Akuchimoya @ Akuchimoya @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

From the article:

The answer to how I became sick may lie in what’s called secondary vaccine failure, which happens when a vaccinated person’s immunity decreases over time until they are no longer protected. This can take place when an immune system doesn’t receive the “boost” it needs from encountering the virus.

“There is evidence to suggest that in the absence of these boosts, the immune response that is induced by the vaccine isn’t lasting as long,” said Janna Shapiro, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases in Toronto. That means even those who were fully vaccinated as kids can lose their immunity.

This was me. I was at the doctor and he was having me get some bloodwork done. I asked him to check my measles immunity status, too, because I'd previously seen online of the possibility mentinoed above. My parents did have me immunized when I was a child, but I thought why not check? The results: I had no immunity.

It was free (to me, the patient) to get the shots. My doctor had to order them in. It's two shots a month apart, and then another blood draw another month later to check. I'll be honest, it was the second most painful vaccination I've ever had (the first was shingles), but totally worth it. Ask your doctor to check the next time you're getting bloodwork done.

I watched all of Discovery. It is, by far, the worst of all Star Treks. (Disclosure: I have not seen TAS.)

The reason is simple: Discovery is really the Michael Burnham show. She is the Mariest Sue who ever Mary Sued. Discovery could have been a really great show if it had been an ensemble show because it has a lot of very interesting characters whom we never explore.

Instead, everything centres around Burnham. She is the reason for the war at the start of the show. She is the magical, fated solution. She is Spock's (adopted) sister and had immeasurable impact on his life. Even through timey-wimey things, her (biological) mother comes to save her and the universe.

And on top of all that is the crying. Oh, gosh, everything is so emotional on this show. There is a time and place for emotions, but Discovery was too much of it, including inappropriate times. Burnham and her maybe-broken-up-boyfriend stop in the middle of an infiltration in a hostile station to talk about their relationship.

Even the really great characters, Saru and (Emperor Georgiou) centre around Burnham. She is like a sister to Saru, she saved his life, he gives up being a Captain to continue serving under her captaincy. Burnham is Georgiou's daughter (not actually), and Georgiou's love for her (as much as she can love) changes her.

No one has a story unless its actually about Burnham. Or they get a story and then get killed off.

The best thing about Discovery is it brought Trek back on TV and it gave us the rest of this era of shows.

All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he's in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he's doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.

If they had, they'd know there was a 13th disciple named Matthias. I'm not even kidding, it's in the Book of Acts. He was selected to replace Judas, and is described as having been with them since the beginning.

You can't win by playing nice is there are no rules for the other side. There is no democracy left in America, and there will be no fair election in 2028 whether Trump is still alive or not.

Anyway, Tyler Robinson showed there is another way. Am I saying Robinson specifically is a good guy? No. But realistically, evil leaders and administrations have been stopped by good guys fighting back with violence, and then stopping when the goal has been achieved and returning to peace. The difference between good and bad isn't non-violence and violence, but restrained violence to achieve the goal of peace and violence as the goal itself.

"Cut. Spend."? I'm no financial analyst, but you have to cut in one area in order to spend in another. Maybe we disagree on what is cut and what gets spent on and those choices could be matters of argument and debate, but trying to call out the fact of it itself like some gotcha is either bad faith or stupid.

Truly, without sarcasm, I invite you to read the gospels and actually get to now about Jesus. The shortest is Mark and can be read through in one evening.

The story progression was predictable and the pacing was not the best. Still, I appreciated the focus on Ortegas and Navia's acting. In this interview she alludes to not being able to dance when others are; I presume she's talking about the death of her partner late 2021 (which was after the worst of covid restrictions, but not so long after them). When it came to the rescue scene and La'an killed the Gorn, Ortegas' only friend in a lonely time and place, it made me sad to think Navia was probably going back to that loss.

But this episode was really made to retcon people not knowing the Gorn in TOS. The writers needed to make up a reason for people to forget a species they've now encountered several times, including medical breakthroughs (Batel). Still, more Ortegas, please. And still more range, please.

Since La'an doesn't make it to TOS, my guess is she dies by the end of the show and the pain of losing her drives Spock to push his humanity aside. I was expecting that to happen with the Chapel break-up, but then they brought La'an into things, so I transferred the theory onto her instead 😂

I previously worked at an insurance company some years ago. Back then the company was complaining that flood maps were something like decades out of date, and that was irresponsible to let developers build and sell homes to unsuspecting homeowners who had no reason, or even a way, to know they were in a flood plain.

