Important For Those Following COVID-19 Pathology (and perhaps Vaccine side effects)
This past week saw a paper published in Nature that sheds light on how the virus causing COVID-19 does damage to the body, and which aligns with much empirical evidence on symptoms. (Link to a plain English summary.)
The authors at UCSF have found that the C19 spike protein, while its primary purpose is to penetrate cell walls, has a secondary effect in binding to a protein called fibrinogen, which is an essential precursor to… blood clots. There’s an affinity between parts of the spike protein and sites along the amino acid chain in fibrinogen – an accidental bonding that’s apparently triggering the clot formation cascade just as bodily damage will do normally. The authors provide evidence for this, as well as secondary effects on inflammation and lung and brain damage. They also perform an experiment in mice using a monoclonal antibody that ameliorates these effects. This seems to be a substantial advance by a credible team, and is likely to trigger plenty of attempts to verify and advance the work.
Breakthrough Against Malpractice of Gender Affirming Care
After years of the American medical community insisting that gender-affirming care is appropriate, in spite of the reversals in European countries on this opinion, one prestigious American medical organization is taking a stand against the treatment:
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) is now stating that there is ‘considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions’ in minors and ‘the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty,’ according to a piece this week by the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir.
A New York Yankee in Fred Hoyle’s Court
I suspect many people are unaware that there is a sequel, of sorts, to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Jules Verne’s classic 1870 work of science fiction. Five years after that work was published, Verne wrote The Mysterious Island, an account of a group of Yankee soldiers who escape Confederate captivity during the American Civil War only to find themselves stranded on an uncharted island in the South Pacific.
The Mysterious Island appealed to the geeky science nerd in me, filled as it was with descriptions of ad hoc engineering, home-made explosives, volcanos, and other fantastic details calculated to capture the imagination of young readers like me.
The First ELINT Satellite GRAB was Launched on 6/22/1960
The photo-reconnaissance satellites such as Corona are much better known than the early ELINT satellites which detected Soviet radars. Gary Powers had been shot down less than two months prior to the launch of GRAB, and President Eisenhower had to specifically approve each time it was turned on looking into Soviet territory. I talk regularly with Pete Wilhelm who worked on it. It had a declassified component SOLRAD and the secret GRAB in the same satellite.
A Step Towards GPS was Taken 60 Years Ago Today
Sixty years ago my father explored the state of atomic clocks. He called his Navsat Timation for TIMe navigATION. It required putting synchronized clocks in satellites to provide a receiver with its position. The clocks weren’t good enough so he pushed for a 2+ order of magnitude improvement over the next decade or so. The result of this process is GPS. Today, false stories about its origin are rife and I thought people would be interested in seeing an important document on the road to modern Navsats.
Last September, two false GPS anniversaries were widely accepted on Twitter/X. The 40th anniversary of the shooting down of KAL 007 was credited with opening up the system to civilian use. It was always open to civilians. Brad Parkinson’s story that he and twelve other people created GPS over Labor Day 1973 was widely accepted (with a Federalist article supporting this). That’s also not correct. Gladys West is widely credited with inventing a system she did not work on. Now I know why historians give credence to primary source materials.
Starliner
Congratulations to Boeing for its successful first launch of a manned Starliner spacecraft. The ship took off this morning from Cape Canaveral, propelling its two-man crew toward the International Space Station atop an Atlas V rocket. (The Atlas V was originally a Lockheed-Martin product but is now under joint development by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin.)
The Starliner launch is a welcome success for Boeing, which has come under fire lately for a series of technical mishaps and quality-control failures amid suggestions that the company’s embrace of DEI goals and its departure from its traditionally engineering-focused management might be undermining its commitment to excellence.
Who Gets the Credit?
Most paternity suits over inventions and ideas are matters of judgment and of degree. Of course, readers and audiences like clear cut stories of little guy inventors versus big, thieving corporations, stories with triumphant, stand-up-and-cheer courtroom verdict scenes. There are some in real life, but lots of inventions—the telephone and television, and in this post, lasers and computers—had several near-simultaneous inventors with competing patent claims. Fighting and negotiating those claims—to academic promotions, to prestige, to big money, and to lasting fame—has a long history.
The two accepted genres of laser history are: Gordon Gould invented it in his attic, had his 1957 notebook notarized, and spent 30 years fighting to Stop the Steal. The other genre is, eminent scientist Charles Townes leads Bell Labs in a brilliant collective effort to imagine the laser into existence, despite the sad later efforts of gadflies with dubious prior claims to its invention. What are the essential features of a laser? As Hannibal Lecter might say, first things, Clarice. One guy’s claim has essential features 1,2,4,6, and 9. The other one, the winning application, has features 1,2,3,5,7, and 8. It’s like a Hollywood lawsuit: At what exact point does a generic idea become a copyrightable original one? What standards apply?
SpaceX Rocket Magic
Elon Musk posted a video of a first stage landing.
Rocket gymnastics
pic.twitter.com/HTZmnXk3XS— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 23, 2024
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Perspective
The April 8th eclipse will pass directly over my house in a matter of hours. I’m delaying business travel until Tuesday in order to be home to see it.
I tutor my cousin Jack in math. After we finished going over his assignment this evening, I had this brief exchange with his older sister, Grace.
Always Listening
I rarely use Siri on my phone – mostly to place a call via Bluetooth while driving (I have the Australian woman voice). A few weeks ago I listened to a podcast that was a long interview with Gina Carano. She was kidding with the podcast hosts about being able to take a punch pretty well because of her fighting career. When I got home I was telling my wife about it (she was laughing) and suddenly Siri said “calling domestic abuse hotline”. I immediately cancelled the call, staring at the phone, wondering if someone would call my local 911 reporting the hang up (apparently they didn’t). After we laughed about it I said “Siri, don’t listen to my conversations”, and my iPad (about 15 feet away) said “OK”.
That’s actually pretty scary stuff. Phone and iPad were listening and decided all by itself that someone needed some very unwelcome help
Vanguard 1 Has Been in Orbit For 66 Years!
On March 17th Vanguard 1 will have been in space for 66 years! Vanguardians had suffered through the failure of their first two attempts to launch a satellite. But they had the luck of the Irish on their third try. Here are clips from their celebration in 2008.
Wernher von Braun congratulated Milt Rosen who was in charge of the rocket development. Milt’s wife Sally showed me this document when I visited them in 2009.
How Do You Make an AI Hallucinate? Like This…
Every year I try to take on some new tech, which can be anything from old news (bookbinding, one year) to trendy. This time I decided to fool around with the currently hot ‘Large Language Models’ (LLM), known in the media as just ‘AI’ (artificial intelligence). I’d had an involvement with very early neural nets and related math over 30 years ago, so seeing how those then very limited capabilities had turned into a cause célebre was interesting.
As an up-to-speed I ran through a Great Courses class on general machine learning (taught by a prof who was a grad student at Bellcore when I knew his boss). Then through the lecture notes and supporting files for a Stanford undergrad course specifically on LLMs. Among other things I learned terms like ‘embedding‘ and ‘hallucinations‘, spicier than the dry math from back in the day. Thus prepared with updated jargon and a list of players, it was time to get my hands a bit dirty.
