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Cake day: 2023年6月22日

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  • What Macron has lately been calling “far-left” would have been considered middle of the road leftism only a couple years ago. Macron has pulled such a massive shift of the Overton window --what with calling himself a centrist when all of his policies are right-wing, and constantly calling anyone that’s left of him “far-left”-- that it’s no surprise right-wing extremism is totally normalized now. LFI is not far-left, and I wish the media would stop repeating and thus normalizing that idea.



  • That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.

    At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone’s pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It’s just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.


  • The article you linked to is about suppressyn, an originally viral protein that’s been integrated in human DNA and is as far as I know only expressed in placenta. There suppressyn helps fight viral infections by competing with some families of viruses for the binding of a membrane receptor (ASCT2) that these viruses use as a way to recognize and attach themselves to target cells.

    It seems NCLDV infects unicellular algae and protists, with at least some of the family members relying on phagocytosis by the host, and many of them displaying fibrils on their particles. And though the binding mechanisms probably differ between different viruses of the NCLDV family, I really doubt these host organisms express ASCT2.




  • According to the paper this article is based on, the family of viruses they study, called NCLDV (for NucleoCytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses), are about 1 μm in diameter, which would indeed put them up there with the largest viruses like Pandoravirus or Pithovirus, which are also around the micrometer mark, and I believe are also part of the NCLDV phylum.

    Those viruses are about the size of a bacterium. In fact they are so large that they weren’t immediately identified as viruses. Here’s something to give you a sense of the size of common viruses :

    However, I don’t know how they come up with that 1500x factor (which doesn’t appear in the source paper), since in size, it’s more like 10x bigger than your average virus (~100nm). Even considering genome size, common viruses genomes are about 10 kb or so, wheras Pandoravirus is the biggest at 2.5Mb. So that would be closer to a 250x factor at best.

    For reference, SARS-CoV2 (of COVID-19 fame) is about 100nm in diameter and has a genome size of 30kb.



  • TL,DR : CO2 concentration in air is easily measured and has been used as a proxy to monitor the level of potentially infectious particle people would release in a room while breathing. The idea is the more people breathe, the more they release CO2 and also possibly infectious particles.

    It turns out that CO2 also plays an important role in buffering the pH of the aerosolized particles in which viruses like SARS-CoV2 travel from one person to the next. Dissolved CO2 is slightly acidic and prevents the particles from becoming too basic, which would destroy the virions. Thus higher CO2 concentrations in ambient air significantly extend the survival of the airborne virus and therefore the average time these particles remain infectious.

    A CO2 concentration of just 800ppm (parts per million), while usually considered a value consistent with a well ventilated room, is nevertheless enough to significantly extend the lifespan of viruses. This means we should strive to lower CO2 concentrations in rooms as much as we can during epidemics.