Former science reporter at The Washington Post and elsewhere. Disabled by complex chronic post-viral illness. Living on #Kauai#Hawaii. Grew up in Wisconsin. Occasional SCUBA diver.
The contract #Boeing got for a new spaceship was fixed-price, and worth much more than SpaceX got for the same job. Boeing has for decades gotten fat off of cost-plus contracts, meaning they could bloat the project until shareholders were fat & happy & DOD just kept paying them.
One fixed-price contract & they turn into helpless marshmallows.
Informative interview with Svetlana Blitshteyn, a pioneering MD in treating #dysautonomia (autonomic dysfunction), which has exploded with #LongCovid by @erictopol
I would like a $12,000 EV that would be perfect for the small island where I live but Biden admin is putting a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs and American EVs cost $10,000,0000.
Welp the last little pocket of #covid sanity has collapsed. The infusion center I go to regularly just eliminated mandatory masking. One nurse out of eight I can see is wearing one. And I'm the only patient of four masking.
I kinda thought it'd be a permanent policy in a roomful of cancer patients and other sick people. Nope.
I watched a bunch of "Super 70mm Panavision 50s-Style" AI-generated highly stylized movie trailers of films like Dune, Star Wars, LOTR etc. The first four or so were mesmerizing. Then it felt like I had eaten a bag of Cheetos and I got a little nauseous & I never need to see them again.
Conservative policies kill. The longest study comparing death rates during liberal vs conservative rule, in the UK and Australia, looked at a century of data. Same holds in the US.
My friend told me her #cat recently died. It was TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OLD. I asked if she called the Guinness Book people and she said she didn't want to sully her pet's memory with such tacky commercialism.
Well shit. I didn't hear about this when it happened. New affordable #housing complex on Kauai - which we desperately need - burned just two months before move-in dates. Arson a possibility and there was lots of grumbling about this project from NIMBYs. Now a bunch of families looking forward to new apartments have nowhere to go.
Innovative Chinese study that looked at tissue samples from people infected by SARS-CoV-2 finds association between viral persistence and #LongCovid. Although the definition of long covid they used seems to be fairly loose.
Gift link to a good article on a jump in diagnoses of an autonomic nervous system disorder among young women especially, after COVID. It's called POTS, I developed it too after a viral infection and you definitely do not want it.
It's very much a part of the suite of awful things that can happen with #LongCovid.
Physicist Peter Higgs has died. He theorized the subatomic particle that gives mass to matter. One of the great joys of my career was waking up at 3am on July 4, 2012, to report on the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Smiling at my $40 monthly electric bill here in Hawaii, where rates are the highest in the nation.
With rooftop PV, my electricity has negative cost during the day - I run dishwasher & washer/dryer when the sun is out, and the excess gets sold back to Kauai's utility co-op. So I only pay for power at night.
"Beth's work must continue..." a message from Laurie Jones, exec dir. of patient advocacy group ME Action, which was co-founded my late partner Beth Mazur.
Laurie bore a daughter shortly after Beth died and named her Georgina Beth - a beautiful tribute.
