Dave gave blood again last Friday
I hope and pray every one of us is doing everything we can to build up the United States and all Americans—very especially veterans– now when we are beaten down so low by the awful government handling of COVID, by ruinous inflation, by the loss of civil order including Defund the Police, by the “unsustainable” illegal immigration, by losses of Freedom of Speech and Religion and by this “worst-debacle-in-history” abandonment of Afghanistan.
Only 19 months ago we were the strongest-ever nation in the world!
Now thrown on the dust of Afghanistan at the feet of the Taliban lay our nation, our flag, our honor and tens of thousands of us American citizens.
We are all crying… unless we can’t cry anymore.
Everyone– do everything we can to help all of us and our USA!
Inslee’s Aug. 20 Dictates:
Every person in Washington must wear a face covering when they are in a place that is generally accessible to any person from outside their household, subject to specific exceptions and exemptions.
Vaccination required of all education employees, on-site contractors and on-site volunteers at all public and private K-12 schools, public and private 2- and 4-year institutions of higher education, and early learning and child care programs serving children from multiple households.
Info: shpr.fyi/insleeaug20
Vaccinations Rising
The pace of COVID-19 vaccinations keeps rising, with more than 1 million doses of vaccine administered in the United States on Thursday, including 562,000 people getting their first dose, White House COVID-19 Data Director Cyrus Shahpar said on Twitter.
Thursday was the first day more than 1 million vaccinations have been given in the U.S. in seven weeks, he said, noting it was a 31% week-over-week increase in the daily average of people completing the vaccine series.
Info: shpr.fyi/vaccsrising
SpaceX Lifts Super Heavy booster up on launchpad then mounts Starship on top
SpaceX’s first orbital Starship SN20 is stacked atop its massive Super Heavy Booster 4 for the first time on Aug. 6, 2021. They stood 395 feet tall, taller than NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket.
Puts spaceship temporarily on top making world’s tallest-ever rocket
Then SpaceX’s newest Starship prototype was briefly placed atop of its massive booster for the first time setting a new record for the world’s tallest rocket.
Engineers performed the stacking test at the SpaceX Starbase facility in South Texas, near the village of Boca Chica, in view of livestreams from NASA Spaceflight and Spadre.com. Multi-billionaire U.S. ruler oligarch Elon Musk sent an update suggesting the company actually wanted to complete the stacking Thursday (Aug. 5), a few hours after Starship completed its rollout to the launch pad, but winds were too high.
The Starship and its Super Heavy booster were mated for about an hour for fit checks, during which time the two vehicles posed a towering site. Super Heavy alone stands 230 feet tall and Starship SN4 added another 165 feet of height. Together they stood a whopping 395 feet tall, taller than NASA’s massive Saturn V moon rocket, which was 363 feet tall.
Info: shpr.fyi/superheavy
Info: shpr.fyi/superhvystarship
Matter created from energy
In a stunning demonstration of one of Einstein’s most famous equations, physicists are claiming to have created matter from pure light for the very first time.
Albert Einstein’s famous E=mc^2 equation says that if you smash two sufficiently energetic photons, or light particles, into each other, you should be able to create matter in the form of an electron and its antimatter opposite, a positron.
Virtual particles are particles that only pop into existence very briefly as disturbances in the fields that exist between real particles. They don’t have the same masses as their real counterparts (unlike their real counterparts that have no mass, virtual photons do have a mass). In this experiment, when the ions zipped past each other in a near miss, their two clouds of virtual photons were moving so fast that they acted as if they were real. The real-acting virtual particles collided — producing a very-much-real electron-positron pair with mass that the scientists detected.
Info: shpr.fyi/matterfromlight
COVID infections up
For the first time since early February, the U.S. reported more than 900,000 COVID-19 cases last week, rising back to pre-vaccination levels, according to USA Today.
Info: shpr.fyi/900kcovid
Cost of vaccinations
Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine costs $19.50 per dose, compared with $15 for Moderna’s shot, $16 for Novavax’s, $10 for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and $4 for AstraZeneca’s.
Info: shpr.fyi/vacccost
Delta variant stretching hospital capacity
From UW Medicine:
While over 95% of current surge cases are occurring among people who are unvaccinated, many of whom thus chose behavior likely to result in infection, the surge also causes significant capacity challenges at hospitals across Washington state.
Every hospital seeks to safely provide hospital care to patients who need it most. In response to the current surge in cases, healthcare organization across the state are working with state and public health leaders on short-term and mid-term solutions to improve hospital capacity. This includes reviewing all non-urgent inpatient surgeries scheduled in the next month and contacting patients whose surgeries can safely be rescheduled to a later date. We want to reassure you that all urgent surgeries and all outpatient surgeries and procedures will proceed as planned. In addition, all of our clinics remain open so please reach out for an appointment if you need care.
We must “flatten the curve” again!
While the rapid spread of the Delta variant is a disappointing setback in our fight against the pandemic, it also reminds us of what we must do individually and collectively to bring this fifth wave of COVID-19 under control.
Get vaccinated! Wear your mask in public indoors!
Info: shpr.fyi/hospstrain
Dave Bunting, Aug. 23, 2021