On 15DEC17, Dr. James Sheehy, Chief Technology Officer for the Naval Aviation Enterprise, wrote a letter to Phillip J. Bonzell, Primary Patent Examiner of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, requesting immediate action concerning a denied patent application by a certain Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, an aerospace engineer at Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division. Dr. Sheehy anecdotally explained his case to Mr. Bonzell, relating how [Howard] Hughes in the early 1960’s claimed the invention of the “ruby laser”, when factually the United States Army at Picatinny Arsenal built the first such device in 1958. The negligence of not seeking a patent for the invention cost the Department of Defense dearly.

The letter concludes with the marginally cloaked implication of United States’ National Security being severely jeopardized by the then current application’s rejection. Dr. Sheehy supported his position stating: ”Based on these initial findings [Dr. Pais’ supporting feasibility experiments] I would assert this will become a reality. China is already investing significantly in this area and I would prefer we hold the patent as opposed to paying forever more to use this revolutionary technology…”

U. S. Patent Application 15/141,270 (PAX205)/B64G1/409 Unconventional spacecraft propulsion systems Patent Number 10,144,532, Granted 4DEC18, Adjusted Expiration 28SEP36

What can we learn from this? 1) The history of the Ruby Laser needs to be rewritten, wikipedia and anything about the laser does not acknowledge what is being claimed here.

2) The Navy has to use an example from 1958/1960 to avoid any issue but still make the point... "just like this other time we didn't patent what we built and therefor it was a mistake... we should patent this new technology... that we haven't made... but in case we did make it like the Ruby Laser, then let's patent it.

Protolyst (collaborative note taking tool) is a product that Dr. Maddy is developing and showcasing in her YouTube Channel playlists.

It's a method that was first developed by Nicholas Luhmann. —Dr. Maddy 00:00:42

Der italienische Mineralölkonzern Eni hat kurz nacheinander LNG-Lieferverträge mit Qatar, der Demokratischen Republik Kongo und Indonesien abgeschlossen. Der Vertrag mit Qatar über die Lieferung von jährlich 1,5 Milliarden Kubikmeter (zusätzlich zu den seit 3007 importieren 2,9 Milliarden Kubikmetern) läuft bis 2053. Der Vertrag mit den Kongo geht über 4,5 Milliarden Kubikmeter. Eni will die LNG-Liefererungen bis 2026 auf über 18 Millionen Kubikmeter verdoppeln. https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2023/10/26/news/eni_gnl_forniture_gas_indonesia_qatar_congo-418811631/

Adding cattle increased the prevalence of fungal hypha (long branching filaments of fungi indicative of healthy fungi growth).

Full name of the ERA (Environmental Research Area) of the Sneed Prairie where Austin College, led by Dr. Peter Schulze, conduct their annual research.

• 21:52 Carbon credits, carbon markets
  • it's a scam designed to perpetuate fossil fuel use, in a phoney war against the climate crisis
  • Offsets were designed to allow polluters to pay others to create schemes that would compensate or "offset" that pollution. The classic example WAS afforestation, the planting of trees that can sequester that carbon.
  • Carbon neutrality comes from this idea that you can keep polluting if you offset it and become "carbon neutral"
  • A company may decarbonize a lot of their supply chain but may struggle to get rid of airflights around the world. In that case, they use offsets. When companies analyze the very difficult choices, they take the easy way out and use carbon offsets
  • However, there is so much offsets for afforestation now that there isn't enough land on earth
  • Carbon markets are a recipe for grifting and fraud or zero impacts
    • https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
  • This is the current state of offsets

31:00 Shell oil carbon offset greenwashing scam - the sky zero proposal - Shell claims they can offset all the O+G emissions out of the ground - it is preposterous - there's not enough land on earth when you tally up all the carbon offset afforestation schemes

• 32:30 Neo-colonialism

  • rich white man can offset his emissions by buying land from a developing nation. Now the indigenous people cannot use that land for any reason.
  • also, will require huge amount of water to grow those trees
  • we don't have enough land and we don't have 100 years, only 5 years.
  • nature-based solutions are an industrial, myopic approach

• 37:00 Deferred Emission Reduction

  • a lot of carbon credits are called deferred emission reduction credits.
  • this is avoided emissions - ie. trees in a forest with 100 ton of sequestering potential
  • this is promise to not destroy the biosphere any further so it's not removing any existing carbon
  • maybe multiple people might own the same forest, or someone might come along and burn it down
  • Trees are vulnerable to climate impacts - ie. Microsoft bought a large forest in California that later burned down in a climate change intensified wildfire

• 40:00 can we do anything within the extractive capitalist system?

  • some people claim that as long as extractivist capitalism still persists, we cannot have system change
  • also a neocolonialist element - global north exploited the global south to create most of the emissions in the atmospheric commons
  • a number of people are beginning to see that an extractivist capitalist system is not in line with effectively addressing the climate crisis
  • wind, solar, etc has displaced electricity generation in a number of countries like in the UK. However, these are only a few countries.Renewables are helping increase overall energy production

• 44:22: Stop burning fossil fuels

  • t doesn't matter if investments in renewables triple. It won't make a difference if we don't significantly stop burning fossil fuels at the same time.

