No need to wait. It is just a T adapter. It screws into existing connections. There is usually a water shut off valve at the wall, just turn that off first. Just takes a basic wrench and some plumbers tape. It can all be undone just as easily.
"Watchmen and policemen are heavily, scarily equipped."
This one amused me, as an American who has been to India (though not Pune, so maybe the area was different in this sense), because while I don't remember what police carried (though I saw a fair number), I remember being shocked by the number of security guards I cam across (mostly in front of office buildings and when entering malls) who were carrying rifles (they looked a bit like AK47s/AKMs, though I don't know for sure if they were), whereas most security I've encountered in the US carries sidearms at most, and often no firearms at all.
An advantage of a rifle is that it is conspicuous. This can make people feel uncomfortable because there is a big obvious gun, but it can also avoid a potential confrontation (someone is more likely to mess with someone who’s gun is concealed than someone holding a large rifle). Personally I think I would prefer if the availability of pistols were very limited and people who wanted to carry firearms had to carry conspicuous large rifles. (I’d prefer this to the status quo but not to e.g. all arms being limited)
Most security you'd encounter in India doesn't even carry sidearms, just Lathi sticks or batons.
At a guess you've seen the police with rifles at high value terrorist targets - airports, major stations, national tourist attractions/monuments. Such locations will have police with SMGs or assault rifles in most other places too, including places like the UK where police are rarely armed otherwise...
The mall guys and some of those I saw guarding places in more expensive neighborhoods may have been police, I'm admittedly not 100% not sure - but the building I worked in employed private security with rifles (it was a Tata Consultancy office a little ways outside of Hyderabad, maybe 20 minutes or so from Ramoji Film City, for whatever it is worth).
Most of the guns carried by such security are very old design lee-enfield rifles, some version of the AK-47 or sten guns. The police in India traditionally had 6 shot revolvers as standard issue for the officers. These work well as a visible deterrent when most people you are guarding against dont have guns. These guns are rarely fired by the private security guards. You will also see double barrel shot guns used by security personell at banks and atms.
agreed, back in days at least in New Delhi you could see those "war nests" (military points) made of sandbags with heavy machine guns at some locations like Red Fort as if there was actual war going
but I can imagine seeing everywhere policemen with big guns can be scary, luckily in my not so multicultural location in Europe it's still odd to see policemen carrying those uzi guns, usually you see just policemen with pistol or nothing at all
and while we are discussing guns, my biggest experience with guns presence in Eastern Asia was in Phillipines, where you can see security guards with shotguns at normal shops every few meters (at least in Manila, outside Manila it seemed better), that was quite crazy and also security guards checking me when going to subway obviously not for drugs, but for guns
> agreed, back in days at least in New Delhi you could see those "war nests" (military points) made of sandbags with heavy machine guns at some locations like Red Fort as if there was actual war going
This is still a thing in Delhi. You can see sand bags or security shields with some security personell hiding behind them all over the city.
Here in Delhi, you will be checked very thoroughly for guns and bombs whenever you enter a luxury hotel, shopping mall or the subway. That checking includes the combination of a doorframe metal detector, hand held metal detector and airport style baggage x ray scanner.
The article and comments together are great, because all at once I have a newfound respect for the complexity of bowling (from the cores to the oil patterns) and yet am bolstered in the feeling that there is something inherently casual about it, mostly because - and I cannot get over this - I had never even considered the possibility of _scented balls_.
That seems like a weird joke, and yet many of these highly engineered and fairly expensive balls seem to not only be scented, but, for some, to come in a choice of scents (matching their colours to some degree).
"People [...] are less likely to become infected with the coronavirus if they have relatively high levels of virus-blocking antibodies..."
This seems self-evident, really - 'virus-blockers help block the virus' hardly seems newsworthy. IF they'd worked out the 'threshold of protection' mentioned at the end, that might be more interesting, but this article seems like it should be a footnote in that larger piece (when it comes) rather than something worth reporting on its own.
In my experience with immune related diseases, and reading about the immune system, the takeaway from all of it is "The immune system is ridiculously convoluted, and nothing necessarily makes sense or doesn't make sense"
Given that I can totally understand why they would investigate something that seems self-evident. I wouldn't have been even slightly surprised if they found that high antibody count meant higher susceptibility to re-infection. The immune system really is a spaghetti code mess of a system, and has seemingly as many intuitive as counter-intuitive behaviors.
There was a time when I worked in the intersection of peripheral neuroscience and the immune system, studying the immune response of mammals to optogenetic therapies. It was a widely held belief that, in that problem space, the complexity of the immune system outpaced ambiguities and unknowns we had surrounding the PNS.
Basically, what I'm saying is take every statement you've seen in the media and documentaries about how complex the nervous system is, and consider that the immune system is considered equally incomprehensible today.
