At this point I would assume the refusal to have a Zoom playdate is about rejecting Zoom, not rejecting your DD. I don't think there's any reason to believe she will be hostile to you or DD at in-person events.

I'm not sure that it makes positivity mean something else. I mean, maybe if you're testing multiple times a day, but if it's once every few weeks the chance or significance of someone catching the virus this week isn't different depending on whether they had a negative test last week. And if you go by individual people rather than tests and have widespread testing you could get to a situation where your positivity was over 100%. On college campuses that tested everyone on their return to campus that would be the case for the rest of the semester.

Yep. My cousin posted that "masks make kids easier to kidnap" one and following out their numbers about the relative risks of catching COVID and being trafficked there would need to be more kidnapped kids birth to age five in my state than there are people in my state.

Yeah, I wasn't even looking at it until you mentioned it here. I was graphing cases, hospitalizatons, and deaths and not seeing any pattern at all. The first time I graphed percent positivity and compared it to deaths I nearly fell out of my chair.

Hmm. That looks a lot more like the death curve. In fact, if we take that one and advance the dates two weeks and multiply everything by two (the red line) we get a pretty good predictor of what deaths will look like two weeks later (the blue line).

Those two graphs don't seem to have a lot in common. You might even think that after our first drop off cases started going up again toward the end of June but deaths didn't. Perhaps new treatments or better care? But wait! Testing also went way up. If we divide the number of new cases by the number of total tests we get this:

Here are deaths:

Here's MN with graphics. All numbers are from the state Department of Heath, and all are 7 day rolling averages. Here are are new cases reported each day since March:

When my kids were in school we occasionally went negative because of glitches in the payment system (I had it set up to auto-charge my credit card when the account went under $10, but it didn't always work.) The kids still got lunch, the cashier just told them to please remind their parents to put some money in their accounts. Throwing away the food is ridiculous.

This is an awesomesauce study of effective rebreathed volume of air under various conditions. It doesn't test for disease transmission directly, which I think is actually better since it avoids all the complications of whether or not someone with the disease is present. Instead it sets up a tool that can be used for any shared-air situation, not just Covid, but including Covid. The question it's working is how much of what the people around you breathe out are you breathing in. Outside and not directly downwind is minuscule compared to any other situation.

I’m still tracking MN numbers, and it’s still predictive. I have graphs, I’ll see if I can figure out how to post them in the morning.

What on earth?!? Lots of non-Catholic Christians use the Apostles Creed. At some point in elementary school most kids in such churches learn that the Roman Catholic Church exists and ask "how come we say 'catholic' in the creed when we're not catholic?" and the adult/older kid they asked says "the word means universal. Some churches have that as part of their name, but when we say it we aren't referring to their name, we mean the world-wide church that includes all Christians." And the kid says "Oh" and that's that.

I would enroll the kids in distance learning at the public school, and jump through the minimal number of hoops to stay enrolled.

Measure him. Most store websites have a link to click to get the measurement to size info, and if not google the brand.

Side note: Supreme Court decision that controls current abortion laws isn’t Roe v. Wade. It was superseded in 1992 by Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Roe still gets all the attention because of the historic value, but to change the legal landscape of abortion today you’d need to overturn Casey.

We do, however, say that if a person is in your house against your will you can kill them. In some states without a duty to try to avoid doing so and without a requirement to prove that you were in actual danger. And when you believe that you are in danger and acting in self-defense even outside of your home there is no requirement that you do what you can to protect yourself without directly harming the person you believe to be a threat and only harm/kill them as a side effect. Now I think those laws are often applied in hideous and immoral ways, but if the standard is consistency our laws definitely allow killing people in those situations.

You’re doing it wrong. You tell the preteens “ don’t open my nightstand drawer because that’s where your dad and I keep sex stuff.” Then you use that drawer to hide the answer keys for their math book and the good chocolate.

Wait . . . is there a new SE that’s the same size as the older ones? I still have my old SE because I don’t want a bigger phone.

*wince* The first house I bought was vacant for 3 months between when the previous owners moved out and when we moved in. The electricity had been turned off, but in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator was a whole raw chicken and a boxed heat-and-eat chili dog.

Is it? Has anyone here ever flamed anyone for such a thing?

Does anyone else remember grocery stores with conveyor belts that took your groceries outside? You got a card with a number, and they put your bags in a big bin with a matching number and put it on the belt. Then you got your car and drove up to the loading area, gave the worker there the number card and they loaded your groceries. I hadn’t thought of that in years.

I had just finished freezing my credit cards, changing all my passwords, and deleting over 5,000 phishing-type emails because of a (unconnected) breach elsewhere. I came here and my email was showing as my username. The help desk told me what to do to re-set it, but it didn’t work. The choices were to leave it that way until their vendor figured out what the bug was or delete my account and start over. 😞. I don’t think I had any posts that were archivably wonderful, but it’s weird to see my post count so low.

Both. All cells are subject to mutations, but only the ones that effect cells that become eggs and sperm are passed on. That reduces the significant ones from trillions to hundreds. And even then, mostly unnoticeable. I mean, if you passed a mutation to one of your kids that caused their toenails to grow slightly slower than they otherwise would have would anyone ever notice?

I have my same username, but a zeroed out post count and new registration date. I had my account deleted during the emails showing as usernames bug. I assume that’s why a lot of other people changed as well.

I’m not engaging your larger point, since you’ve said you don’t want to, but the bolded is just not true. The vast majority of mutations are neither helpful nor harmful nor even noticed. Here’s an Atlantic article about it. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/your-body-acquires-trillions-of-new-mutations-every-day/559472/