• 47:00 economic growth prevents real change

  • Insisting on 1, 2 or 3% growth, will limit the response to the climate threat to render it irrelevant
  • Climate change is still mostly an optimization problem. They are more concerned with economic damage.
  • Economists believe that anything that threatens economic growth cannot be accepted

• 51:00 Degrowth making headway

  • Degrowth scholars are getting more attention on the need to decouple economic grwoth from climate policies

• 52:10 Is there a positive future scenario - The role of solidarity

  • Solidarity is the greatest strength we can harness.
  • The success of Doughnut Economics gives me hope
  • The richest 1% must reign in their impacts and redistribute to allow the impoverished to live humane lives
  • We can all have good lives and we don't have to manufacture that wonder
  • This is what it is to be human

https://snarfed.org/2022-12-03_48181

I wonder if their music is as good as the Bard's.

OK, let's break down these terms: * multicenter: the study was conducted studying animals at multiple clinics/locations * prospective: study subjects are enrolled and followed BEFORE the disease or the outcome is observed (in this case the painful procedure/analgesic response. Prospective studies tend to be less prone to bias, compared to retrospective studies (like evaluating historical patient records of prior disase/treatment/outcome). * randomized: enrolled subjects are assigned to treatment or control groups randomly. Randomization can be an effective way to minimize intentional or unintentional bias in a study. For example, in a non-randomized study an investigator might (intentionally or unintentionally) place all of the younger subjects in the control group and the older subjects in the treatment group. Now you have two things that could contribute to a difference between controls and treatments, the actual treatment AND AGE. So if there was an improvement in the treatment group, which thing did it, treatment or age? Randomization reduces the occurrence of biases like that. * masked : this is also called blinded. In masking, one or more categories of study workers are blinded as to whether subjects are in the treatment group or the control group. I'd have to look at the full experimental write-up to know exactly who was blinded, but at a minimum the study workers assessing the analgesia should be blinded as to whether they are observing a treatment, or a control animal. This can be complicated! A vehicle control cat is unlikely to be dysphoric/euphoric, so if I am a study worker and I see a dysphoric cat, I will likely be biased to assume that it has been treated with drug, and that could in turn bias my assessment of its pain. * vehicle control : this is a form of placebo control. the treatment group gets vehicle+drug, the control group gets only vehicle. You will also read about "active control". In this case it is an intramuscular injection of bupe. This allows a comparison between all the things that can interfere with transdermal absorption, and an administration of bupe that bypasses the vagaries of transdermal absorption and lets the investigators know what a more reliably absorbed, roughly equivalent dose, is capable of. Placebo controls and vehicle controls are also related to masking/blinding. In the ideal world, almost no one should know whether a patient got the control treatment or the test treatment, until the study is completed and the data analyzed. This reduces bias in assessing the effect of the treatment. * pilot : a pilot study is an early study, often used to explore dose, timing, effectiveness in a smaller number of animals to aid in designing a larger subsequent study.

Remember, the two basic things that FDA requires for approval are 1) actual evidence that establishes the drug is an effective treatment for the specific indications in the application (in this case post operative analgesia in cats) and 2) typical use of the drug is unlikely to cause injury that is disproportionate to the risk that the disease presents. For example, most anticancer drugs may cause injury, but the diseases that they treat have a much greater risk of injury if left untreated. But there would be a much higher expectation of safety in a drug to treat kennel cough, a disease which is rarely fatal and often self-limiting. So here, in this data we'll see studies designed to provide evidence of effectiveness, and studies designed to provide evidence of safety.

This drug is not exactly an earth-shaking discovery. "BuTrans", from the notorious Purdue Pharma (in a legal settlement, Purdue Pharma agreed to disband as a business) was FDA approved for humans in 1981, is a transdermal buprenorphine patch.

Beyond our scope, don't worry about this.

Inclusion and Exclusion criteria are important! Remember, you are trying to keep the treatment group and control group as similar to each other as possible.

To me, the executive summary (not sure why they call it that!) seems to be pretty dialed-down for a non technical audience. This is a great skill to get better at, although at points the basic language can get a bit confusing

This concept is called dose proportionality, and it is a really handy thing to know. What they are saying here is that beyond a dose of 30mg/cat you lose dose proportionality. This implies that below that dose, if you double the dose you should see approximately a doubling of plasma concentration--That's dose proportionality!

This is a nice & clear explanation of "flip-flop kinetics"! Far more common is the situation in which absorption is fast, compared to the slower elimination. In that far more common scenario, half-life (aka terminal half-life) is driven by clearance. Here, the rate of absorption is so slow that whatever drug is absorbed is quickly distributed and cleared (but of course during that process some drug gets to its CNS targets and binds (tightly!) to them.

