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Go Dolly!

https://digbysblog.net/2022/12/29/go-dolly/
Created
Fri, 30/12/2022 - 12:00
They say this about a lot of people but she truly deserves it: Dolly Parton is a national treasure. Remember this? Last year, Ms. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drug maker Moderna to develop one of the first coronavirus vaccines to be authorized in the United States. The federal government eventually invested $1 billion in the creation and testing of the vaccine, but the leader of the research effort, Dr. Mark Denison, said that the singer’s donation had funded its critical early stages. On Tuesday, Ms. Parton, 75, received a Moderna shot at Vanderbilt Health in Tennessee. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she wrote on Twitter. A truly great American.

Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/selected-negative-teaching-evaluations-of-j…
Created
Fri, 30/12/2022 - 11:15

Our 4th most-read article of the 2022.

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Originally published March 2, 2022.

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“Very inconvenient class! Always holds lectures on top of mountains, in middle of the Sea of Galilee—but never close to the main campus.”

“Inconsistent attendance policy. Said we had to be in class by 9:00 a.m. every day. Over half the class showed up late or didn’t attend until the last meeting, but we all got the same participation grade.”

“He’s nice enough, I guess, but he doesn’t vet his TAs: they all provide completely different, conflicting lecture notes. (TIP: Try to get in Luke’s section.)”

“By week one, I was already tired of his anti-rich, pro-Samaritan bullshit. I wanted to take a course in Christianity, not liberalism.”

What surprised the scientists?

https://digbysblog.net/2022/12/29/what-surprised-the-scientists/
Created
Fri, 30/12/2022 - 10:30
Helen Branswell of STAT News, one of the best science writers around, interviewed a whole bunch of scientists and public health experts about what surprised them about the COVID pandemic. It’s fascinating. Some of them were surprised by things like the supply chain breakdown or the eerie quiet of the streets during the early days. With others it was the virus itself. You need to read the whole thing, but I’ve excerpted a few of the findings below: The biggest surprise, hands down: How the virus has evolved In the early days of the pandemic, before the new virus had a name, people who had studied coronaviruses offered reassuring predictions about the stability of the virus, which has implications for how often people might be reinfected and how frequently vaccines would need to be updated. Coronaviruses don’t change very quickly, they aren’t as mutable as, say, influenza viruses, those experts said. In fact, the spike protein on the virus’ exterior, the one that attaches to human cells and triggers infection, cannot change too much without losing its ability to infect, they assured the rest of us. That was the dogma.

The Musk Bubble

https://digbysblog.net/2022/12/29/the-musk-bubble/
Created
Fri, 30/12/2022 - 09:00
It’s not just Twitter, it’s Tesla too Paul Krugman addresses one of the big questions I think a lot of us have had over the past few weeks. If that guy is running twitter isn’t that guy also running Tesla? How much of his reputation is hype? If you’re one of those people who bought Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead? OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think. It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation.

Use It Or Lose It

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/12/use-it-or-lose-it.html
Created
Fri, 30/12/2022 - 08:10
Scalia's "Major Questions" doctrine is just another "Democrat laws we don't like aren't real" argument, but there is a tendency to leave clear statutory authority on the table while looking to Congress to pass "no we really mean it enforce this law clearly in this specific way because you won't do it with the general authority we passed."

Decades of the executive branch just not acting like it for various reasons. It isn't wrong to hope that Democratic administrations change that. "Don't make things worse faster" is not enough!

I Suspect He Doesn't Always Tell The Truth

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/12/i-suspect-he-doesnt-always-tell-truth.html
Created
Fri, 30/12/2022 - 07:30
Of course if he is being dishonest it's the kind of thing the SEC should get upset about but lol they are out of the habit of doing anything like every other regulatory agency.
The Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, has said he will not sell any more of the electric car company’s stock for about two years.
I suppose he could just be putting up increasing amounts of it as collateral.

What did the American people vote for in 2022?

https://digbysblog.net/2022/12/29/what-did-the-american-people-vote-for-in-2022/
Created
Fri, 30/12/2022 - 07:30
The GOP agenda is something else Oh, and also they need to get to the bottom of the pandemic origins and figure out why kids were kept out of schools. This is just a friendly reminder of the circus that’s raising its tent in Washington DC next week. RICH EDSON, FOX NEWS: Congressman, there is a speakership race coming up in less than a week. Who is going to be Speaker? REP. ANDY BIGGS: We will have to have that vote on January 3. Right now, nobody has 218 votes which is the magic number. I don’t we are going to see that until January 3. Maybe it will take a few ballots to shake that out. EDSON: Is there a candidate you would support or that you want or think should be Speaker of the House? BIGGS: Of course, I’m running. But there are some good people in our conference. I don’t want to put a name. I don’t want to put a target on their back, but there are several people that are very capable, actually more than just a few capable of being Speaker of the House. I think we will get a consensus candidate, and we will get it in fairly short order and move on.