Blog longevity

 I would like to point out that this blog is read by many people and has influence. Scooby does a great job, and keeps up the legacy of the blogs that become before. LLNL the true story has had been around the longest which speaks the for the longevity of this blog and the owner of the blog. Who knows what the future brings but I know for a fact that readers ranging from LLNL and many of the other labs have read this blog and it has made a difference keep up the good work. Thank you Scooby.

"And I Would Have Gotten Away With It, If It Weren't For You Meddling Kids And Your Dog.”

Is vaccine mandatory at LANL

 Hi Scooby-

Just heard today that LANL is requiring 100% COVID vaccination, with case by case exceptions for medical exceptions.
Is this something you've gotten info. on?
Thanks

Scooby's reply:

I am no more informed on LANL than you are but I am certain someone from there will chime in. 

Vaccine resistance

 I took the vaccine and I will take a booster. I am not in a high risk group but I see little personal downside. What I find odd is that all the people saying that if everyone just took the vaccine that we would get rid of Covid. This simply makes no sense. (1) The vaccines wear off rather rapidly. (2) Covid has all sorts of non-human hosts. If you vaccinated the world to 100% Covid is still around in tons of animals and will just come back like every other flu.

They say "listen to the science!". Ok I am a scientist, I am not an expert in epidemics but I do understand math. I have had a few conversations with the epidemic modeling crowd and one thing is obvious is that it is a complex systems and many of these models are not particularly accurate. The epidemic scientists are pretty honest about just how limited what they can predict but somehow the public and politicians have this idea that these scientists know exactly what is going on. In a complex system you simply do not have this level of predictability.

There is also the question is all the hysteria really worth it for fairly mellow disease at least in any historical perspective.
The death rate is rather low and is concentrated on the old and those with underlaying conditions. I would guess in the last 300 years there has been many pandemics of this same lethality that no one really noticed since the number of people over 65 has historically been very low. The 1918 flu killed young people, that is why we know so much about it. Where these mass lockdowns really all the effective? Maybe if they just concentrated on the vulnerable populations that would have been better? I know someone is going to say that is not what the scientists said to do! The problem again is that such systems they really do not know all the variables very well. It could very well be possible that non-locking down and only concentrating on the old could have actually saved more lives, they simply do not know at this point. By the way the number people who die of malaria every year is 410k. The number of Covid death per year is 2.75 million. That is much more but average age of people who died of malaria is much lower with like 60% being children, if you actually calculated total years of life lost it is about the same.

Now the question is if the US actually did a mandate could they get everyone to vaccinated? I would say no. You have have to be willing to go door to door and force people. If you look at the current vaccination rates by populations and groups you are going to run into some problems rather fast. The popular narrative is that it is white republicans that are not getting the vaccine. However if you do a simple calculation. ( I can go through this if you really want, but I simply urge to the reader think about it), you actually have a fairly even split of democrats and republicans who unvaccinated but probably slightly higher on the democratic side.

8/24/2021 9:19 AM

 

170kJ

 "170 kJ. That result suggested NIF was finally creating a “burning plasma,” in which the fusion reactions themselves provide the heat for more fusion—a runaway reaction that is key to getting higher yields. Then, on 8 August, a shot generated the remarkable 1.35 MJ. “It was a surprise to everyone,” Herrmann says. “This is a whole new regime.”"

That is certainly a big jump up and something to be happy about. I have a couple of problems. The first is it is only a single shot, if they could that two shot, three shots and so on then I think this is major. The issue is that this was a single shot, no two samples are the same on the atomic level by definition so it could be some odd property go the surface of the sample, lack of grain boundaries or defects act, not to mention that rare events can arise where by chance some particles just happen to go the right way due to chaotic dynamics. This could be some kind of lucky shot kind of thing where some unknown parameter could be present that could hard to reproduce. Single event discoveries happen all the time that cannot be reproduced, like the magnetic monopole. Perhaps they know a lot more that will be in the paper that shows that this result is repeatable and can be built upon. Let us hope so., I am also a bit leery they that the go from 170 to 1.35 MJ, a rather large jump. It may be possible that the burning phase simply has a long trail distribution with mostly short times but occasionally you get a long time.

On a funny note I was watching popular sci-tech podcast tonight and they talked about the great new laser induced fusion just done at some place in California when someone said you mean UC Berkley National labs to be exact. Ha

NIF laser-powered fusion

 NIF: laser-powered fusion may beat tokamaks soon.

Someone in California is apparently still working on hot applied nuclear physics research (not just critical race theory). Unless we are completely lied to, I think that the super-optimistic headline is justified.

With explosive new result, laser-powered fusion effort nears ‘ignition’

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/explosive-new-result-laser-powered-fusion-effort-nears-ignition

https://motls.blogspot.com/2021/08/nif-laser-powered-fusion-may-beat.html

How's that working out?

 Trump negotiated with the Taliban without the Afghan government involved to 1) have the Taliban give up their ties with Al Qaeda, and 2) the US leave by May 1. Oh, and the Afghans to release 5000 Taliban prisoners they held. Biden says he was bound by it. How's that working out?

NNSA Labs and the war on terror

 The NNSA labs and many other labs got funds for research on counter terror including actions in Afghanistan. In fact the US spent 2 trillion dollars on Afghanistan. You could say we got Bin Ladin or at least forced him into Pakistan and then we got him which was 10 years ago, but other than that the whole thing as a huge waste of money and lives. The US is now just another empire to come to Afghanistan and fail. Plenty of blame to go around on this one. All those nukes and high tech gadgets just do not cut it sometimes. I like the saying I heard about what the Taliban have said of the US high tech version of war, "you have all the watches but we have all the time".

Maybe we should reconsider how we do national security in terms of intelligence gathering, tactics, weapons, analysis, and reliance on high tech and massive fire power. All those super smart military and intelligence agencies sure called this one wrong.