i'll replace it. but, for now, it's just not working.

so, i've got september finished, but i'm getting slowed down by some poor results at the conversion to pdf stage. i really want the one drive site to work, and it usually does, but it's so sporadic sometimes, and right now it's taking a while.

i've got the posts updated at the blog side, at least. but, i don't want to jump ahead on the pdf side, so if this doesn't work soon, it could be a long night.

Sunday, July 26, 2020

the second package to update is the august music journal at bandcamp, and the travel blog just got much bigger, jumping from 2 to 14 posts. while i have minimal documentation of my actual truck ride to windsor, this should help fill in the time gap a little bit better. also added are some posts documenting some trips i made around town after i moved in.

as this update is strictly to the travel blog, it will not be documented in the notes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/08-2013-music-journal

the following four posts were made from ottawa, before i left, and added to the front of the blog:

4) $50 gift certificate pt 1
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/08/so-i-have-still-have-that-50-gift.html

5) disc scavenging
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/08/re-cds.html

6) $50 gift certificate pt 2
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-wasnt-expecting-them-to-give-me-cash.html

7) recovery
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/08/thankfully-i-was-at-least-able-to.html

the following eight posts were made from windsor, and document some trips made out of the house after moving in:

8) documents to print:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/08/documents-to-print.html

9) do i have internet now?
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/08/mom-i-guess-you-have-your-internet-now.html

10) new dresser sequence
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013_08_20_archive.html

11) wood improperly cut:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-should-probably-just-laugh.html

12) make-up self
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/08/building-myself-make-up-shelf-out-of.html

13) found tv
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/08/so-i-found-on-old-tv-on-curb-it-works.html

14) fitted shelf
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-fitted-shelf-eventually.html

15) found shoe rack
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/08/shoe-shelf-found-on-curb.html

so, why aren't i all in on climate change, then?

if only it were that easy, right?

when i talk about my genome being adapted to some kind of warm, humid climate, i want to be clear what stage of evolution i'm talking about, here.

clearly, there has been large amounts of gene flow through the western part of the old world, from the tip of norway to the reaches of the sahara, and from the distant island of ireland to the mountains overlooking the indian subcontinent. there has also been substantive gene flow into this region from the blackest reaches of africa and india, as well as the furthest reaches of the east. all of that substantive gene flow has prevented any sort of substantive subgrouping of broadly caucasian types from developing. if you take random people from britain, from libya, from italy, from turkey and from iran and mix them all up in non-descript clothing, or just observe them naked, you're consequently not going to find it as easy to identify them as you'd imagine.

i'm not suggesting that my warmer climate genetic history is suggestive of some kind of speciation event or something.

rather, i'm talking about percentages of alleles in the population that control for adaptations to climate, which i would imagine are not very likely to change over time in the presence of gene flow because the people that stay and thrive in whatever climate are those best able to adapt to it.

so, sure - people come and go. for that reason, people like me with a clear predisposition towards warmer weather get born in cooler climates, and those with a clear predisposition towards cooler weather get born in warmer climates. so, in any population, you're going to have a level of variation. but, what i'm getting at is that it's going to be those with the right match that actually thrive and reproduce, and that for that reason you would expect populations in sweden to be adapted to the weather differently than populations in sicily, when measured in aggregate. that is, alleles for the right kind of climate would predominate in either area.

i would thrive much better in a more tropical climate, and in a way where i'm able to enjoy the heat and humidity, i'm sure of it.

and, yes, i think that coverage surrounding the effectiveness of antibodies has, to say the least, been overblown.

it's the memory of the virus that's more important than the antibodies themselves. that said, i'll acknowledge that the testing seems to indicate that there's a higher percentage of people clearing the virus from their system without an immune response than was previously imagined.

so, let's logically beak down what might happen if you get the virus.

1) you might clear the virus without developing an immune response, which would essentially mean that your immune system just ate it without thinking about it twice. it may have just thought it was a variant of the common cold, and decided it wasn't worth amounting an immune response to (a very interesting conclusion, if true.). if this happens, then you are not going to be immune to the virus in the future. in theory, you could catch the disease repeatedly without getting sick, and act as a superspreader of it.

