Re: OT: Covid's True Origins

Like renaming the gulf of Mexico? Or expelling the Palestinians to make place for some casinos? pretty casinos, very pretty casinos? With TRUMPET in big golden capital letters on them, pretty letters, very very pretty letters?

They don't have a president, they have a king wannabe. And that king has no clothes. Can you imagine DT nekkid? Let alone someone kissing his wrinkled arse? aaaargh....

I've read a substantial portion of the Slack messages and emails referenced in this article:

talk about yawn-town.

Seems like Congress discovered academics employed by the CDC under the first Trump administration can believe stupid things as well as anyone. They must be sorta smart though they seemed able to confine being dumb to their Slack messages and not tell everyone who they thought would listen (whether the victim felt like listening, or not.) That's a very difficult skill for many people to master it would probably take like 15 years of academic study for the average American to develop it.

"The Republican subcommittee deemed it a co-ordinated 'attempt to kill the lab leak theory'”.

Hey wait a minute I thought there was going to be evidence of a Chinese lab leak here but I guess the best they could produce was evidence of "a conspiracy to kill the lab leak theory" which isn't quite the same thing.

Producing actual evidence of the former might require learning Mandarin for a start and there's almost nobody in all of Congress, much less the R side of the aisle, equipped for that task.

Well no one's perfect. And you can't take anything he says too literally as he does have a whacky sense of humor as well know.

That is to say a lot of citizens voted based on emotion, and the only crazier people to show up to vote than the people voting on emotion was anyone trying to vote on logic.

This isn't any kind of summary. It's Cursitor Doom's demented idea of what went on.

There's nothing crazy about using logic to work out who you will vote for. The US problem is that the political parties spread out a lot of misinformation - election propaganda - and a lot of the electorate is too poorly educated to reject the misinformation.

Donald Trump is remarkably good at putting the kind of emotional wrapper on his misinformation that makes it attractive to the less well-educated

- people like Cursitor Doom and John Larkin - and the US public has been hit by a lot of nonsense over the years - Joe McCarthy and Ronald Regan come mind. and George W. Bush and his non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Irak. They haven't learned as much scepticism as they should have. Cursitor Doom is only sceptical about correct information - if it isn't implausible he isn't interested.

So you don't think there was anything suspicious about the CCP denying the delegation from the WHO access to the bat virus lab for a fortnight whilst they removed all the evidence you're now crowing about the absence of?

The imaginary evidence that you seem to want to believe in.

The Chinese Communist Party would have been documenting everything so that when Trump's stooges got into the lab and tried to plant "evidence" they be able to show that it had been planted.

With fantasists like you around, it's hard to prove a negative - you just imagine one more thoroughly implausible way in which they might have cheated.

Well, square waves give rise to lots of harmonics which can be useful. But what about triangles and sawtooths. Any interesting properies hidden away in those?

Periodic waveforms are all boring. They just do the same thing, over and over.

A complex pulse can do interesting things. Spin an airplane. Fuse deuterium-tritium. Trigger a megaton boom.

I wish the world would move on from the slide rule and graph paper days, narrowband s-parameters and Smith charts and load pulls. We have computers now.

With the right effectors to translate the electrical waveform into the physical displacement of moving mass.

But if you don't know enough to understand what the computer could be telling you, the computer is less helpful than it might be.

The narrow road to comprehension is more easily negotiated with the right crutches. What worked in the historical past can still work today. There may be an easier route through more easily comprehended computer graphics but I've not seen any evidence to suggest that it has yet been found.

Sloman is boring. He just does the same thing, over and over.

It's dumb *not* to use computers for the complicated and trap-ridden calculations relating to impedance transformations, filters and transmission lines. *However* if someone using computers for this purpose hasn't been schooled in the derivation of the calculations by learning how the Smith Chart was developed and how it got that scary, warped shape, then they're going to be too far abstracted from the underlying physics to be able to understand fully what's going on under the hood. And they'll be that much poorer for it. Like people who use rules-based calculus to solve problems because they have little understanding of the nuts and bolts of derivatives and integrals. Ask them to solve a new problem and they're lost!

No, don't just automate the antique concepts. We need Spice For RF, genuine wideband time-domain analysis. Anything interesting is nonlinear anyhow.

I develop my own Spice models for MMICs and phemts and distributed amplifiers and other RF parts. That usually involves measurements, because most RF parts don't even specify DC things. Some data sheets say "adjust the bias until it works" or "ac couple the input and output."

I drive electro-optical modulators with narrow pulses. The RF part data sheets assume a continous, symmetrical sine wave. I can get twice the swing for pulses if I bias a distributed amp way off-center.

RF parts seem to specify their abs max voltage assuming that a sine wave might swing from ground to 2xVcc, but the data sheet specifies abs max Vcc. So one has to cheat.

Testing a $300 distributed amplifier chip for its genuine abs max output voltage limit is emotionally tricky.

It's a deeply paranoid and authoritarian regime (like some others one could mention), doing suspicious things is their stock & trade, that's any given Tuesday in the power structure of the PRC.

Like an American's insurance company delay and deny is what they do, it'd probably be more suspicious if they extended a warm invitation. "Oh yeah sure, we're cool with that!"

????? What did you do with the devil I know

Anyway, some of the best evidence we have that the market was the origin is THAT'S WHERE THE BULK OF THE EARLY CASES WERE, people who lived in that area, many of whom had confirmed contact with the market. Not around the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the better part of 10 miles away to the southeast.

Straight-up Dr. John Snow London 1854 cholera-outbreak stuff, back to the contaminated well, in the neighborhood with the most cases. Not some _other_ goddamn well 10 miles away..

When people like John Larkin post the same misinformation over and over again, the responses do tend to become stereotyped.

Yes, they're generally poor on detail for sure.

You should get yourself a curve-tracer - or design one (and share that with me so I can build one).:)

I would imagine so, yes. However, at least today you can launch a crowd-funding appeal to share the burden. ;-)

Sorry, not buying it. I don't know if you actually believe the nonsense you wrote or not, but it's what we've come to expect from you and Bill Sloman. Do you get a stipend from the CCP for your services?

I certainly don't. You seem to share Jim Thompson's delusion that anybody who isn't rabidly pro-American is anti-American, and have added in the idea that anybody who isn't rabidly anti-Chinese is pro-Chinese.

Most people are a little more complicated than that, and most people are smart enough to cope with actual human behavior.

The proposition that Covid-19 is a Chinese biological weapon is grossly implausible and you do like your nonsense to be flagrantly implausible.

I'm not sure whether Trump suffers from the same disease, or just makes fatuous claims as an attention-getting device. It takes a fairly high level of ignorance to carry it off, and you and Donald Trump have got that in spades.