jadero

Yes, it was very badly constructed. I had to read it a couple of times to decode it, and I have the advantage of having graded essays :)

That would have been awesome, but I suspect that it was just the arms and that it was powered in some way, hence “pendulum-like”.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Oh that’s not good. Obviously, I’ve chosen to allow js, but basic stuff should work without it.

Heh. I gave up trying to figure out voting a long time ago. I find it both fascinating and disturbing that there are people out there who see anything I write as worthy of a dowvote. :)

Anyone who hasn’t followed that link needs to do so now! It’s got human cadaver arms manipulated with fishing line and guitar tuning knobs. It’s got a link to an article titled “Your Face: Punching Bag or Spandrel?”

You can’t possibly find a better way to spend 10 minutes!

Tell me again why it’s okay to publish this tripe. It’s no wonder that so many women think men are pigs.

Same with my dad. He said that the military liked red/green colour blindness for spotting camouflaged stuff.

Yeah, I’ve started thinking that, too, so I push back every chance I get. As an actual boomer, I think it’s my prerogative, in a kind of “get off lawn” way. :)

Really? Every boomer I know, including me, was an absolute pothead. Many still indulge regularly.

That’s true, it is, but you need to check your definitions. A pandemic is an emergency when something dangerous and new spreads rapidly, threatening to overwhelm health care systems. Now that we have vaccines, treatments, and are working on health care capacity, the emergency is over.

That doesn’t mean the danger has passed or that our “death from disease” rate has fallen to pre-COVID levels. In fact, it looks like the new normal will be to have about twice as many COVID deaths each year as flu deaths. All of those COVID deaths are new deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of COVID.

That death rate will continue until the vulnerable populations have been nearly wiped out, forever changing our demographics and life expectancy. By that time, we’ll start seeing whether long COVID is as disastrous as it looks like it might be. If it goes the way many reasonable people think, we’ll still need all the long term care programs that aren’t being used by the elderly and infirm who got wiped out by the immediate effects of COVID infection, because we’ll have a new class of infirmity requiring care.

On the plus side, all those 50- and 60-year old people forced out of the workforce will open up a lot of good jobs and promotions for the youth. On the downside, it’ll still be demographically difficult, with too many in care, not enough working.

So, yeah, pandemic is over, but the endemic isn’t going to be all that much fun for millions of people.

Less serious than what? If my aged brain remembers correctly, Omicron severity is comparable to the original strain, only making it less serious than Delta. As I understand it, the primary factor in reduced severity was that vaccines were available and most people got the vaccine.

Just a note that “Measles parties” are also likely to end badly.

Are these the same doctors who insist on taking a wait and see approach to Paxlovid? If so, I’m not sure they should even be allowed to call themselves doctors.

I believe that the article was making the point that it’s kind of strange to call it a crisis when the system is working as it has always worked. Instead of trying yet another way to keep the system working, maybe it’s time to redesign the system.

It devolves pretty quickly into an infantile solipsism. The world exists only for me, and only when I’m looking.

I had a very strange conversation a couple of years ago. It seems that some people think that math is used only as a tool to control the population or something.

We were talking about something that most people would consider pretty innocuous, catch and release fishing. I mentioned that I had recently read an article that claimed that mortality among released fish was still high enough that approximately every second released fish should be counted against your limit because of the percentage of released fish that die of catch-related causes.

That lit the other guy’s hair on fire. “That’s math! You can’t seriously think that math is real? It’s all made up!” (Or words to that effect. Mouth frothing removed to protect the innocent.)

Over the course of the rest of the conversation, I “learned” that math was invented as a tool of oppression. Science uses math to create fake knowledge. Our senses are the only true sources of knowledge.

Good point.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. If he was already a member of the elite instead of a flunky hoping for acceptance, maybe he wouldn’t be working so hard to screw us over.