2) otherwise, you will get sick. if you get sick, that means that your body is mounting an immune response, and you should expect protective antibodies, if you beat it.

i) if you beat it, and your body successfully produces antibodies that clear it, it remembers how to produce those antibodies, again. forever. so, while antibody levels may fade over time (your body will prioritize that accordingly), you don't forget how to create the antibodies again. it's sort of a tempest in a teapot. but, note that your body may be dropping production of antibodies for this class of virus (the common cold.) because it knows that the virus mutates quickly.

ii) if you don't beat it, it's because you were unable to crack the virus' code and develop antibodies fast enough to clear it. and, you are now dead. sucks.

of course, if the virus has mutated by the next you come into contact with it then all bets are off.

so, the first package to update was the july music journal at bandcamp. the addition is minimal - four additions to the travel blog - and will not be documented in the notes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/07-2013-music-journal-2-2

the following four posts were added to the very front of the travel blog:

1) legit drunk last night
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/07/consequences.html

2) moving thoughts:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/07/so-im-in-process-of-blowing-my-life-up.html
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-think-my-perspective-is-slightly.html

3) the plan
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-plan.html

i want to be clear: i wouldn't propose ramping up to 20%. you could blow up the system, just by doing it, and the thing could run out of control, for real.

i might at most suggest encouraging the spread amongst university students, which is about what's going to happen right now, anyways. 'cause you can cancel frosh, but you can't really cancel frosh.

so, it's going to make the most sense to post the errata on a month-by-month basis, and update each file, as it's updated.

soon.

i have to finish reinstalling the other drive first, because that's where my editing software is.

expect about 20 posts added to the travel blog, mostly before 11/2013. also expect about 20 posts added to dtk, all after 08/2013.

this was frustrating and slow and tedious but i'm a perfectionist, and there wasn't really any way around it - i had to let the blogs all develop a little before i was able to go back and ensure a concept of consistency within each of them. i want to be to the next thing, but that was necessary.

the numbers in the united states generally dip dramatically on the weekends. the fact that saturday's numbers did not dip dramatically from friday's is a red flag that next week will be brutal.

i wish i understood why some posts are broadcasting and others aren't. it's quite strange.

how much longer do we have to go with this?

with forty million confirmed cases globally, the actual number is something more like 600 million, as a lower bound - that's 7.5%. the seroprevalence to crude case count ratio has mostly been measured in advanced countries, and seems to be somewhat less than ten, but the spread is global and you would expect that ratio to be much higher in most of the world, so a factor of 15 is no doubt an underestimate.

so, we're probably pushing close to a 10% infection rate, with the vast majority of those people showing enough symptoms that they can expect to develop an immune response.

now, this is going to be very localized, with some regions having high levels of immunity and some regions having low levels of immunity. you should be able to loosely measure this by how hard the region was hit.

a reasonable estimate for the actual case count in the united states right now based on empirical data is roughly 40 million, which is 12% of the population. it seems that the magic number to drastically slow the spread is not 70% as previously thought but rather 20%. while regional variations in the united states will dominate, it would seem to be halfway there, overall.

we could of course stop this with a vaccine, if we can get one first. but, if we're halfway there, and the growth rate is an increasing function, that would suggest we have less than six months to get there before it burns itself out. three, probably. it's going to peak in september...

our governments have all spent a lot of money on these vaccines, but they may find themselves arriving to a muted threat.

that's not to say that this thing won't be dangerous for years to come, or that it won't continue to spread in much the same way that it does now, albeit at a reduced rate. it will still be out there, and the vulnerable will remain at risk. when the vaccines get here, the elderly and at risk should take them immediately.

it's just that 20% immunity seems to be enough to stop the actual pandemic.

i think people maybe have this binary view of herd immunity, but this isn't quantum physics, we can have continuity, here. herd immunity is an inflection point, but the reduction in spread will increase proportionally with the number of people infected. so, 70% is better than 50% is better than 20%. but, the magic number for the health system seems to be a lot lower than previously thought, making the concept a lot more attainable than previously imagined.

the same rough calculation produces less than 5% immunity in canada, as a whole, indicating that we have much further to go. but, we will still probably beat the vaccine to substantive immunity, in the end.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

so, what i've done is start at the beginning and, whenever i see a thread in one of the blogs, have noted it, with the hope of maintaining consistency and completeness, godel be damned. the blogs will each morph, now, to better fit these threads.

this should help everybody understand the differences between these blogs, which i'm only beginning to fully grasp, myself.

