Tag Archives: OddBox

Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows

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At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the horde of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside the U.S. Capitol building and into areas normally restricted to the public, according to GPS metadata linked to videos posted to the platform the day of the insurrection in…

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Deep History

You may have heard before that Cleopatra was born closer in time to the Space Shuttle (or Moon landing, or launch of the iPhone – basically today) than she did to the building of the pyramids. The first time you hear this it may seem odd. We have a tendency to compress ancient history, as if it were one time period. It is also difficult for modern people to imagine the incredibly deep history of humanity. Civilization has changed so much over the last 100 years, and 2000 years, that it is difficult to imagine thousands or even tens of thousands of years going by will relatively little change.

I was reminded of this by a recent news item – evidence now suggests that the middle stone age lasted 20,000 years longer than previously thought. To put this into context, the early stone age, with the most primitive stone tools, started about 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 300,000 years ago. Don’t even try to wrap your head around 2.3 million years. This only counts the human genus, but stone tool use predates humans. From 300k to 30k year ago was considered the middle stone age, using a more sophisticated tool kit and tool production methods. The tool kit was more diversified and likely represented a greater range of activities for hunting and processing food.

Then around 50,000 years ago the later stone age tools started appearing. This was still a more sophisticated too kit, designed to be smaller and more mobile and likely reflected a change in lifestyle. The middle stone age was replaced by the later stone age by 30,000 years ago – or so we thought. New evidence suggests that middle stone age culture persisted until about 11,000 years ago in isolated populations in Africa.

This persistence likely reflects the fact that prehistoric populations were far more isolated than more modern populations. It may also simply reflect the persistence of culture. If these populations did not change their basic subsistence strategy, they would have had no reason to update their tool kit. Researchers hypothesize that changes in the environment allowed for easier migration corridors, causing cultural mixing and the final replacement of the last vestiges of middle stone age culture.

At 7000 years ago (5,000 BCE) there is the first evidence of copper smelting, which was a transition period (the Chalcolithic) to the bronze age, which started 3,300 BCE and lasted until 1,200 BCE.  Metallurgy was clearly a huge innovation for humanity. The technology was also largely about temperature – how hot could they make their ovens. Copper has a relatively low melting point of 1084 C, which was achievable in the pottery kilns of the time. Eventually they figured out how to alloy copper with other metals, like tin (which has a melting point of only 232 C), making a metal, bronze, that is stronger than either element by itself.

For iron you need to get up to about 1,500 degrees (depending on type) so this required better oven technology. The iron age begins at different times in different regions, beginning by about 1,200 BCE and spreading everywhere by 500 BCE.

Historians have noted the overall pattern here, if you look at the time to transition to the next stage of technology: 2.3 million years, 270,000 years, 23,000 years, 2,000 years. There is wiggle room in the exact dating, as the recent news item indicates, because transitions occurred over time, with older technology persisting in regions or isolated populations sometimes for a relatively long time. But the overall pattern is pretty clear – each major transition occurred about one order or magnitude more quickly than the one before. If we consider technological development in the last 2,000 years this acceleration seems to be holding. It is more difficult to determine clear technological “ages” because there are many types of technology that are changing all the time. There is no longer one dominant toolkit that can determine the overall level of technology. But still, the pattern seems to be holding more or less.

This is one core premise of ideas like the Singularity. Kurzweil and others argue that this pattern will continue, until massive technology progress is happening so quickly the timeline for predicting or extrapolating future technology will shrink essentially to nothing, a singularity beyond which we cannot see. I don’t entire buy this premise, as I think other patterns start to intrude on the overall pattern of accelerating progress. The problem here is that we are trying to predict future patterns of change by extrapolating from past patterns, but this assumes that all the important forces will remain the same.

It is possible, however, that we may run up against practical limitations. While it is true that our knowledge and technological prowess may still be accelerating, the difficulty of the challenges we are trying to solve are also getting greater. So technology progress is different for different areas, depending on how mature the technology is and the difficulty of the challenge. For example, commercial jet travel is not any faster today than half a century ago. There are practical limitations to how fast a jet can go, and it will take a major shift to a new technology before that will change. Progress will happen, but it’s not really linear, and therefore it’s hard to extrapolate.

I would love to have access to an “Encyclopedia Galactica” and read the history of technological development of many different species to see what patterns tend to exist, looking back from a point far in our technological future. That’s unlikely to happen, so we will have to content ourselves will trying to extrapolate from past patterns, but this has significant caveats.

Right now we are in the middle of the broad brushstrokes of technological history (although this may be an artifact of our perspective). We tend to grossly mentally underestimate the depth of history, because it is simply outside of our experience. Taking millions of years for a noticeable shift in technology is simply beyond our perspective. The same is likely true of our future – we would have a hard time imaging the pace of future technological progress. We may be at the inflection point of history. At the same time, future technology may hit significant plateaus dictated by the laws of physics and issues of practicality. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

The post Deep History first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Report: D.C. Police Made At Least 5 Times More Arrests During One Day of BLM Protests Than at Capitol Insurrection

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Surprising no one, but confirming of us what many suspected while watching a free-wheeling mass of Trump supporters break into the U.S. Capitol building, police in Washington D.C. arrested far less rioters in the white supremacist insurrection than they did during a single day of racial justice protests in the city…

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Rep. Maxine Waters and Others Raise Questions About How Easily Mob Broke into Capitol as Congress Plans Investigations into Police Response

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There’s plenty that smells suspicious about the recent takeover of the U.S. Capitol building by supporters of President Trump—not least of all the evident lackluster response by law enforcement to repel the insurrectionists during the dangerous breach of the institution.

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25th Amendment or Impeachment TODAY!!!

