Conservative. Tennessee (now). Ex-Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
Email complaints/requests about copyright infringement to clayton @ claytoncramer.com. Reminder: the last copyright troll that bothered me went bankrupt.
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." -- Rom. 8:28
I was reading Ruth for a Bible Study and ran into both the word and concept of gleaning. Leviticus 19:9-10 directs farmers:
9“ ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.
Why? Even the poorest could put a small amount of labor into gathering food without anyone else needing to do so. This provided for them but also meant that a poor person would need to invest some effort into getting himself fed. At the same time, he was not going (to mix a Victorian metaphor profoundly time machine blended) cap in hand asking for help. His dignity was undamaged. If you were too proud to invest a few minutes of your time locating unharvested food, you were probably too proud. From the Torah.com:
The concept of “charity” (tzedakah) in a form recognizable to us today – as giving one’s money or other asset to the poor without an expectation of compensation from the recipient – is a post-biblical development, beginning in the Hellenistic era and brought to fuller fruition in the earliest rabbinic texts (second-third centuries C.E.).[1] In the Hebrew Bible, support for the poor is provided in a variety of different ways.
Exodus 23:11 instructs landowners to leave their land fallow every seventh year for the poor to collect what grows. Deuteronomy (14:28–9 and 26:12–15) requires the tithe in the third and sixth years of the Sabbatical cycle, to be given to the needy, and advocates lending to the poor in the years leading up to the cancellation of debts every seventh year (15:7–11).
A number of prophetic texts also express special empathy for the poor, instructing the reader not to take advantage of the needy (Isa 3:14–15, 10:1–2; Jer 5:28; Amos 8:4–6) while the book of Esther (9:22) instructs one to give “gifts to the poor” on the festival of Purim.
Above all, the preeminent way to support the poor in the Hebrew Bible is through allocations to the poor at the time of the harvest, which is the focus of this piece.
Gleraning seems to have been a right recognized in English law at times:
If the right to glean was ever recognized in American law, I have not seen it. Yet the parallel to SNAP (or "Food Stamps" as the program was known in my youth) is very strong. When Food Stamps were created, the goal was to soak up the surplus that American agriculture had created by its high efficiency in the postwar era. This is why the Food Stamp Act of 1964 excluded imported foods:
(b) The term “food” means any food or food product for human consumption except alcoholic beverages, tobacco, those foods which are identified on the package as being imported, and meat and meat products which are imported.
In a weird analogy, SNAP was doing the gleaning on behalf of the poor. Farmers were producing food so efficiently that there was not enough demand to buy it all, so our government was doing a sort of post-harvest gleaning. Similarly, if you are of my generation, you remember US Government surplus cheese in the 1980s.
Most cities have laws prohibiting the poor from taking the garbage behind restaurants. There are certainly some health risks associated with this; I can also see why this likely leads to unsightly messes. I think laws allowing restaurants to leave in clearly marked locations food that has not gone bad that could be safely put in a timed container: eat until 10:00 PM. This could certainly alleviate hunger among the homeless. Is this an ideal way of doing it? No. But better than letting people fall through the crevasses of pride or bureaucracy.
I can see why farmers might not be keen on legal recognition of gleaning. It would certainly be commercially misused. Not everyone gleaning a harvest is likely to be responsible about access to the fields.
11/07/1973: Seven adults were bound and gagged in a
semicircle, then shot to death. Two children were found shot to death in a
bedroom. Police eventually arrested two persons for whom arrest warrants were
already outstanding for a similar crime in Phoenix One of the dead owned a
nearby market. An undetermined amount of cash was missing from its floor safe
which had not been forced. Police believed this mass murder was to cover up the
robbery. Police across Northern California were stacking up charges against
these two for murder and rape. Arizona executed one of them in 1978; the other
died of cirrhosis of the liver on death row in 1986.
My wife went to an ATM to get some cash. She walks up to the ATM and saw an account balance. Odd, almost like the previous customer walked away with exiting a menu. She put in her card and took out $20. The new balance in checking was essentially what it showed before she put her card in the machine.
Her first thought and mine was that someone put a scanner on the front of the ATM. The cleek in the store spoke little English. Our online account showed the transaction she had just completed.
I called the credit union. After hours goes to somewhere with cheap labor but at least English sufficiently free of accent that he could well have been an American.
He agreed it was odd, but he said some ATMs actually interrogate your card as you get close. Think of this as an aggressive tap card interrogation. He had me turn on alerts for all accounts just in case.
This was the key figure in a Nature Medicine paper published on Dec 14, 2021. It showed clearly that myocarditis after vaccination (in this case, Moderna dose 2) was higher! than myocarditis after sars-cov-2 infection for people <40.
There were a few remaining issues. While the denominator for vaccines is known with precision, the true number of infections is unknown. Many people don’t seek testing or medical care. So the red bar above will be shorter if you used a sero-prevalence (aka the correct) denominator. The authors needed to fix this.
