Chips and China

What can you believe?

Boccelli e Bartoli via a Toscana

Two views of gun control

Some thoughts re QAnon

How do we deal with China?

The wealth of generations

Melania speaks

 

A failed bank robbery

Two raccoons broke into a California bank this week. They did so when the bank was closed. They climbed an outside tree to the roof of the bank and managed to crawl through the air ducts before falling through the ceiling tiles. They were discovered by a man who had been using the ATM machine outside of a Chase Bank after business hours.

The raccoons broke several ceiling tiles, and knocked papers around and even a computer over. “Thankfully the raccoons were not injured during their morning escapade, and to our knowledge, they didn’t abscond with any money,” said the bank manager. However, the raccoons had eaten a tin of almond cookies from the employee break room. 

Another senior doing good

Another oldie from Frank

Water on the moon

The 60 Minutes Interviews

How would you respond?

Some adults need to watch this

Ella again

Losing Allies?

Farm living isn't what it was

Masks do work

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

One view of the debate

 

Some good news?

The death rate from COVID-19 may be lowering. Two new peer-reviewed studies show a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions. One study in New York looked at 5,000 hospitalized patients, a second looked at 21,000 in England.

The NY study found that mortality dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance, which is still very high. The England study also found a similarly sharp drop in the death rate.

Obviously, there is a possibility that the rates were lower because, as one researcher says, "The people who are getting hospitalized now tend to be much younger, tend to have fewer other diseases and tend to be less frail than people who were hospitalized in the early days of the epidemic." 

But the studies were adjusted for factors including race, age and other diseases, such as diabetes, to rule out the possibility that the numbers had dropped only because younger, healthier people were getting diagnosed. They found that death rates dropped for all groups, even older patients by 18 percentage points on average. 

The researchers don’t think that there is one reason for the decline. There are many factors. 

For example, the data strongly suggest that keeping hospitals below their maximum capacity also helps to increase survival rates. When cases surge and hospitals fill up, "staff are stretched, mistakes are made, it's no one's fault — it's that the system isn't built to operate near 100%," he says. 

Doctors have gotten better at quickly recognizing when COVID-19 patients are at risk of experiencing blood clots or debilitating "cytokine storms," where the body's immune system turns on itself. This “makes it much easier to deal with the complications that occur because you already have protocols in place." 

Doctors have developed standardized treatments that have been promulgated by groups such as the Infectious Diseases Society of America. 

The researchers believe that mask-wearing may be helping by reducing the initial dose of virus a person receives, thereby lessening the overall severity of illness for many patients.

This sounds good. But the lowered rate of 7.6% dying is still very high. As one researcher says, "A lot of my patients are still complaining of shortness of breath," she says. "Some of them have persistent changes on their CT scans and impacts on their lung functions."

Here's something you always wanted to know

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

Dancing Doctor

60 years 215 days

Making friends

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

Musings on alliances

Moonrise - Byron Bay, Australia

Walking a marathon

 

Will your vote be counted?

Teenagers in the Arctic Circle

Hope springs eternal

Flying in a jetpack

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

What do you know about soaps?

Detecting disinformation

Wade-ins

Mining Uranium

Lyon, France Winter 1896

Cortesy of our Florida correspondent

What are we teaching

 

The next Tiger Woods?

He's 6-years-old

 

Courtesy of a childhood friend

The Patron Saint of the Internet

Carlo Acutis, who died at 15 in 2016, took the first step toward becoming a saint in the Catholic Church. The Church believes that he interceded from heaven in 2013 to cure a Brazilian boy who was suffering from a rare pancreatic disease. One more miracle and he will be declared a saint. Last weekend he was beatified in 2020 at a ceremony in Assisi. He may become the Church’s first millennial saint.

"Carlo used the internet in service of the Gospel, to reach as many people as possible," Cardinal Agostino Vallini said at the ceremony. Acutis took care of websites for local Catholic organizations and also created some of his own.

The teenager was also involved in charity work and spent his own money on helping disadvantaged people in his local area. He also volunteered at a soup kitchen in Milan. And, his mother says, "With his savings, he bought sleeping bags for homeless people and in the evening he brought them hot drinks."

Prosthetics for Blacks

Is this what we want?

Sinatra sings opera

Where the battle stands today

Were these your 1950s?

Courtesy of a childhood friend

Going to school when Black

 

Barbara and Judy

Science publications and Trump

The New England Journal of Medicine and Scientific American have been around for quite a while, the Journal for 208 years. The publications have never supported or condemned a political candidate - until now. In the latest edition of The Journal its 34 editors - all of them, which is only the fourth time this has been done - signed a letter that said the Trump administration had responded so poorly to the coronavirus pandemic that they “have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.” Last month the Scientific American endorsed Biden.

The Journal had a number of concerns:

The political leadership has failed Americans in many ways that contrast vividly with responses from leaders in other countries.
In the United States there was too little testing for the virus, especially early on. There was too little protective equipment, and a lack of national leadership on important measures like mask wearing, social distancing, quarantine and isolation.
There were attempts to politicize and undermine the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Furthermore, the editorial castigated the Trump administration’s rejection of science, writing, 

“Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.”
“When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

A girl and her python

 

The S&P since the Depression

Where's the money?

In March Congress passed the CARES Act. The act enabled the Treasury to hand over $454 billion of taxpayers’ money to the Federal Reserve. The Fed, in turn, was to leverage the money by 10 times to approximately $4.54 trillion to keep the economy moving, credit flowing, workers employed and businesses alive until the pandemic had been brought under control. But, in the seven months that have gone by the Treasury has handed only $114 billion of the $454 billion to the Fed. What has happened with the other $340 billion allocated by Congress?

In the seven months that have elapsed 97,966 businesses have permanently closed. Could some have been saved with some of the $340 billion? One problem with the plan is that the act established a minimum loan amount. A business has to borrow at least $250,000, which, for many small businesses is a heck of a lot of money. The minimum is not a burden for others. Why haven't they gotten some?

Finding a mate

Match, Tinder or a similar web application was not used when Harris' partner, Apricot, died. Harris couldn't do so, because he was an otter. But otters naturally live in pairs and the managers at Cornish Seal Sanctuary in Cornwall, England, thought that Harris had been a very good partner to Apricot; he deserved a second chance at love. So, they developed an ad to try to find a female partner for him.

One excerpt from the ad "I am very attentive, I love a cuddle, and I am a very good listener. I will love you like no otter."

He got a hit. There was an otter named Pumpkin at Sea Life Scarborough sanctuary, who had recently lost her own elderly partner named Eric. They got together and eventually Harris moved in with Pumpkin.

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

That feels good

It could be much worse

The Arctic 103 years later

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

Numbers and the election

Helping a friend

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

Cat and Louis

Do you have an extra $400?

If so, you can buy a swan from the city of Lakeland, Florida, which is currently supporting - with food and medical care - 80 swans living in Lake Morton. The swans were donated by Queen Elizabeth in 1957. For the past forty years the town has had the  Annual Swan Round-Up so that it can closely monitor the health and vitality of Lakeland’s swan population. 

The town feels that there are more swans than it can care for. The swans fight over space in the lake and surrounding areas, and they roam onto streets and into traffic. This year two were killed by motorists. So, the town wants to lower the population by half.

Courtesy of a Florida friend.

Want a free ride in Shanghai?

The tech and retail giant Alibaba is testing autonomous cars. The following was filmed in Shanghai. They are not charging a fee, but are testing only in a small area of Shanghai.

Is this our future?