This is our 4th ¨Comment/Prognostication¨ for 2021 posted in our Blog Page in http://www.ex-gringo.com. Feel free to add your comments or input below! ¨Are you Standing Up and Impeaching and invoking the 25th Amendment against dt Today…OR…Will the eeuu Continue to be seen as COBARDES/COWARDS to the Rest of the WORLD??!!?¨ Comments…?! Gracias Ex-Gringo

mRNA Vaccines

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This week should see the first people in the US to actually receive an approved (at least EUA) vaccine to prevent SARS-CoV-2. There are three vaccines currently ready to go in the West, the Pfizer vaccine which received it’s EUA in the US on Friday and was already approved in the UK, Moderna which should get approval this week, and the Astra Zeneca vaccine which should not be too far behind. The (arguably) biggest challenge has been met – a massive scientific effort to develop vaccines in record time. This has been a collaboration between government and industry, and shows what we can accomplish with sufficient motivation (which translates into both money and easing red tape).

Now we have three further challenges in front of us. The companies need to mass produce their vaccines. This is happening with about 100 million doses ready to ship. We should have another 2 billion Pfizer doses by the end of 2021, and 1.5 billion Moderna doses. We also need to distribute the doses. This is happening through collaboration among FedEx, UPS, and the military who will get the doses to hospitals and physicians, who can then administer and track the doses. So far, so good.

The final hurdle, however, may prove the stickiest – we need people to accept the vaccine. In a December 9th survey by the AP-NORC, only 47% of Americans said they would get the vaccine, with 26% saying they would not, and 27% saying they are not sure. These and similar results have caused some to comment that the disinformation virus may prove deadlier than the COVID virus. We have a vaccine that can protect people from a deadly pandemic – this is a no-brainer. Resistance is partly due to a dedicated anti-vaccine movement that appears immune only to logic and evidence. We can only marginalize them. But these numbers go beyond the hard-core anti-vaxxers. People also fear what they don’t know, and these are the first mRNA vaccines to hit the market. So let’s review what these are, and the safety data.

Vaccines basically work by exposing the body to antigens (something to which the immune system can react) that are found on an infecting organism so that the body can mount an immune response, including memory for those antigens. This will allow the body to respond more quickly and robustly when exposed to the living organism, fighting it off before a full-blow infection can occur. Antigens can be a weakened and/or altered form of a virus, an inactivated virus, or isolated proteins from the surface of a virus or bacteria. These exposures are often given with adjuvants that help stimulate the immune system to maximize the response. They may also be given in multiple timed doses to maximize immune response. The immune memory will then last for a variable amount of time, depending on the organism and the vaccine (typically years).

The mRNA vaccines are just a novel way of getting antigens into the body to provoke an immune response. Instead of injecting proteins, you inject mRNA – RNA is similar to DNA, one form of the genetic information that codes for each organism. You have DNA in most cells in your body (some cell types, like red blood cells) lose their nucleus and so have no DNA). DNA is like repository of the code, while RNA does the work. The “m” in mRNA stands for messenger. These RNA strands are made from the DNA, they travel outside of the nucleus onto the cytoplasm where their code is converted into a string of amino acids, which is then folded into a protein.

If you inject mRNA which codes for a specific protein into the body, and this mRNA is then taken up into cells, the machinery of those cells will make protein from the introduced mRNA. The mRNA vaccines, therefore, introduce the code for a viral protein that will provoke an immune response. So instead of injecting the protein, you inject the mRNA which then gets translated into the desired protein. The vaccines use mRNA for the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 surface, and they also include a shell that protects the mRNA from being degraded and helps it get into the cells. Why would we do it this way? One reason is that we are really good at making RNA, and it can actually be easier, faster, and cheaper than making proteins.

Here are a couple of important points: The mRNA will mostly be absorbed by muscle cells near the point of injection. The half-life of mRNA in humans is about 10 hours, so it will be gone in a matter of days. The mRNA never gets into the nucleus of the cells, and so it has absolutely no effect on the DNA. It is therefore entirely wrong that the vaccines can alter our DNA, as some anti-vaxxers are saying.

Also, while these vaccines are new, mRNA technology has been researched for years. The company Moderna was founded in 2010 purely for mRNA technology, and so has been developing that technology for the last decade – even though their COVID vaccine is their first commercial product. The mRNA technology can also be used for more than vaccines – any protein-based therapy can be achieved through mRNA.

Regarding the safety of the vaccines, the two mRNA vaccines together have followed about 70,000 subjects for at least two months. This time frame was chosen by the FDA because most vaccine side effects are apparent by 6 weeks from the time of injection. By their calculations, this is a good safety buffer. No serious side effects have emerged.

This does not prove zero risk. There is never zero risk. But we have to make a risk vs benefit analysis. While side effects may emerge once millions of people get the vaccine (and yes, this will be tracked), the data we have sets statistical limits on how frequent those adverse events can be. We can compare this to the risk of contracting COVID. In the US about 1 in 20 people have caught the virus, and the death rate is on the order of magnitude of 1 in 1,000. That is many times less than the greatest side effect rate of the vaccines. Even if you are in a low risk group, you are statistically more likely to benefit from getting the vaccine than to be harmed by it. (Keep in mind, death is not the only outcome – spending time in the hospital is very inconvenient, and many people survive but have long term health consequences.)

But people are risk-averse, and are more afraid of the risk of an action than a non-action. But we don’t have to rely on our evolved instincts – we can crunch the numbers. It is more risky to not get the vaccine than to get it. And the mRNA technology is well understood and safe – and it does not affect your DNA. Further, the vaccines are our shortest route out of this pandemic and all the downstream negative effects of that, including on education, our economy, and our future. Seriously – get the COVID vaccine as soon as you are able.

The post mRNA Vaccines first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.