Yup. The scale and scope of the damage would hopefully have been less, but it strikes me as an incredibly apt analogy.

Just to clarify why the anti-vax idiot was for this trial, it was going to withhold the known effective and safe vaccine from the control group for six weeks to see what happens, without even checking if any mothers tested positive prenatally. Due to limited resources, Guinea-Bissau has been slow to enforce their new guidance to align with other countries and administer the vaccine to all newborns.

It was basically leveraging the fact that the test subjects lived in a poor country to do something they’d never be allowed to do in a richer country, even MAHA’s America.

As someone who read more Honor Harrington than he should have, the American one is a bit on the nose.

Yeah, this is kinda funny. Doctor Doctor is definitely pricier and very likely better than Dr Pepper, and the label on the soda fountain basically says as much. You need to get some Dr. Thunder up in there to make the meme really work.

It certainly seems promising, and I am like a moth to a flame with anything involving recovering lost texts, but I feel like we’ve done some interesting reporting on the horse before checking to see if the cart has anything in it. :-)

No need to shit on dreams, yet, though. I really do hope this leads to a breakthrough, because I believe the previous scanning methods relied on actual physical differences (e.g. tiny stylus scratches) rather than the ink. This could be a huge shortcut.

Sounds promising, but it didn’t seem clear from the article whether there is any particular reason to expect to find much lead or another metal in the Vesuvius scrolls’ ink. I guess somebody found one fragment that had some, which is not nothing, but fingers crossed that it was common.

While I don’t want to presume that science that feels intuitive is bad science, I’m not entirely sure how newsworthy it is to talk about how getting used to heat helps one deal with heat. People did live in hot places before AC.

It starts to feel like instructions and socialization rather than simple science journalism…

Actually, yeah, it’s probably just that.

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If you can step back cognitively and see it’s your own pre-existing expectations, then yeah, I can absolutely see this. As an American, when I visited Paris, my preconceived notion of dogs in Paris sort of unavoidably meant, “my dogs, or dogs I know, in Paris.” My dogs are reasonably well socialized for a suburban American introvert’s dogs, but they would be an absolute menace in Paris.

They pull on the leash because they spend most of their outside time in the backyard or with their heads out the car window, so walkies is a special occasion, for good or for ill. They are obsessed with every new person until that person has moved on. Sitting calmly at a cafe has happened once or twice, but it takes a bit to get them used to it. One of them is a bit weird about new foot textures he hasn’t dealt with. Everything about Paris is different from their everyday life, and much of it is different from my everyday life. To a certain extent, it would be the same in any pedestrianized urban area, but Paris is also so aesthetically distinct.

So, to see dogs just doing their thing, confident and happy, barking at neighbors from a 130-year old wrought iron balcony railing instead of through a cedar fenceboard, accompanying their owner for daily outdoor market shopping instead of being told they can’t come this time because I’ll be getting out of the car, or walking through that crushed-limestone surface Paris seems to like for their parks (unlike any city I’ve been to in the US), all of that endows the dogs with a certain “Frenchness” that will seem weird until you parse it. It’s amplified if the owner’s sense of style or affect strikes an American’s eye, or even their subconscious, as distinctively French.

So, having grown up in exurban (my old haunts are now firmly suburban) Jacksonville…

Alligator in the water behind the house?

Not mine, but the folks actually on the lake instead of the river? Sure. I saw a few. My parents did always warn me not to go into the EPA drainage easement behind the house, too. I only had to stop my car to let a gator pass one time, and that was pretty far out into the sticks.

Dinosaur bird in the front yard?

Egrets, maybe, especially after a rain. Plenty of turkey buzzards too, when there was roadkill. Really, though, all birds are dinosaurs.

Shirtless outdoor beer drinker?

Ran into this more that summer in college when we lived in my buddy’s 500 sqft concrete block “lake house”, but it probably happened at home too. After we moved the 30 minutes back to Gainesville for fall semester, I understand his dad got drunk one night and crashed his bass boat into one of the neighbors’ dock, so he came over the next day with a 12-pack and a van full of lumber.

Gun-toting motorist?

How else to you propose he get the gun into the car? Sheesh. This was more necessary than unusual.

Spiky thing?

Now, you need thin flip flops and a big sand spur, but sure. Happened to me at least once. Also need to watch out for young prickly-pear cactus that are still small but have sprouted their thorns.

Little itchy bugs.

You’ll have to be more specific. Fire ants would be the most likely. Most I ever got at once was about thirty when I stepped right in a pile while helping my dad, illegally it turns out, dump fill dirt on the aforementioned drainage easement. They may also have meant chiggers or redbugs. They’re most common in the Spanish moss, but they’re around everywhere, and if you get into the larvae they can also give you a bunch of red rashy-looking bites.

Hurricane parties

NE Florida was in a long hurricane lull during my time living there, but this was a pretty known thing everywhere else, and sitting out to watch the lightning was pretty common. That part of Florida also gets tornadoes.