igor67

I usually have terrible luck with plumbing, but I have been able to swap out faucets some of the time. The two big question are do you have shut-off valves just for that faucet and can you get your wrenches back behind the sink with room to turn? Plumbers have a weird small head extended neck wrench that can just reach up behind the sink. When I've run into problems it was not being able to get behind the sink to get enough leverage due to limited space.

The last interview I saw with a rep from Pfizer or Moderna indicated that they were reporting continued strong antibody numbers up to 6 months, and expecting that by the end of summer they would have another update.

https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(21)00356-6/pdf Not surprising that the news summary missed some important framing on the percentage above.

I believe I posted something akin to this earlier, but for younger individuals particularly students and 20 somethings we've over focused on death as the big downside. Particularly with the new variants there risk of boring Covid is still very high and many of them would suffer quite a bit either educationally or financially if they end up just having to take 2 weeks off. Factor in the fairly high number that end of with long covid. We currently have a senior honors level student whose multi-month battle has put them in danger of not graduating as an example. I believe the Mayo study I had seen reported on indicated that close to a 1/3 of all covid sufferers regardless of initial severity had lingering symptoms. Next year is already going to be tough if I try and extrapolate what that type of impact would be on my teaching with a school wide outbreak... I certainly understand the difficulty of convincing teenagers, but maybe that helps.

To a certain extent I would say it is fairly encouraging that a number of the places where there have been price spikes have caused people to reconsider projects. If it seemed like there were no adjustments to the price hikes then we could be in some real trouble.

It's kind of exciting, I was more excited that they opened things up to 12+ this week. All muted though that we lost a parent at my school last week, he caught it shortly before he had the chance to get signed up.

I was even thinking of Reyes actually getting the green light earlier in the game a 3-0 and just missing going deep. Over the years I think I've seen more guys swing at 3-0 and get nothing but Reyes was really close and obviously in that situation with the pitcher due up in made a ton of sense.

Maybe Stearns identified pitcher's hitting homers as the new inefficiency.

Crazy to be playing for a sweep today. I'm mean I'd rather have swept them 2 years ago in the playoffs, but I'll take it.

If ever you play a game under protest this is it

MN setting up a few locations in the Metro this week specifically with Pfizer and geared towards 16-17 year olds. I like it, Memorial Day isn't too far away and it would be a great idea for the tourism heavy parts of Wisconsin to maybe look at High school sites and get those kids ready to work this summer.

There are of course former players all over the league, but facing the Marlins line-up does often seem like an alternate reality Brewers squad at the moment.

Given his OPS is over 1.000 I'm also pretty confident he will cool off, some and certainly the fact that it is just 70ABs total is relevant. I'm more struck by the fact that he has been able to repeat the feat of getting his chance and just hitting 3 times. I can't really think of anyone else who has fit that pattern. Also worth pointing out that most of those chances were not in typical September call-up times.

One of the weirder things about Tyrone though is that not only was he a bigtime prospect once upon a time, he has now just plain hit in his 3 call-ups. Even his lower performance last year still featured a .500 SLG. So it's not like we are just fixating on this year.

I like to recommend quantum computing for those who are really trying to be forward looking. The programming and coding is going to be just different enough I suspect there will be good opportunities for those who get into it early.

I would be down for calling Braun out of retirement at the moment.

This is not a disagreement with anyone, more of a deliberate topic shift. Especially with younger people death probably really isn't the most important drawback to Covid. As we wind down the school year with all that entails I would be very worried about how a relatively normal bout of symptomatic covid can easily push students into failing a course. In normal years the big marker in education is students who miss more than 2 days/ month are dramatically more likely to fail. A 2 week bout of covid where they are just sick enough they can't really do school is more than half the total days they can miss for the year, all concentrated at the end. All kinds of individual students could pull that off, but as a group that is a real negative and frankly all the spiraling effects that tends to have on students going forward. For the 20 something crowd how many of them can really afford to again just miss 2 weeks of work? Probably a fair number, but knowing the statistics and reality of just getting started in the job market it has the potential to have a rather nasty hang over on long term wealth.

It's a solid point, and I think a big part of raising that floor is defense. It just doesn't slump the same way offense or even pitching can. With a year to potentially figure out exactly how to get the bullpen mix right we have a pretty nasty mix for the postseason at the moment.

I've seen both it is more lethal, and that it has not been shown to but maybe more lethal in print for the British variant. I'm sure some of that has to do with it being a small enough number to begin with that getting enough data to be convincing is a challenge. It is an ultra weird time, the numbers in MN this week suggest that we may be peaking in case numbers, and if our hesitancy data is correct we maybe one of the few states to push into that 80%+ vaccinated territory. So the numbers could start to drop somewhat quickly. On the other hand some of our most local experiences have seen case numbers get high enough that we sent out a caution letter to our families asking for vigilance, so we don't need to shut down because our quarantine numbers were getting up there. The Atlantic had an article with the headline America has Covid Senioritis. That pretty much sums it up. Aside from children immune compromised individuals are also at risk potentially even if they tried to be responsible themselves with the vaccine. So I'm not completely ready to simplify masking down to being something that only impacts the individual. That said I would rather not have to teach with a mask in the fall, but that may not be able to happen.