The other problem is that this analysis lumps together men & women, while men have the greatest risk. Well, the authors are back with a new pre-print to fix this point, and here is what they find.
It is now clear for men <40, dose 2 and dose 3 of Pfizer have more myocarditis than sars-cov-2 infection, and this is true for dose 1 and dose 2 of Moderna.
Pfizer boosters (Dose 3) have more myocarditis for men <40 than infection.
Myocarditis post infection is more common as you get older, in contrast with myocarditis post vaccination, which is more common as you are younger (reverse gradients).
Medicare in Idaho cost both the several hundred dollar Medicare premium deducted from my Social Security check, but also an additional $89 owed directly to Blue Cross of Idaho to cover what my Medicare Advantage added beyond Medicare: dental, vision, and some4 additional prescription coverage. In Tennessee, Blue Cross covers everything for the premium from my Social Security check alone. We signed up for the Diamond plan: $0 copayments for PCP; $20 copayment for specialists.
I have been so busy unpacking telescopes and shop that I have not taken a serious look at my night sky.
I have the mount for the Televue-85 on the back porch which is so dark that I absolutely will need my little red LED headlamp to avoid injuries. It is dark there at a level at which the last two houses could only hint. To my pleasure, not only are the third magnitude stars of Lyra visible, they do not require averted vision to see them. While not at the level of my house in the hills north of Boise, the Milky Way is visible above me. The area by the shop of which where the telescopes will roll once I have a pad poured is likely even darker.
I am too tired right now but tomorrow night I will start setting up about 8:30. Being closer to the equator, the Sun sets much faster and the sky gets dark much more dramatically.
President Donald Trump’s remarks about the possibility that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego have sparked a firestorm of criticism, with Democrats claiming the president was either calling for a foreign adversary to attack the U.S. or portraying the destruction of two major cities as acceptable collateral damage.
But given the full context — as well as Trump’s numerous past comments on this issue and the White House’s later clarification — that’s not our reading of the president’s comments. While his wording is confusing, a more plausible interpretation is that he meant the war would prevent Iran from posing a threat to U.S. cities, and higher gas prices are a small sacrifice to make. He’s made versions of those points before, using similar language.
Trump’s remarks came during an Oct. 5 rally in Nebraska.
“Remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high,” he said, apparently referencing gas prices. “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let them take — let it — let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.
“That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon,” he continued. “It’s essentially almost over with.”
Thank you for helping us make discoveries together.
Working with researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, we found that people carrying a rare inherited genetic variant called EGFR T790M had roughly 25 times higher odds of developing lung cancer. That is equal to or higher than well-established inherited cancer risk variants such as those in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes for breast and ovarian cancer.
These findings were recently published in the journal Science, in a peer-reviewed study titled 'Germline EGFR T790M mutation and lung cancer risk.' You can read the paper here.
Many people believe exposure to tobacco smoke is the only risk factor for lung cancer, but tens of thousands of Americans without this risk factor are diagnosed each year. For many people the question of why has had no good answer. This study is a step toward one.
What we discovered together:
• Researchers identified EGFR T790M as the largest known single genetic risk factor for lung cancer. This could have important implications for genetic testing and future lung cancer screening strategies for people who carry the variant.
• More common than anyone knew. Among more than 10 million research participants, 641 carried the variant. It remains rare, but that is about ten times more common than public genetic databases had reported.
• Specific to lung cancer. Often genetic variants that dramatically increase the risk of one cancer also increase the risk of other cancers, but for people with the EGFR T790M variant there were no significant associations with other frequent cancers, such as breast, prostate or colorectal cancer. This finding could help people with this variant know the specific, targeted screening they may need.
• A window into American history. By combining genetics with ancestry and geography, our researchers traced the variant to British and Irish settlers who migrated to the Southeastern United States. Regional expansion and demographic isolation led to a founder effect, where a small group is genetically separated from a larger population, in the Southern Appalachian region, making the variant far more common among their descendants. Participants with Southern U.S. ancestry were about six times more likely to carry this variant. This is a striking example of how our ancestors' origins can remain relevant to our health generations later.
Data analyzed in the study includes participants in the Lung Cancer Genetics Study, which is funded by the Susan Wojcicki Foundation and powered by the 23andMe Research Institute in collaboration with 22 lung cancer advocacy organizations. To learn more about the study, our collaborators, and eligibility criteria, visit the study landing page.
This kind of research is only possible at scale. By answering our research surveys, you help make discoveries like this possible. On behalf of the 23andMe Research Institute, thank you for being part of this journey.
It is about 200-250 feet from my router to the end of shop with the CNC mill. As you might expect, signal strength was not great. This TP-Link BE2000 WiFi extender did the job:
I was only getting about 850 Mbps in my office but with the extender in my wife's office (optimal for the shop) even my PC in my office is doing pretty well.
We replaced the corded pool cleaning robot named Poseidon that Lillie chased around the pool while chewing on its cord with a cordless version that being newer and more sophisticated is the Roman god of the sea: Neptune. Same dumb behavior.