politics:
- life narrative. feelings. events. reflections. dialogues. stories.
- essays. rants. comments. short stories, notes, reactions to quotes.
- philosophical reflections
- political activism
- lectures exclusive
- debates
- news reports exclusive (except sarcasm)
- mathematical & scientific analysis, of varying levels
- historical analysis
- cultural analysis
- economic analysis
- legal analysis
- blogs of any sort, really
- any excerpts of existing texts
- anything published to the appspot site, including cd reviews, concert reviews & music web
- food blog
- all official music releases
- some extra discussions outside of the main narrative
- persies
- benchmark discs
- reviews of substantive influences in real time
- concerts
- headphones
- posts about isps & network topology
- installation files & scripts
- posts about non-musical celebrities, and about some newsworthy musical celebrities
- theory of art sequence
- other youtube videos posted and/or commentary around them should have some kind of relevance to one of these categories
- general commentary about web pages and their uses (with personal use commentary, too)

music:
- life narrative. feeling, events. reflections. dialogues.
- studio narrative
- cover art
- all official music releases
- damaged cds are part of the narrative.
- computer troubleshooting is a part of the narrative
- cleaning the studio. scripting machines.
- benchmark discs / obligatory influentials / comment threads about influences
- reviews of new records by selected artists that are of specific historical influence
- some obituaries of direct or indirect influences
- no appspot reviews, but reviews of new music affecting me as i'm recording.
- concerts
- persies
- headphones
- installation files & files created when recording
~~- posts about isps & network topology~~ (ends after getting isp access)
- posts about personal social media sites
- posts about music theory or music history or music as any other academic interest
- posts about music production, gear, equipment, etc
- posts about the guitar, the development of the guitar, guitar music history, specific guitarists, etc
- comments where i drop my own music
- comments where i present biographical information in a way that is relevant to understanding my influences and development as an artist
- theory of art sequence
- concepts that relate to topics explored in songs
- some excerpts of existing texts as they are relevant to art or my artistic development
- discussions with people inquiring about the music

dtk:
- any posts containing music videos of any sort
- any youtube videos or comments around videos except those that are considered official new sources
- tv show & film excerpts
- news source allowed for light content or content about music
- interviews with musicians or authors, but not speeches or lectures, or news reports.
- posts with pictures or comments on pop culture or music, broadly
- media commentary & criticism
- cds, cd reviews, cd collections, etc
- anything posted to the appspot site as a review
- music web
- official original album releases
- spontaneous song lyrics
- minimal personal commentary (almost none).
- no persies, except profile updates.
- gaming exclusive
- posts about isps & network topology
- any paintings & cover art
- release dates
- animal vids
- general commentary about web pages and their uses (but not personal use commentary)
- headphones sequence
- border stuff because of concerts
- concerts
- not considered official news sources: vice news.
- posts about music theory or music history or music as any other academic interest
- comments on articles about music and art in any abstraction
- some excerpts of existing texts as they are relevant to art or culture, broadly
- some (usually ironic) self-referential comments about my posting habits

travel:
- posts made to facebook, blogger, etc from somewhere physically outside the house or about things that happened outside of the house
- travel blog needs to be more about action scenes, and less about documenting every time i leave the house. so, actually try to avoid posts that just mention going somewhere, and make it more about the narrative of actually going somewhere.
- should avoid planning posts
- should include reflections on travelling or moving
- posts about isps & network topology
- posts made about the weather
- persies for going out only
- border stuff because of concerts
- concerts
- posts about time zones
- posts about odsp renewal
- posts about dr's offices

so, i have now finally finished a very careful run through of the first reconstruction phase, with the purpose of ensuring consistency & completeness, as i said i needed to do however many weeks ago, before i got badly slowed down with it. i started over several times, and rethought things many times in the process, but i'm done, i think, at this point.

two posts will follow. the first will contain a list of concepts that are running through each of the blogs for the the first reconstruction phase (07/13-01/14). this list will continue to update as i flip this over and keep moving through 2014 and into 2015 and beyond. the second will include a list of what i'm going to call errata to the already published deathtokoalas and travel blogs. i'm going to chew on that for a bit before it posts. there will not need to be a second errata because i can make the edits before any sort of publishing, which won't happen for a long time.