Not surprising since bupe is really, really lipophilic.

this is an example where oversimplification distorts the facts. "bind as strongly" is not accurate, and it disagrees with "high binding affinity" in the previous paragraph. Bupe does bind with very high affinity to the mu opioid receptor. It is a partial agonist because that tight binding is not capable of causing the conformational change in the receptor that is necessary to produce a maximal receptor response. The ability to fully activate a receptor is not a function of the tightness of binding (if that was the case naloxone, which also binds tightly, would be a full agonist). It is a function of whether the binding induces the 3-d changes in the receptor that cause it to signal its activation to the interior of the cell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2zq_R1uBc

Rhodes, E. (2021, September 10). “We need to flex our mental and emotional muscles outside the point of desperation” | The Psychologist. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/we-need-flex-our-mental-and-emotional-muscles-outside-point-desperation

Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:

• Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book (Random House,1984) which is based on
• the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels, which was based on an argument over the correct end to crack an egg once soft-boiled.

It almost seems related to creating identity politics as bike-shedding because the real issues are so complex that most people can't grasp all the nuances, so it's easier to choose sides based on some completely other heuristic. Changing sides later on causes too much cognitive dissonance, so once on a path, one must stick to it.

Donie O’Sullivan. ‘So the Video Bannon Streamed Live Saying Dr. Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray Should Be Beheaded Has Been on Facebook for 10 Hours and Has 200,000 Views. 10 Hours. Remember That next Time Zuckerberg Talks about All the Moderators and A.I. They Have.’ Tweet. @donie (blog), 6 November 2020. https://twitter.com/donie/status/1324524141869965312.

I found this absolutely shocking, and to be a rather strange twist for Mr. Candy's character. I also think it might be notable that he is not referred to as Dr. Candy, which may have the effect of reducing his authority.

‘Germany Has Its Own Dr. Fauci—and Actually Follows His Advice’. Bloomberg.Com, 28 September 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-28/christian-drosten-germany-s-dr-fauci-worries-about-second-wave-of-covid.

%APPDATA%\Dr. Memory

points awarded for a specific FERPA stanza. Unclear what kinds of educational records may be made available to the service.

this, in essence, waters down basically everything about a privacy policy. It is at the point of 3rd-party involvement where the wheels fall off the cart.

also recent update.

fairly recent effective date for this policy is a good sign. some of these from other companies can get rather stale.

tone is interesting. It's engaging, but the 'thou shalt not' nature of these assertions, combined with this language, is a little intimidating, also. It would be nice to see this same tone applied to a summary statement of how Poll Everywhere was looking out for user data protection, etc.

this is a good way to start.

wiki etc etc no spoilers

"Tavros" is Greek for "bull" and is also the Modern Greek pronunciation of the name "Taurus." His name resembles that of the Doctor Who villain Davros, the wheelchair-bound creator of the Daleks [...] "Nitram" is "Martin" written backwards. There are two possible connections for this. Operation Taurus was the name of a planned prosecution by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) against Martin McGuinness, and Mary Martin played Peter Pan in the 1954 musical.

http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Tavros_Nitram

Ludwig Seuss: Ludwig Seuss and the Boogie Men [oooo]

VÖ: 21.4.2017

AppleMusic / iTunes

Part of the enormous diet discourse, this one taking on Dr. Esselstyn's work, with mention of Campbell's book

The Pacific Science Congress is in core meeting for the Pacific Science Association. These meetings take place every four years in various locations throughout the Asia- Pacific Rim and Basin. Various scientists, at different levels of expertise, present at the congress. Presentations are based on the central theme and have anywhere between 1000 and 2000 people in attendance. Each meeting has a President and a Secretary-General who represent them. The first meeting took place between August 2 and 20, 1920 in Honolulu, HI. The meetings and the

Starting in 1969, there have been twelve Pacific Science Inter-Congresses. These meetings are smaller and focus on a more central theme. They, like the Pacific Science Congresses, take place every four years, staggered between them. They also are located in similar locations in the Pacific region.

The article quotes Dr. Ian McTaggart-Cowan, who was speaking on August 26, 1975, during the 13th Pacific Science Congress in Vancouver, Canada at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McTaggart Cowan was the President for this meeting. For that year, the Pacific Science Congress's theme was “Sublethal Effects of Pollution on Aquatic Organisms”. Since this meeting, there hasn’t been another meeting in Canada or one with focus on the issues Arctic Canada faces. The most recent congress took place summer of 2016 in Taipai, Taiwan, with the theme “Sceince, Technology, and Innovation: Building a Sustainable Future in Asia and the Pacific.” These meetings are so important because they bring together a group of scientists with similar studies and interests. By presenting and sharing their ideas, scientists can work together to have a conscious and sustainable Pacific.

Annotated from the Pacific Science Association's website www.pacificscience.org.

Gerard de Nerval:

"I have never felt any rest in sleep. For a few seconds I am numbed, then a new life begins, freed from the conditions of time and space, and doubtless similar to that state which awaits us after death. Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to unite them now?"

Interesting Interview of how being black is perceived in the Caribbean, more specifically in the Dominican Republic.