I suspect nothing has changed in the intervening years.

Forgive me for saying this, but the final Kelpian design looks much, um, tastier than the original one. I can't imagine Terrans looking at a green and brown multi-eyed triangular headed alien and think "delicacy".

The benefit is mostly in "Oh, this (show/movie I like) is Canadian? What else is Canadian?"

Let's take Netflix for a negative example. People know it's reputation for cancelling shows after the third season, so viewers choose not to get invested in Netflix shows, so they do poorly, and then Netflix cancels them. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.

But what if the reputation around the world was "CBC (or Canada in general) produces great shows"? Then more people will look for them and it grows the international audience. It genuinely annoys me when people call great, original Canadian shows, like North of North, a Netflix show. No, it's quality CBC, Canadian, Inuit content. But if people think North of North is Netflix, how many are expecting it to get cancelled after the third season, and therefore not bothering to get interested in it?

Also, it's important to counter right-wing populism everywhere. Poilievre and the Conservatives (in its current incarnation) needs to be shut down and not taken seriously in Canada and internationally. He needs to be seen as a joke by foreign nationals, and for people to see right wing populists in their own countries as jokes. The more he calls CBC state media, the more everyone needs to say WTF are you on about, you dingus?

Canada, CBC in particular, produces quality content. I feel that these shows and Gem need to be better promoted in Canada, and outside Canada they need to be better promoted as Canadian.

One thing that needs to happen is the Conservative traitors to stop lying about and maligning the CBC. They directly undermine our productions and industry when they spew false and hateful garbage to frenzy up their base. Canada is already a relatively small market, and half the country is against the CBC because they believe the ridiculous lies that it's a communist state media outlet. I wish there were consequences for slander and libel for defamation from politicians.

Canadian Tire is buying the intellectual property (essentially, the brand) for an absolute steal at $30m. https://globalnews.ca/news/11210165/hudsons-bay-court-canadian-tire-deal-approval/

CT has the money and manufacturing, and distribution to continue to make Hudson's Bay products. I would expect to see things like blankets, socks, and outdoor wear begin to appear at Marks, housewares also in CT stores. Heck, the CT corporation is so big they could just open Bay and Zellers stores if they wanted (with adjusted business plans, of course).

Have you heard of drones being used to smuggle guns? No physical person even needs to cross a border now. Personally, I can't think of a practical solution to this.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/drone-carrying-bag-of-handguns-from-united-states-to-canada-intercepted-by-tree-1.6438267

They didn't learn their lesson, evidenced by attempting to destroy evidence after the fact, and they're only sorry that they're facing consequences, evidenced by their own we've had enough consequences-type statements.

Surely if not disbarred, they would brag about not being charged and advertise themselves as a lawyers for the anti-government types.

Why would you deliberately use a resource that is going to lie, just not predicably?

I can give a real-life answer to that. I was working on an assignment where keyword searching journal databases was not really helping because the while the primary keywords have specific meanings in the context I was intending, the words themselves have different meanings and uses. So I had to weed through a ton of articles in order to get just a few useful ones. Asking ChatGPT to give me 10 peer-reviewed journal articles about X and Y topic would return maybe three or four real articles, but it took me a lot less time to identify the three real ones from a set of 10 compared to locating three on-topic articles from, say, 100 results.

The above was using the public version of ChatGPT. Partway through the semester, my school got ChatGPT Edu. Interestingly, the Edu version, given the same prompt, did not return fake articles, but it included somewhat related, but not-relevant ones. In either case (public or Edu), I still had to check all 10 results, but it was still less time consuming than trying to search on my own.

I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn't like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It's similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It's okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

Saul (Sha'ul) is a Jewish/Hebrew name. Paulos is a Greek name. Even until now, bilingual people who are of a minority culture (compared to where they're living) often have two names, one in their their native (family) language and one in the local majority language, one official, the other unofficial.

This was not limited to Paul, even in that immediate timeline. Levi (Jewish name) was also called Levi (Greek name). There's no reason to believe Paul "changed" his name sheet his conversion. He continued to go by Saul after he became a Christian. He went by his Jewish name among Jewish people, then his Greek name when he travelled across Rome and interacted with Greek-speakers.

I only got a nickel and quarter with King Charles on the last weekend, among a literal handful of change.

There are a lot of years of QEII coins out there, though. She's going to still be in circulation for a many years, yet.