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Covid-only links
Mar. 27th, 2020 10:34 amI tried, as usual, to put the more serious stuff at the bottom and the lighter stuff at the top. There's a LOT of links, though, so my sorting may be flawed.
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Mar. 27th, 2020
Corvid-only links
Mar. 27th, 2020 10:39 am13 Surprisingly Weird Reasons Why Crows And Ravens Are The Best Birds, No Question
16 Unnerving Facts About Corvids Most People Don't Know
Crow adopts kitten (Video)
Edit: If anybody has any more, share them in the comments! Cute pics welcome!
16 Unnerving Facts About Corvids Most People Don't Know
Crow adopts kitten (Video)
Edit: If anybody has any more, share them in the comments! Cute pics welcome!
Holy shit. I hope her job reimburses this expense. I just put a hefty amount of black ink on auto-delivery, and also paper.
In other news, we ran out of coffee, so I made an emergency run to the dollar store to get more. Nothing else would've impelled me to go there just now, but since I was there already I got more snacks, soup, milk, and bleach. They were sold out of butter, alas... I may have to brave the over-expensive Western Beef pricing! Talked to the cashier, she's stuck, when she's not at work, in a home with ten other people, only one bathroom. Puts my complaints about being cooped up in perspective!
Now, here's a thing I'm curious about. Two people I know - two people who are pretty reliable when it comes to this sort of thing, and whose opinions on science article abstracts I can trust - have recently linked me to this article, using it to back up a claim that use of cloth masks increases spread of disease compared to not wearing a mask at all: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577
The reasoning around this makes sense - even careful users are going to have more moisture near the face, which may breed disease, and most people are not careful users and do all sorts of stupid things with face masks like lower and raise them willy-nilly. And, of course, there's not much quality control on the homemade cloth mask front.
However, the article does not seem to back this conclusion up at all, for the simple reason that they were not ethically able to put together a control group of hospital workers who don't wear masks, and their "normal use" group overwhelmingly used masks, so what you're comparing is "workers who use surgical masks" and "workers who use cloth masks". It's also not clear if the cloth masks were being changed with the same frequency as the surgical masks (twice a shift) or not. And, importantly, we definitely haven't established if using masks all day in a hospital gets results that can be generalized to the casual wearer who only wants to go out briefly to walk their dogs or buy butter.
(Other people, without citing any articles, have suggested that people wearing face masks may go out and about more and thus spread more disease. This is funny. The mere thought of having to breathe through a mask is enough to make me reconsider even the most dire of errands.)
So I don't actually know what to make of this article. Is there any data at all to back up the conclusion that face masks are riskier than no mask? Obviously I want the best and most accurate information so I can make the best choices.
In other news, we ran out of coffee, so I made an emergency run to the dollar store to get more. Nothing else would've impelled me to go there just now, but since I was there already I got more snacks, soup, milk, and bleach. They were sold out of butter, alas... I may have to brave the over-expensive Western Beef pricing! Talked to the cashier, she's stuck, when she's not at work, in a home with ten other people, only one bathroom. Puts my complaints about being cooped up in perspective!
Now, here's a thing I'm curious about. Two people I know - two people who are pretty reliable when it comes to this sort of thing, and whose opinions on science article abstracts I can trust - have recently linked me to this article, using it to back up a claim that use of cloth masks increases spread of disease compared to not wearing a mask at all: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577
The reasoning around this makes sense - even careful users are going to have more moisture near the face, which may breed disease, and most people are not careful users and do all sorts of stupid things with face masks like lower and raise them willy-nilly. And, of course, there's not much quality control on the homemade cloth mask front.
However, the article does not seem to back this conclusion up at all, for the simple reason that they were not ethically able to put together a control group of hospital workers who don't wear masks, and their "normal use" group overwhelmingly used masks, so what you're comparing is "workers who use surgical masks" and "workers who use cloth masks". It's also not clear if the cloth masks were being changed with the same frequency as the surgical masks (twice a shift) or not. And, importantly, we definitely haven't established if using masks all day in a hospital gets results that can be generalized to the casual wearer who only wants to go out briefly to walk their dogs or buy butter.
(Other people, without citing any articles, have suggested that people wearing face masks may go out and about more and thus spread more disease. This is funny. The mere thought of having to breathe through a mask is enough to make me reconsider even the most dire of errands.)
So I don't actually know what to make of this article. Is there any data at all to back up the conclusion that face masks are riskier than no mask? Obviously I want the best and most accurate information so I can make the best choices.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08665QJNM
This is a silly series with a decidedly silly premise, and I've read it more times than I can count. Life is too short to take every book seriously.
(And it's better prose than that other series I just commented on. Thank goodness.)
This is a silly series with a decidedly silly premise, and I've read it more times than I can count. Life is too short to take every book seriously.
(And it's better prose than that other series I just commented on. Thank goodness.)