We do currently have the 4th best run differential at +16, and if I'm remembering correctly the next closest teams are +11. So it is early enough that can change fairly quickly, but we are noticeably ahead of almost everyone at this stage.

My son graduated college a couple of years ago, and he tried a number of different sports never specializing and generally enjoyed his experience all the way through until he ended up on a team with a bad vibe. My daughter really enjoys volleyball but has other interests and is not super motivated to devote enough time just to volleyball to specialize. Short version up through middle school it is definitely a good call to let them try a lot of different things, and then give them a say once they get to high school. There were a lot of well adjusted girls on my daughters team over the last few years to get scholarships, but that was due more to their interests than their parents. So there is some room for both approaches as they get older, but at a minimum pre-puberty athleticism is not a terribly good predictor of much.

Yes the ballpark is technically within the city limits of Grand Chute not Appleton.

So no comparison to the risk of other types of events is remotely perfect, but for some sense of comparison about 800,000 people have developed peanut allergies as adults. Each of those represents an out of the blue event with frequent exposures and all the dangers that anaphylactic reactions bring. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/adults-are-developing-peanut-allergies-after-age-18-heres-what-we-know I'm not sure if that is useful at all for helping others understand risks.

Worst thing I saw last night was a CBS report that made it sound like it was a big disappointment that the FDA or CDC panel (can't remember which) had met and didn't have any answers so it was continuing the pause. It was a terrible example of how movie and TV scientist heroes can really mess with actually understanding what is reasonable. Given the rarity of the events I would guess that they will need some new type of experimental data to actually sift through the various hypotheses. Maybe super detailed clinical comparisons will settle it, but that seems rather optimistic. And while any slow down in vaccination is not ideal having decided to pause this one doing a really definitive look at the issue is the best for public health. Lots of people watching, so getting it right is way better than getting it fast.

I would actually be really interested if homer wanted to expand on what a smart contract was. A link outlining a hack related to crypto Chu, Dennis. “BROKER-DEALERS FOR VIRTUAL CURRENCY: REGULATING CRYPTOCURRENCY WALLETS AND EXCHANGES.” Columbia Law Review, vol. 118, no. 8, 2018, pp. 2323–2360. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26542511 p.(16) and another "One of the main flaws with cryptocurrencies can be attributed to the “blockchains” that they are built on. Whenever a new coin is “mined” or sold, it is subject to a review by the community of miners. In other words, whenever a transaction occurs, the other people involved with mining the currency are notified and decide whether the transaction was legitimate or not. This sort of community verification requires 51% of the community to approve a transaction for it to occur" quoted from "51% Attack Explained." Mycryptopedia. January 08, 2019. Accessed March 20, 2019. https://www.mycryptopedia.com/51-percent-attack-explained/. and a 3rd one for good measure "Bitcoin Gold Hacked for $18 Million." Bitcoin News. May 24, 2018. Accessed March 20, 2019. https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-gold-hacked-for-18-million/ For some additional background I have both a low tolerance for risk, and a high threshold (generally) of evidence. On the investing side this usually means sticking to traditional investing principles (low fees and index funds go back to at least the mid 90's). I recognize that this particular combination has certain downsides, but given I don't have stacks of capital to be an angel investor I can live with that. My sentiments against cryptocurrencies though were rooted in the clear pattern of mid 2010's articles hyping in a very standard 'it will revolutionize', but not following through with a clear explanation of what was going to be solved. For some reference this was overlapping with the era when we were being told that Silicon Valley was also going to revolutionize education with MOOCs. We've all seen how well people actually like online education. At least those articles though were clear what was being proposed and sold. As a science generalist I read a wide diversity of secondary and primary sources across many disciplines (math, physics, chem, biology, and economics mostly), and I do not recall any of my range of sources ever jumping in and walking through how the blockchain was an important technology. That isn't 'proof' but it is enough for me to not want to waste time fully researching the topic myself. Particularly after one of my students (who was a huge crypto believer) did his thesis project a couple of years ago (those are his references above). From his abstract "Then the history of cryptocurrencies’ rise from 2008-2018 is analyzed. This analysis explains why the cryptocurrency market came into being, rose, and fell in such short succession. It describes how the market was exploited through fraudulent practices such as “pump and dump schemes”, hacks, and faulty brokers. These problems with the market are then compared to problems that the U.S. stock market experienced in the 1970’s." If the blockchain itself is going to be a significant technology going forward that would be interesting and as far as I can tell at the moment it would end up being a rather unique path for a legitimate technology to rise to utility. Last thought the economics side of crypto are somewhat analogous to gold, which I also loathe as an investment. It is way too useful as a material to use purely as a trade device.