Not only is the immune system spaghetti code, but it likes to break all the time and, to our perspective, is full of weird and undefined behaviors.
Well, if my bio 200 class taught me anything, it's that we don't have bodies that are created with cells all united to single goals or purposes.
Our bodies are microservice hell :D. We have a bunch of cells all performing their complicated jobs and duties working together in a crazy complex distributed system. Even the internals of the cells are a bunch of horribly stitched together glue code that just happens to work because of billions of years of pruning off the glue that doesn't work.
It's an incredibly complex chain of chemical reactions which has been selected of eons based on which chains of chemical reactions produce more of the same chains. It's madness.
Yeah. I did a lot of work with blood measures and every disease had some characteristic spike in n immune function. I worked in a lab with a ton of immunologists and we never knew what was going on. All we could say was activation of complement or strong TNF response or something else descriptive but not really helpful. Just too much dark matter in the immune system. My big hope is that the silver lining of COVID will be a much deeper understanding of the immune system. Certainly a ton of money is being poured into it. Fingers crossed, we could be entering a golden age for immuno-therapeutics.
Here here to the possibility of starting a golden age of immune related research and investment. IMO (as an autoimmune patient who reads a bunch about my disease/immune system and has done some computation biology work during my CS masters, but otherwise unqualified), immune system research is severely underfunded in relation to how involved it is in virtually ever bodily function.
I kinda feel like with other organs that are tangible and you can like see and feel (brain, kidney, heart, etc) are much more obvious choices to study and examine for pathology (ie plaque in the arteries, kidney stone). But an ephemeral system of on/off switches that communicate with each other to attack or not attack stuff? kinda makes sense that it is elusive and poorly understood.
my great hope is we are starting to enter a golden age of immuno-therapies, and it's not just because of COVID. Immunotherapy is genuinely the most exciting area of cancer therapies right now (again, IMO). between CAR-T cell therapies, proposed NK cell therapies, PD-1 inhibitors, etc, whats not to be excited about?
As someone who is currently considering IL-17 inhibitors for psoriasis, this kind of comment fills me with dread. The claims for products like skyrizi make it seem like they have a very good idea of why it works and what the potential risks are, but if things are as complex as you say then how could that be true?
Ankylosing Spondylitis patient here who has tried and failed most NSAIDS, Sulfasalazine, and 3 TNF inhibitors. Don't feel dread towards this notion! The immune system is definitely super complex and spaghetti code like, but rheumatology and science in general is working it's way through reverse engineering it. Since TNF inhibitors have come out, lots of data on these monoclonal antibody drugs that inhibit specific parts of the immune system have been gathered. The short term and long term side effects are noted and increasingly understood. If your rheumatologist has a good bedside manner, they should give you some comfort in how widely many of these drugs are used, what is known, and what is unknown.
I'm not trying to make any claims that we are close to a full or maybe not even good understanding of how the immune system works, but science is definitely advancing towards reducing the unknowns. I've been through the ringer of all the treatments and currently am not able to find relief in any, but I'm just trying to offer some hopeful empathy as someone who has at times felt dread from having very rare side effects to a whole bunch of the medicines and I rarely feel dread in general despite the uncertainty and my pain.
As always, talk things through with your rheumatologist and GP if you have concerns.
I'm glad they're confirming this, and it could be useful for determining who needs a booster the most, but yeah, it would be more surprising if this _weren't_ true.
It's a step in that direction, which is more than we had previously. It doesn't establish a cutoff threshold, but it does allow a doctor to say whether somebody's antibody level is closer to the group that got infected or the group that didn't. They could warn that person to be extra cautious and theoretically save lives based on this study alone. I find that newsworthy.
A main difference in this research is that it's very difficult to actually measure the levels of neutralizing antibodies. Traditional antibody tests aren't able to tell if you have high neutralizing antibody levels yet, as a BSL3 lab is needed to perform these experiments with live virus. Antibody levels aren't always a clear indication of level of immunity, so this was still an open question with COVID.
This study has serious implications for a recommendation for a third dose. It was known for a while that a 3rd dose increases levels of neutralizing antibodies, but this study now ties that increase to a significant boost in immunity which has implications for the new variants like Delta. It means that likely we don't need to wait 3-6 months for approval for a new strain specific booster. We can just use the doses we already have to bump up the neutralizing antibody level.
It also has implications for how long the 2-dose or 1-dose regimens are good for, since it has been known that the neutralizing antibody level does tend to dip after around 6-9 months, so this gives more evidence for the benefit of getting a booster after around 6 months to keep neutralizing antibody levels high.
I think what really hurts, for me, is that this has become the general tone from Mozilla - whether the changes are ones I'd agree with or not.
