Category: Education

Ukraine’s nuclear power base quickly returning to capacity

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All nuclear power plants that are located in the government-controlled territory of Ukraine are already connected to the power system. In 1-2 days it will be possible to return to scheduled power outages instead of emergency ones.

“Now the energy system is fully integrated, all regions are connected. It is again connected to the energy system of the European Union… All three nuclear power plants located in the unoccupied territory are working… In 1-2 days, they will reach their normal planned capacity, and we expect that it will be possible to return to scheduled power outages instead of emergency ones,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, CEO of Ukrenergo national energy company, said during the nationwide telethon on Thursday evening.

As a result of the November 23 attack, Ukraine lost a significant part of electricity generation at various types of power plants: nuclear, thermal, and hydroelectric, he noted.

I tend to take note of incidents like this in wartime. Mostly because most educated nations in the broad West/East ensemble rely much more on nuclear power generation of electricity than the “advanced” USA. We’re at 20%. Nations like France [for example] are up to 70%.

Everything we’re told we should worry about have been dealt with generations ago…elsewhere…satisfactorily.

Nope!

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Campbell didn’t vanish from the Internet…yet. Just the new Xfinity flavor of Comcrap. Not about to say anything especially bad about them, today. At the user end of things, it’s too hard to know who’s really to blame when you lose contact with the rest of the interwebitube culture.

Thought about this on my walks, today. Recalling my short-term adventures in Louisiana beaucoup decades ago. Talked my way into a pretty snazzy fit with a giant firm. Only a tad in over my head. Didn’t plan on working long for them…and didn’t. But, I left behind a smallish error that was caught by the younger dude who’d been my #2 on the job. On parole from some slammer in California. But, he was good at thinking on his feet. Helped me out with a clean farewell.

So, why badmouth Comcrap for today’s situation which obviously multiplied on them at least twice…judging by their revisions in projected time back online. Could’ve been something that’s happened to me, too. Some time or other in the gray and red past.

Human Composting to be Legal in California

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The only way I’d choose to come back from death

In a few years, people in California will have a new choice for what to do with their loved ones’ bodies after death: put them in their garden.

…Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that makes human composting legal in the state beginning in 2027. The bill, AB-351, makes California the fifth state to allow human composting since it was first legalized in Washington in 2019 (Oregon, Colorado, and Vermont are the other places where you can make yourself into mulch).

“AB 351 will provide an additional option for California residents that is more environmentally-friendly and gives them another choice for burial,” Assemblymember Cristina Garcia, who sponsored the bill, said in a release. “With climate change and sea-level rise as very real threats to our environment, this is an alternative method of final disposition that won’t contribute emissions into our atmosphere.”

Human beings cause more than enough trouble while we’re alive, but the practices we’ve developed to handle our bodies after death are also pretty bad for the environment. Burying a dead body takes about three gallons of embalming liquid per corpse—stuff like formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—and about 5.3 million gallons total gets buried with bodies each year. Meanwhile, cremation creates more than 500 pounds (227 kilograms) of carbon dioxide from the burning process of just one body, and the burning itself uses up the energy equivalent of two tanks of gasoline. In the U.S., cremation creates roughly 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

C’mon, folks. Get onboard with a future appropriate to common sense disposition of what remains after you shuffle off this mortal coil. If you’ve dedicated a chunk of your life to doing good…consider keeping it up after you’re dead and gone.

Viruses May Be “Watching” – Lying in Wait Before Multiplying and Attacking

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For many viruses, including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the “mindless killer” moniker is essentially true. However, there’s more to virus biology than meets the eye.