the next thing i'm going to need to do, once i'm certain of the various changes, will be to actually make the updates. so, i will need to update and reupload the pdfs for all of the deathtokoalas blogs and all of the travel blogs. as mentioned, the errata will be posted here for easy comparisons; these are not major edits, but are merely being done to ensure that the narrative flows through each of the blogs in a contextually self-contained manner. no changes are expected for the main two blogs.

that's a good way to get a lot of dogs very sick, very fast.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/dogs-detect-covid-19_ca_5f1b4463c5b6128e6825be1e

listen.

they're going to need to bring in mandatory testing & vaccination for foreign workers next year, anyways.

this is a federal responsibility, and it's the feds that need to make some changes.

this looks like it's going to mostly be a rain event.

but, i'm just imagining the effect that a major hurricane coming into a state like florida might have on the spread of the virus, if it results in the need for people to utilize things like sports arenas for shelter.

....or, what might happen if the earth finally swallowed los angeles, right now.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hurricane-hanna-texas-1.5663150

in crude terms...

we can't force the migrant workers to put a needle in their arm. it's their body; they maintain sovereignty over it. like, period. that's sec 7 in it's most assertive form, and the form i will generally interpret it.

but, we can tell them that if they don't want to get tested then they're not allowed to work and they have to go home. sort of. that's still likely to be deemed unconstitutional, but because it's a lesser breach, and in the name of public safety, it's likely to be allowed.

can doug ford order mandatory testing for agrifood workers?

no. sec 7, clearly.

however, the federal government can make periodic mandatory testing a work visa requirement and challenge the courts to undo it. it would no doubt fail an oakes test (that is, the oakes test would conclude that a breach is justified). so, this is one of those scenarios where the federal government breaking the rules on purpose could actually lead to a useful clarification of the rules, moving forward. this is the nature of our peculiar type of easily suspendable constitutional law - the government has to be willing to push loopholes.

if you want to look doug ford in the eye and give him a clear answer he understands, tell him it's out of his jurisdiction - but that the feds can effectively do it.

see, this has been understood the whole time.

the article doesn't really touch on it, but the canadian system of reporting has a lot of privacy restrictions built-in that can protect causes of death from becoming public for quite a while after it happens. quebec is always the caveat, when talking about canada. so, i keep arguing that the data is useless and it isn't worth seriously analyzing, and some of that is stating to come out in the wash.

the numbers for canada are going to be revised upwards, it's just a question of by how much.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/07/24/theres-a-death-gap-in-canadas-four-most-populous-provinces-if-covid-19-isnt-killing-these-people-what-is.html

it's sort of poetic, actually.

didn't even come close to getting it right.

and, he just shrugs it off, after.

Friday, July 24, 2020

you can't eliminate corruption from capitalism, that's crazy talk.

so, i don't want to talk about ending corruption, i want to talk about abolishing capitalism.

it's always funny to hear the conservatives put this charade on though, as though they aren't 100x more corrupt, right?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/scheer-trudeau-morneau-step-aside-1.5661717

what's the update on if it's safe to open schools or not?

my previous position was that it was a reasonable step to take to protect the staff of the institutions, particularly older professors. that said, i acknowledged that the early evidence suggested the virus posed little risk to children, and appreciated the midway point taken by sweden, where they allowed children under a specific age (i believe it was 16) to go to school.

i think the evidence as it has unfolded suggests that 16 may have been a little too old, if the intent was to stop the spread of the virus - that 12 might be a better age cutoff. that said, it would seem as though there is increasing evidence to be cautious even about younger kids.

it would be great if we had this early result and it withheld all kinds of scrutiny, and we could move ahead with confidence on it; that doesn't seem to be the case, here. rather, it seems as though the virus can sometimes affect children, and we're not quite sure what the reasons for it are.

you have to balance the level of risk in sending kids back to school, and this doesn't strike me as worse than a bad flu season, when it comes to young children, specifically; if anything, this seems to be far less dangerous to young kids than the flu is.

but, the virus could very well change, and what i'm getting at is that there is some indication that it might have.

so, i'd proceed with some caution.

the rt number really needs to be calculated experimentally, and that's exceedingly difficult without widespread serological testing. the modelling hasn't been very predictive, because they haven't been able to get very good data.

i know that the public health people keeping push this number as something to base policy on, and if you could find it easily then it certainly would be, but this is in truth a relic of the theoretical part of their academic training; the difficulty in determining it to the accuracy required makes it a metric of questionable relevance, in actual practice.

