pumpkinhead

This isn't a far-fetched as you might think. This damned virus seems to mutate at an alarmingly fast rate.

Something very important that I didn't mention in my post - the virus mutates very quickly and each of the major variants seems to evade the vaccine of the last major variant.

Here in Australia I will be going to get my 4th shot in a few weeks. I only get one 'flu shot a year though in comparison, and I got MMR decades ago.

People pushing extreme and divisive politics and religious beliefs are more likely to get votes when people are frightened and under stress. Unfortunate but true.

Gain of function research is very important in that you get to see how a pathogen behaves. From this you can formulate a plan/vaccines/treatment etc. It is too difficult to infer from what is already known. You just gotta be careful.

That COVID-19 is new in humans, is incredibly fast spreading, evades both vaccines and tests worries me. Now it just needs to pick up some genes that can cause it to be more deadly and we are in a lot more trouble.

Did a postgrad degree in Mol Bio a while back, and I cannot think of any reason why this virus has/will not pick up genes that would increase its pathogenicity.

"Interesting tidbit, the mongol empire had a significant but indirect part in the "discovery" of the americas by columbus."

So did the Ottomans. Their monopoly of the eastern routes caused the Western kingdoms to go the other direction.

"However, there’s a version of GNAT released by AdaCore called “GNAT Community Edition” which is similar to FSF GNAT but does not provide the runtime exception."

Ok, so if I download the GNAT Community Edition from Adacore, how I do switch GPS to use the FSF GNAT tool chain? How about the static analysis tools? Windows and Linux?

Everytime I look at Ada, I want to start doing a project with it. What a wonderful tool.

That is what exactly I think the Wuhan labs was studying, given that SARS did jump from another animal to human very recently. What would happen if these things mutate naturally and infect humans? They add gain-of-function genes to a near relative, study how it infect cells and come up with a plan to treat it. Except someone dropped some stuff on their shoe and went out shopping to the wet market.

I did plenty of these gain-of-function experiments in my postgrad studies. Mice tumours cells given genes to super-express certain cell adhesion molecules. Without this kind of approach, it is difficult to impossible to study these reactions. You just gotta be careful.

I want one of these to custom-make shoes for me and my family. Son has in-turning soles and the podiatrist has recommended specialist shoes.

Imagine that - the podiatrist can just write configs/settings that you could load into the shoe-maker and we're done.

Then I want a machine to custom-make pants and shirts. The rubbish from the dept store never seems to fit all that well and wear out far too quickly.