There are mountain ranges of money to be made here and you can bet that they are all racing to solve this puzzle. Anyone who wants to smash big pharma is an idiot. All of those profit-hating progs make profits in their own lives because someone pays them to do something. Hatred breeds ignorance.
In the past two days, I've read about four candidate protocols for dealing with Chinese Coronavirus. I know enough organic chem to make my way through the documents and they increase my optimism. At the bottom of this post are some links, in case you want to check them out.
Good friend and regular commenter Ohioan at Heart is a real, live chemist as is his wife. The papers look promising to him, too. I'd be very interested in hearing what the invaluable Tim Eisele has to say on the topic as well.
Sorry for the digression there. On with the show.
So what we have now is a brief window of time in our lives in which we can't go play outside with the other children. We have an opportunity to do and learn those things we've never done or learned. When it's over next week, two weeks from now or whenever, what will you have done with your time?
Here are some suggestions.
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Develop written goals. There is nothing better for being productive in your life than goals and concrete plans. I re-did mine a few days ago and I now feel much more confident that I'm using my time wisely.
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Learn a new skill or set of skills. You've got ingredients in your pantry, improve your cooking. You've got the Internet, learn a language. Journal every day and work on your writing. You have all of the knowledge of Mankind at your fingertips. Go grab some of it!
- Create a budget. Anyone who was on the Dave Ramsey plan before the Wuhan Flu pandemic struck is now in decent shape. Baby step 3 is to have 3-6 months of expenses in the bank. You're locked inside, so sit down with your significant other and work out a budget. When this all blows over, you'll be ready to make sure you don't get financially whacked again.
By the end of today, I will have completed my MGB's cockpit wiring harness. I don't mean the design, I don't mean a mock up, I mean the real thing with connectors and wrapping. I'll have to wait to install it as my center console will take a few days to build out of fiberglass and I've got parts arriving on Friday, but I will have completed the wiring harness.
I've decided I'm going to journal my daily progress here. Each morning, I'll post my goal(s) for the day and how they fit into my strategic goals. At the end of the day, I'll append the post with photos of my progress.
Today, I'll show my progress in a separate post because this one is already a bit long.
There. How about you? What are you going to do with this time bonanza?
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| Make use of this time. |
Links to possible Kung Flu cures
https://www.zmescience.com/science/first-antiviral-drug-coronavirus-0423/
https://kfor.com/health/coronavirus/drug-used-to-originally-fight-malaria-showing-promise-in-treating-coronavirus-oklahoma-medical-research-foundation-says/
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/coronavirus-australia-queensland-researchers-find-cure-want-drug-trial/news-story/93e7656da0cff4fc4d2c5e51706accb5
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vTi-g18ftNZUMRAj2SwRPodtscFio7bJ7GdNgbJAGbdfF67WuRJB3ZsidgpidB2eocFHAVjIL-7deJ7/pub
6 comments:
What am I going to do with this time bonanza? Well, it looks like I am going to be using it to learn video editing, considering that I have three courses that will run for another 6 weeks, and I have to do them all remotely. Luckily, my TG-3 camera actually shoots pretty decent video, and I can take it into the lab and get right down there into the process without worrying about damaging it (it is waterproof and ruggedized).
Regarding the papers you linked to, I expect that there is something there and while they clearly don't have cures, they at least have treatments to reduce the severity until a real vaccine comes along. Although, statements like this concern me:
“When malaria gets inside a cell, if you change the pH with a drug like chloroquine phosphate, the malaria can’t live,” said James, an immunologist and rheumatologist. “The same goes for a virus like COVID-19. If you change the pH, the virus cannot assemble, and if it can’t assemble, it can’t infect you.”
The problem I have with this is that, if you change the pH enough to kill malaria or disrupt a virus, what do they think this is doing to the human cell they are trying to protect? Killing or deactivating viruses is no trick at all, they are really fragile. But so are human cells, which are notoriously finicky about their pH limits. The trick is, and always has been, to kill the infectious agent and not the human cell. I really hope that "James" was either misquoted, or was trying to dumb things down for the interviewer and made a bad analogy, and that pH alteration isn't really what he thinks is happening.
And looking through those articles, I did notice a point: none of them are going on in the US. It is all work done in China, South Korea, and Australia. While Big Pharma may be involved, it isn't our Big Pharma.
What are you using for your video editing? I've been an Adobe honk for years and use Premier all the time. Like most Adobe products, it probably has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to it, it's really powerful and easy.
As for the pH, the treatment is combining two things that are FDA-approved already - chloroquine and zinc. That would imply safety to me, but what do I know?
As for American big pharma, as Ohioan noted to me on a private message, who knows what roadblocks the FDA has erected. Oh well. One can hope that the Trump Administration's penchant for slashing regulations will go into turbo mode here.
What am I doing with my time?
Well for one thing I've been fighting the ever intransigent federal bureaucracy trying to get a W-2 that should have been mailed at least a month ago. The story itself is much like David and Goliath, except that in this version Goliath has phone trees that randomly disconnect you, a bunch of worker bees that are not at their desks (due to CoViD-19), and the casual disinterest we display when we step on an ant (for clarity, I am the ant, and Goliath is stomping me). I'd go into more detail, but it's too long and so confusing that only a former federal worker could possibly appreciate the convolutions.
Once I eventually slay the windmill, my next task is to continue... no, not continue, complete(!) my efforts to scan every photo in our house (I'm actually down to just a couple hundred to go). Once that is done I can start the Herculean task of organizing all the photos (including all the digitals). I did a rough count and that means sorting over 23,000 photos. At the moment I still haven't even figured out HOW to sort them. Chronological makes sense and it is the only thing that has come to mind, so I will probably start doing that. Maybe as I work on it I'll come up with a better method. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them (actually I guess that should be "I'd love to read them").
Tim - that explanation was not something I found terribly persuasive. But KT had sent me this YouTube link . Go to around 1:30. He gives a rough idea of what might actually be happening from a realistic biochemical basis. Far more persuasive and reasonable.
Ohioan, how are you storing your photos once you digitize them? I've moved to iDrive as my offsite backup provider and I love it. Inexpensive, unobtrusive and all kinds of other big words that mean super-de-dooper good.
For now storage is on my computer hard disk and an external backup. Once I have everything, I will put another copy on Mrs Ohioan’s external backup. Once they are organized (and I have deleted all duplicates - I have an estimate on that number and dropped it from my previous estimated total) I will put another copy somewhere offsite. At least a copy to one or more of my kids, even if I have to buy one of them a backup drive. As to cloud storage, I hadn’t even started considering which way to go with that, but I will look into iDrive based on your high recommendation that it is “super-de-dooper good”.
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