so, could the rt number be a key indicator? it could be, yeah - but you'd have to find it with a high level of confidence first, because it's a very delicate metric, and that's almost impossible.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/could-rt-number-be-a-key-indicator-of-whether-we-need-return-to-lockdown-mode-1.5037351

so, i think i've managed to save everything important. that's the most important thing.

on second thought, though, i am going to move to a new drive, and relegate this one to emergency backup. i probably should have done that some time ago, i guess i just needed the smart test to fail to get me to do it.

i mean, that's what this is there for - to tell you it's dying, and backup and replace. i have a backup that i was intending to move to soon anyways...

well, the chkdsk seems to have produced the mysteriously cut out folder entirely in tact, although i can't really know. it didn't cough up any chk files, either. so, let's hope it's fine.

i know that this seems like a good time to do a back up.

i just need to go back to the story about the guy in training for vista support, who repeatedly asked about how to stop physical attackers, and the eventual response from the trainer:

"scenarios where the bad guys can actually physically get a hold of the computer are not supported."

and, it's actually kind of an old trope.

so, my attacker is my landlord and appears to also be a police officer of some sort. he can physically touch the computer, when i am out. there is really no feasible defence.

i can only shame the officers into knocking it off.

so, i was fairly certain i got attacked due to looking at what happened to my install partition, but looking at what happened to my data drive just confirms it.

the data corruption appears to have been targeted to the directories where i stored specific pieces of data. i can't read a specific directory, where all kinds of tasty stuff is stored.

rest assured, it is all backed up, repeatedly....except maybe some of the most recent edits to personal files. so, i don't expect to permanently lose too much, even if it is lost. but, i'm going to have to run a chkdsk and hope it's not too garbled because reconstructing the folder could be a pain. and you never know what you forgot until you need it...

right now, it doesn't seem to be finding much, which could be good - it could mean the index file just needs to be rebuilt. and, indeed, it is now telling me it is recovering unindexed files, so i guess i should get these in a found folder - i just hope it's pretty close to what it was initially.

of course, the other option is it runs through silently and recovers empty space, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

just on the jefferson specifically, and the washington somewhat less so.

it's not that they weren't racist. they were racist, clearly, and especially when they were younger. but, stop for a second and imagine living in a reality where everybody is racist.

it's not that it was just business. it's not that the times were different. it's that everybody was racist - and that ridiculous displays of overt racism were normal. so, people express the norms that they are raised into - and jefferson and washington both did, absolutely. for that reason, they were both racist.

but.

jefferson, especially (although also washington, later in his life) were amongst the first members of the aristocratic class to wake up and realize just how horrific what they were doing really was. and, before you can take steps to make changes, you have to actually realize the need to do so.

so, when i stand up for jefferson particularly (and washington less so), it's really not meant to whitewash the truth - they owned slaves, they were racist. it's just to point out that they were amongst the first to question the system as it existed, and that we might still have slavery, if they hadn't asked those questions and put in motion some of the first steps to end it.

it's subtle. but, it's a part of understanding how we got here to realize that, in the larger unfolding of history, some of those guys were really on your side.

so, that's going to slow me down a bit tonight.

yeah, it seems like i pissed the cop off upstairs, so he's launching some kind of attack on me when i go out for a smoke. my chromebook just rebooted, too. lovely behaviour.

i've got the laptop drive reading via xp and it seems like the chkdsk had to recover the entire registry, so i'm not booting back into that install. i'm concerned about data integrity first, and then i'm going to format it and reinstall.

these attacks are generally more annoying than legitimately damaging, but it's an infringement on my personal space that is quite disconcerting coming from law enforcement, especially.

the second chkdsk got the partition table back, anyways. i tried to reboot and i'm getting bcd errors, which is something i understand well enough.

i'm going to just do a quick perusal through the drive to get anything substantive off before i try a reinstall, but i don't think there's anything substantive in there, anyways.

i mean, i know the smart error means my time is limited, but if i can back a few things up, i might let it crash.

the first chkdsk aborted, which left the partition unreadable. i'm also getting a smart error on boot-up.

this drive has been up an down for years and i have a backup but i don't know if i want to move to it just quite yet. i'm going to try another chkdsk first and go from there.