Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Today’s Quote | Chateau Cherie

“Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”

~ M. Scott Peck ~

Source: Today’s Quote | Chateau Cherie

Wildflowers Late Winter / Early Spring 1

Michael Stephen Wills Photography

February 2020 I upgraded to the Canon 5D Mark IV dslr. These are the first images. These flowers are the first to bloom on our property, around a magnolia tree. Each year these “buttercups” grow thicker and spread. A fellow blogger, Audrey Driscoll’s Blog, provided the correct and exact species name Eranthis hyemalis. The latin name proclaims the early nature of its flowering both in the genus, “Eranthis” – “spring flower”, and species, “hyemalis” – winter flowering. The genus encompasses eight species, all early flowering winter aconite.

Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.

A macro lens was mounted, Canon EF 100 mm f/2.8 Macro USB. A characteristic of this lens is to underexpose, so I set two stops higher. All these are f25.

With the thermometer…

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Ministers frustrated with PM’s ‘mistakes’ ahead of Covid second wave – BBC News (Boy Boris just wanted to look good early on but just killed more Brits to stoke his ego.)

One senior minister said the government “should have locked down more severely in the autumn”, while another said it had been “totally ridiculous” to be arguing about whether people should return to the office when there was inevitably going to be a second wave.

And one senior figure told us: “The biggest mistake was the rush of blood of to the head in the summer… there was a sense of denial about the second wave.”

One former official added: “We kept repeating the same mistakes over and over again, despite the masses of evidence that kept coming up.

Source: Ministers frustrated with PM’s ‘mistakes’ ahead of Covid second wave – BBC News

Much of Europe tightens anti-pandemic rules as virus surges – The Washington Post

 Tighter restrictions aimed at reining in surging coronavirus infections took hold in much of Italy and parts of Poland on Monday, while in France, Paris risks being slapped with a weekend lockdown as ICUs near saturation with COVID-19 patients.

In line with an Italian government decision late last week, 80% of schoolchildren, from nursery through high schools, were locked out of classroom starting on Monday. Ever-mounting numbers of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients, steadily rising daily caseloads and infection transmission predominantly driven by a virus variant first discovered in Britain have combined to make Italian Premier Mario Draghi’s new government apply “red zone” designation on more regions, including, for the first time since the color-tiered system was created last fall, on Lazio, the region including Rome.

Source: Much of Europe tightens anti-pandemic rules as virus surges – The Washington Post

There’s no proof the Oxford vaccine causes blood clots. So why are people worried? | Vaccines and immunisation | The Guardian – (the politics of discarding science and being over-cautious)

So when the European Medicines Agency says there have been 30 “thromboembolic events” after around 5m vaccinations, the crucial question to ask is: how many would be expected anyway, in the normal run of things?

We can try a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. Deep vein thromboses (DVTs) happen to around one person per 1,000 each year, and probably more in the older population being vaccinated. Working on the basis of these figures, out of 5 million people getting vaccinated, we would expect significantly more than 5,000 DVTs a year, or at least 100 every week. So it is not at all surprising that there have been 30 reports. 

Source: There’s no proof the Oxford vaccine causes blood clots. So why are people worried? | Vaccines and immunisation | The Guardian

Opinion | India’s Covid Vaccine Roller Coaster – The New York Times

In August, Mr. Modi’s government created an expert group staffed largely with federal bureaucrats to formulate India’s vaccine rollout policy. It did not allow Indian state governments to make independent decisions or consider the views and experiences of state authorities and community leaders. Its cardinal mistake was failing to tap the decades-old and highly efficient national immunization program networks and following its best practices.

The focus on online registrations ignored a fundamental fact: More than half of the Indian population doesn’t have access to the internet, computers or smartphones. Reports in the Indian press suggest a stark class divide in the vaccination drive: The middle and upper classes arrived at the vaccination centers in much greater numbers than the urban and rural poor.

Mr. Modi’s vaccine rollout group proceeded to limit the first phase of the vaccination program to India’s public health system, which caters to about one-third of the population, and left out the privately run health care facilities, which two-thirds of the population rely on. The wise members of the expert group also limited the vaccination sessions to 100 people per session at a facility, which slowed down the process.

As of March 10, 54 days into the drive, India had administered 25 million doses of the vaccine. In number of doses administered, India is third after the United States and Britain, but it still covers merely 1 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people.

Old Nissan Leaf batteries are now powering the robots that used to make them

As part of its production line, Nissan uses automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to deliver vehicle components to human workers on the factory floor.

These AGVs are already battery powered, but they use old-style lead acid batteries which only last a couple of years. Not mentioning how bad lead is for the environment.

However, Nissan engineers have developed a process to take three battery modules from an old Leaf, and repackage them to fit in an AGV.

 

Source: Old Nissan Leaf batteries are now powering the robots that used to make them