COVID-19 (2): Turns out it's going to be pretty bad actually

Nasa has spent 10x as much money as they’ve given SpaceX on their own rocket, which doesn’t work and (if it did work) would be less capable than what SpaceX has in development (with solely private funding).

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Musk talk should go in the guillotine thread imo

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Folks <=.05 is an agreed upon arbitrary standard for studies.

As a scientist, if you told me A treatment gave 0.049 and B treatment gave 0.051 so therefor A IS effective and B is not I’d laugh in your face after visiting the Covid Ward.

But that’s the world we live in. Lines do have to be drawn but common sense comes into play. 0.06 means keep looking. It doesn’t mean give up.

At the plant I did a principle component analysis w an engineer friend (all variables against all other variables, each pair regressed). We set the R^2 threshold at 0.5. Pretty effin low but there were so many confounding factors.

He did the big data set. I went through and got rid of the obvious covariables and aliases then started filtering down based on some intuition/experience. (Basically hypothesized what could be cause effect, eliminated points that had other likely influences).

In the end our problem was pretty subtle and the initial analysis only gave an R^2 of 0.7. Once we got rid of the noise we got above 0.85.

Once we tested and proved the hypothesis in the lab, we changed something in the plant and the problem was solved. It took a few weeks but each step was necessary. It was very not obvious until we got all the pieces lined up.

( we were running anearobic. Turns out when small amounts of air were let in our bacteria would make 100 ppm of a compound that really impacted the product quality). We had vent valves that opened to relieve pressure. Turned out they were set too low and allowing a little big of air into the tanks. We proved it by adding small amounts of air into lab tanks and seeing the byproduct. Then we adjusted the valve settings in the plant). There were roughly 300 IO points to sort through along with dozens of analytical data tags. Thankfully the valves had open/closed readouts and gave us a signal.

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I don’t think that’s true, we still don’t have the battery capacity to make that happen.

Wasn’t Musk supposed to solve this problem too? Wherever happened to his giant batteries for places like Puerto Rico?

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Made a thread @mods please move

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I’m not here to defend Musk, but I believe they have made strides in improving battery performance with Tesla and maybe sun city. Like, I don’t understand why everyone tries to flatten shit like this into some kind of zero context all-or-nothing proposition.

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Right, making a gigantic load of money by selling something for less than it costs to make is basically american capitalism at its finest. Every coastal city in the world is going to get destroyed over the next hundred years because we refuse to pay the cost of releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

Now who could have predicted this?

Just seems like they could have accomplished all that without Musk’s rampant fraud and clown acts.

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Sure, I agree. It’s dumb to say, though, that Musk hasn’t done anything to advance green technologies . Everyone wants to turn people and their actions into characatures of reality. One of my pet peeves especially coming from otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people who are regulars here.

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Proud of my old company making a contribution. Worked 20 years on making the monomer.

NatureWorks | NatureWorks partners with Nonwovens Institute to support production of 10 million N95 masks for healthcare workers fighting COVID-19

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I sleep on my side, usually alternate sides throughout the night. I’ll try this if I have trouble breathing, though. Thanks… So far it’s just a little painful, not difficult, if that makes sense.

I’ve been debating it today, but I’m still leaning against it. With my symptoms this mild, the odds are that I don’t have it and would be putting myself at risk of catching it by going to a testing site. Also, even if I do have it, I could increase the viral load if I exposed myself to more of it… and if I do have it, so far my immune system seems to be handling it reasonably well.

No carpet here, it’s all tile or hardwood. The baseboard in the bathroom would have gotten wet, it had to get through there between the tile and the baseboard to get down into the ceiling below I assume. We opened up the recessed lighting below and left it open to air out for a few hours after it happened - the maintenance guy said it was dry and fine, but they aren’t exactly the All-Star Team of maintenance.

How does one go about checking under the baseboard for mold? I can’t just be prying it off the wall, and in fact there are actually no visible nails or anything even. It appears to have been attached by caulking and then painted.

Thanks… I got some fresh air yesterday, but by the time I woke up today it was already looking kinda bad out. The wind is really whipping around over here. I’ll pop out on the balcony for a couple minutes, though.

Thanks… Yeah, the incident itself definitely sucked. I was going to post about it because I thought the story might be kind of funny to read, but then I was like, “Ehh, not really in a mood to write about this right now.”

Hopefully a coincidence - I’m about the same right now as I was yesterday. Hopefully it goes away, although I guess the day/night cycle is better than it getting worse.

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Just blow a fan an any areas that get wet for now. No carpet is a big plus. It never dries once it gets soaked.

If you keep having a problem and it’s not Covid then you probably should have someone official in and check for mold.

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I’m getting worried that we are going to be on the plateau model with insane levels of daily cases and daily deaths.

I did adjust my plateau dates based on April so far. Basically we hit a peak and have been holding steady since mid April. This assumes we stay steady through May and then start to decline. Why would we decline? Hopes and Prayers at this point.

100,000. It’s a beautiful number. Many said it would be over 2 million.

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Of course you have to have a public that complies with public safety measures to make sure restriction removal doesn’t lead to a flare up.

Clearly the US does not. The Czech Republic mostly does.

It seems like a very bad idea to apply academic science standards to a public health crisis. For the same reason we should be speculatively manufacturing vaccines that might not pan out, we shouldn’t pretend not to see that it’s very likely that remdesivir could save possibly hundreds of thousands of lives and invest a lot into scaling up production.

As far as I can tell, the “plan” for ramping up remdesivir production is to do nothing and hope Gilead produces a lot, which is a scandal.

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