I remember back when the Spread Firefox campaign was still around - at the time, Firefox and Mozilla in general felt grassroots, fun, and human. Like a club anyone could join and that anyone would want their friends, family, coworkers, and even strangers or people they didn't like to get in on: an all-in-this-together effort for a better internet.
Anymore, Mozilla feels more and more corporate, more like a company - even as Google Chrome (and the many browsers built from Chromium) eats away more and of their market share and they move toward being "the little guy" again - and less and less like a group of people.
I think what I really miss is having a browser that made me care about it beyond just wanting alternatives.
To throw on what others have said, if you've got a vehicle and drive at all frequently, it is fairly easy and inexpensive to install a CB radio in your vehicle.
I've got one in my Subaru Legacy I stuck up by the driver's seat, down to the left of the steering wheel. The radio itself is a Uniden PRO520XL (around $50) with a TRAM 703-HC antenna (about $20) that's on my trunk via a magnetic base. The antenna cord goes into the drunk (under the rain seal - no modification needed) and runs along the inside of the car tucked under the flooring. No tools needed, just tuck it all in until it's out of the way.
The radio itself is just screwed into a blank spot my knees don't hit with the included screws (just needed to pre-drill the holes). Ground wire is wrenched down under a bolt to the vehicles frame, and the power comes from the in-cabin fuse box (for mine that was closest, right next to the steering wheel) using a fuse tap (which lets you go under an existing fuse, so no permanent wiring or soldering needed), which I got a pack of 4 of for around $8.
All in all, about $80 to get it all together and other than two small screw holes, it can all come out like it was never there if needed.
I would reccomend getting an SWR meter (around $50 for the Workman brand one I got), which you can use to calibrate your antenna so you get better reception - it makes a major difference.
On the road, it's great in heavy traffic and rush-hour, as you can often pick up (and join in, though some are more open to this than others) trucker chatter, either to pass the time or as a pre-Waze-style method of knowing where the jams, cops, accidents, and so forth are so you can avoid them as needed. As LinuxBender said, channels 17 and 19 seem to be the usual trucker channels - some places will use both, some cities will focus on one (the Cincinnati area, for example, generally seems to be all on 19).
I've never run into the "people playing with voice modification and trash talking" busterarm mentioned in his comment, but the truckers are often VERY colourful in their language and topics - I would reccomend picking up some of the more common slang they use (I used to do tech support for trucking dealerships and garages, and years ago my dad drove a box truck, so I knew a reasonable amount already when I started) as it lets you get a lot more out of CB, since they're really still the primary people on it, at least in the US.
My radio also came with and output port for hooking a PA to it (i.e. in the hood like some police cars have), and while I've tested it with a cheap Pyle trumpet style speaker, I don't currently have that hooked up because I can't quite work out a good way to run the wire for it from the cabin to the engine compartment (though there are plenty of spots inside the hood I can zip-tie in the speaker, which I've seen people have pretty solid success with) - not exactly related to CB itself, but a fun thing if you want to add function to the radio, I suppose.
The author notes that SQL has been around since, roughly, 1974 - but MultiValue Query Language/ENGLISH has been around since the the 60s. The choice is clear. /s
At the same time, it’s important to understand that the relational model is independent of (and prior to) SQL. SQL is by far the most commonly used language implementation and is important because of that, but it also deviates from the relational model in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways. Understanding those differences and how to accommodate for them can be important to understanding how to write schema and queries in more holistic and powerful ways.
And to be fair, I wouldn’t have found the relational model without SQL. I wish it were more common to write about both in SQL tutorials and such, but I understand the motivation to write about what people can do with an implementation rather than the mathematical and logical underpinnings.
Still the case in Kroger's in the US - there's a few home brands:
Private Selection (higher-end)
Simple Truth (organic and "natural" products)
Kroger (main home brand)
Pssst (discount/low-end brand)
I think a large potion of the attention might be for aesthetic reasons - Nova N 176 is interesting, but the artwork throughout Voynich makes it much more interesting to look through for people "just looking."
Nova isn't ugly, but for a non-linguist, there's less to see.
The actual text of the Voynich is also much more beguiling to a Western audience. Nova N 176 may be written in an undeciphered language, but, to someone who cannot read any scripts from the Chinese family, it looks completely indistinguishable from any other old Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Mongolian/Vietnamese/etc text, all of which are also completely indistinguishable from each other.
In Voynich, on the other hand, a speaker of an Indo-European language sees a script that is indecipherable, but also looks hauntingly familiar. There's a lot more intrigue in that.
I miss when stores in malls and the like would have weird contraptions of that sort (mobiles, pendulums, ball/marble race tracks, etc.) to catch your eye.
I always kept some TP around, though, even when I was in places with the jets - but for the reason you mention the towel: it's handy to dry off with.
Well, and for sticking on shaving nicks or blowing your nose.