Florin
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Florin has not written any posts yet.
Florin has not written any posts yet.
What disturbs me more than the fact that the transmission question hasn’t been settled yet is that public health policy still seems to assume, even after Covid, that fomite and droplet transmission are the only ways for the common cold (and other respiratory viral infections like the flu) to spread, entirely ignoring the possibility of airborne aerosol transmission.
Even without definitive evidence of how a particular strain of common cold virus is transmitted, we know that respiratory viruses can only spread through three possible routes: fomites, droplets, and aerosols. So, the missing piece of public health advice, besides washing hands (for fomite protection), is at least to wear a respirator (for droplet and... (read more)
If you have the government LARPing a pandemic response, the fact that the government shouldn't be trusted is the right learning. The key question you should ask if what you could do so that the next time the government isn't LARPing but actually has a decent pandemic response.
I don't blame politicians as much as the infectious disease experts they listened to. These experts were slow to recognize that aerosols were the primary mode of transmission and failed to drop support for stuff that was of dubious value such as surgical masks and lockdowns in favor of the widespread use of respirators. Some of the most prominent experts even badmouthed respirators just like... (read more)
Wouldn't a respirator with a exhalation valve be more comfortable?
...EN argues that any sufficiently expressive cognitive system—such as the human brain—must generate internal propositions that are arithmetically undecidable. These undecidable structures function as evolutionarily advantageous analogues to Gödel sentences, inverted into the belief in raw subjective experience (qualia), despite being formally unprovable within the system itself.
Rather than explaining subjective illusions away in third-person terms, EN proposes that they arise as formal consequences of self-referential modeling, constrained by the expressive limits of second-order logic.
How could undecidability, unprovability, self-referential modeling, incompleteness, or any sort of logic generate the redness of red?
Incomplete, self-referential modeling → ? → red
... (read more)The brain does this by creating a symbol, which refers to a symbol, which refers to a symbol—an
We keep getting better at curing disease and preventing death, but this makes little difference in our fight against aging, due to its exponential nature.
Almost no age-related disease or condition can currently be prevented or cured. They can be somewhat slowed, but that's about it. A rare exception is cataracts; it can be cured by replacing the eye's lens.
This concept is inspired by established systems like Nordic civilian defense against nuclear threats or lifeboats on ships.
But those systems weren't designed with the survival of humanity in mind, and so, they're obviously going to be much less robust.
I might not have emphasized this sufficiently in the post, but the aim is not to achieve near 100% robustness. Instead, the goal is to provide people with a fair chance of survival in a subset of crisis scenarios.
My initial intuition is that even if 70% of the units function effectively in a crisis, this would be a success.
You need to think about how much time these shelters could buy. 70% survival for how... (read 537 more words →)
I just thought of another showstopper that makes the other issues now seem insignificant: how could you ever determine whether or not the suits and shelters work to prevent bacterial contamination? The problem here is that humans are already "contaminated" and another problem is that the world isn't contaminated with a unique kind of bacteria or bacteria-sized particle that you could test for. So, there's actually nothing to test for. Even if you could test for something, how could you even detect one or a few bacteria that got through? I don't see any way around this.
... (read 1067 more words →)Air Supply Leaks
The below diagram illustrates the airflow dynamics. The air system is designed with a
-air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue
I'm not sure what you're describing here. Unless you're talking about some sort of closed-loop system (like on a submarine or spacecraft), leaks are always a possibility. Can you share an illustration of what you're trying to describe?
-leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside
It might not be a major issue for a tiny pinhole but what about a larger hole or tear? What if that pinhole suddenly... (read more)
This shelter idea has many points of potential failure, possible showstoppers, and assuming a small population of shelters (hundreds or a few thousand), seems extremely unlikely to maintain an MVP for more than a few months.
Points of failure:
Showstoppers:
Another reason to doubt the "noble lie" theory is that it was easy to make masks out of commonly available materials like cloth.
The real reason that requests to save PPE for health care workers were made was that these workers needed N95 respirators to protect themselves from procedures (like intubation) that were already know to aerosolize (and thus make airborne) any respiratory virus or bacteria, and surgical masks were needed for protection during medical procedures unrelated to Covid.