A suitable illustration is HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. HIV is a retrovirus that does not immediately go on a killing spree when it enters a cell. Instead, it integrates itself into your chromosomes and chills, waiting for the proper opportunity to command the cell to make copies of it and burst out to infect other immune cells and eventually cause AIDS…

The best-studied phage, lambda, works a bit like HIV. Upon entering the bacterial cell, lambda decides whether to replicate and kill the cell outright, like most viruses do, or to integrate itself into the cell’s chromosome, as HIV does. If the latter, lambda harmlessly replicates with its host each time the bacteria divides…

However, like HIV, lambda is not just sitting idle. It uses a special protein called CI like a stethoscope to listen for signs of DNA damage within the bacterial cell. If the bacterium’s DNA gets compromised, that’s bad news for the lambda phage nested within it. Damaged DNA leads straight to evolution’s landfill because it’s useless for the phage that needs it to reproduce. So lambda turns on its replication genes, makes copies of itself, and bursts out of the cell to look for other undamaged cells to infect.

Scary stuff; but, interesting and perhaps even necessary information. If you’re serious about living a healthy life, there is always a need for more info about both the good guys and bad guys that live within your body.

What we say versus what we mean

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When we say Culture wars. Cultural issues. Identity politics. Social issues…We mean…Abortion. The rights of people who are bisexual, gay, lesbian, queer and/or transgender. Racial issues. Women’s issues.

When we say Woke, wokeness…We mean…Left-wing/very left-wing on issues of gender, LGBTQ and race.

When we say…Elites. Establishment…We mean…Democratic and Republican Party leaders. Elected officials. Political pundits and commentators. The wealthy.

The article is by Perry Bacon, jr…an opinion columnist. Though I’m not familiar with his work, he raises a couple of interesting points about contemporary journalism. Politeness…to a fault. Gentility supplants courage. Dissemblance replaces pointed accuracy.

A worthwhile read.

GOP “Commitment to America” doesn’t include learning how to navigate the Web

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They simply flipped documentary footage from Russia

House Republican leaders on Friday unveiled their “Commitment to America” agenda for 2023 ― and with it, an inspirational video full of scenes presented as exceptional imagery of America that were actually stock footage from Russia and Ukraine.

The GOP’s video, “The Preamble to the Commitment to America,” opens with a narrator highlighting aspects of what it means to be an American.

“We celebrate the rich heritage of the American story and the vibrancy of the American Dream,” the voice says, over footage of a drilling rig at sunrise.

But this video snippet, an apparent nod to America’s natural resources, wasn’t filmed in America. It’s stock footage created by Serg Grbanoff, a filmmaker based in Russia.

This bumped Jennifer Bendery’s curiosity enough to start her looking around, checking on productions on other websites “designed” to build the online presence of leading Republicans. Turds like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

Consistent mistakes. Guess they just discovered the Web

Thanks, Ray K.

Polio vaccination rates are too low in some parts of the United States

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During the height of the polio epidemic in 1956

For more than 60 years, vaccines against the poliovirus have protected virtually everyone in the United States from the disease. Due to an enormously successful polio vaccination campaign beginning in the 1950s when the first polio vaccines became available, by 1979 polio was considered eliminated in the U.S.

Unfortunately, even today, there are communities in the U.S. that have lower-than-necessary polio vaccination rates. Because many people have not been vaccinated, there is now a real possibility of a resurgence of polio in the U.S….

…In July 2022, a man from Rockland County, New York, was diagnosed with polio, the first such diagnosis in the U.S. in nearly a decade. The patient – who developed the severe, paralytic form of the disease – had been exposed to an altered live vaccine strain from overseas.

Then on Sept. 9, 2022, New York declared a state of emergency due to ongoing poliovirus transmission. As of that date, using wastewater surveillance, officials had identified 57 samples of poliovirus in wastewater from four New York counties. More than half of those were detected in the same county where the adult patient is from, just outside New York City.

As a result of the continued poliovirus detection in wastewater, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that the U.S. now meets the World Health Organization’s criteria for “a country with circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus.”

OK. Unless you live near the trouble spots in the WHO report, you’re probably not in trouble. Yet. As long as you’re vaccinated. As long as you’re in a community with vaccination levels that qualify as providing “herd immunity”.

This news article provides lots of info. And the basic premise is the same for any comparable disease. You need to be vaccinated to even be capable of being out of danger.