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A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

nytimes.com

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Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#151

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #99
UncleOxidant wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Perl Traumatic Stress Disorder from too much Perl in the 90s. Just looking at Perl code makes me break out in a cold sweat. I wish I were kidding. Otherwise, just noted that it was written in Perl.

Ok. It came across as a value judgement. Personally I don't much care what its written in, executable line noise or anything else as long as practitioners of that particular language do not find anything wrong with it. Scientists typically don't particularly care about the latest and greatest software development environments and practices, they simply need answers. The best way to deal with that is to help out, I pe…

[deleted]

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#152

Post by undersuit »

asveikau wrote: post #142
WalterBright wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other things we have today that mitigate spread: 1. sanitation 2. hand washing 3. understanding of how the disease spreads (not swamp gas) 4. knowing that throwing virgins into volcanoes does not work 5. clean water

Have we really done a thorough scientific test of #4?

Maybe it's not all volcanoes, just the ones on ley lines.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#153

Post by kragen »

sinsterizme wrote: post #28
nonameiguess wrote: post #10

People keep posting archive links to "non-paywalled" copies, but the study itself has freely available full-text not behind a paywall. No need to read the NY Times at all. Just go straight to the source: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

I’d personally rather read the NYT article because it’s much easier to understand as a layman

That's not helpful if what the NYT article says is wrong, which it probably is. As a general rule, any popular-press story about a scientific paper is wrong, usually dramatically, spectacularly wrong. I'm invariably better off just reading the paper's abstract.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#154

Post by vlovich123 »

moralestapia wrote: post #141
vlovich123 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually dug into it, & it's not clear. Rust & many C libraries do outperform Perl if you can stick to an NFA regex. If you like backtracking & lookaround, then it's not clear that Perl loses that much in performance. The language itself is definitely better suited to writing those regexes all over the place, so if you have two axes of performance & regex usability, I wouldn't discount Perl for those use-cases. I d…

I actually programmed it, for that exact scenario, and there's some really nice C++ libraries that outperform Perl, even in the cases you mentioned. Sure, Perl it's easier, but not necessarily faster. You can downvote this comment as well, code is code at the end of the day :^)

I’m not downvoting you. I shared your prior but I couldn’t find any benchmarks showing it in a fair comparison. Now of course it’s entirely possible that bioinformatics applications don’t really need Perl features in most applications so they would benefit from something else. Rust also has fancy regex crate that has an advanced fused implementation to detect when it can use the faster form automatically. But I haven’t found any benchmarks definitively showing other implementations beating Perl in use cases it’s optimized for (complex backtracking and lookaround).

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#155

Post by londons_explore »

blocked_again wrote: post #96
binarymax wrote: post #29

“It should make us worry,” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.” Should it though? Seems like we've survived this many times as a species, and now have the technology to combat it! I'm more optimistic with this information…

Our great ancestors were not doing gain of function research on viruses. If countries continues to do gain of function research on viruses we might not last the next two or three decades. No labs are 100% failproof. And there have been multiple cases of leaks even from the top security BSL4 labs.

Time we made BSL5, which is like dealing with a nuclear reactor. Everything is sealed inside when the lab is built, and lab operators operate everything remotely. No atoms ever enter or leave the lab during its lifespan.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#156

Post by f6v »

hatware wrote: post #124
f6v wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to never hear about another coronavirus again. We should definitely hear about coronavirus again and again until everyone learns that millions of people might die unless we completely master immunology. Public awareness, safety measures, and vaccine development should get as much attention as possible until we have a pipeline that allows to develop and distribute vaccines in a matter of months. We never kn…

> until everyone learns See, that's the problem. You can't force anything, but you present it as a "must be done at all costs" proposition. That's very disingenuous. Regardless, I think you missed my point. Some of us are just sick and tired of every crusade that dominates the news cycle with severe lack of pragmatism. There are plenty of more important issues than coronavirus and it sounds like you're suffering from…

> You can't force anything

Sounds like you don’t have the right perspective.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#157

Post by noduerme »

lamontcg wrote: post #144
LocalPCGuy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time. That's all I'm saying. That could be on par with the jet engine example, but if so, then all the people saying we need to learn from Covid and adjust our immunology strategies are worrying about low possibility items also. Anyways, I'll defer to you on this, I'm definitely not an expert, and you were willing…

> From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time. I've read literally nothing credible that suggests that immune escape will ever be complete. There are people who are "concerned" or "worried" about it or will argue that "we can't say" But they're basically the same people who were arguing that the vacccines that we were producing that produced strong neu…

Your logic seems fairly sound as far as the future trajectory of covid-19, if history is a guide. What I've been wondering and I'd put to you is, do you think the T-cell response to the mRNA vaccines / infection will also confer immunity or decrease the severity of MERS? Or other more distantly related wild coronaviruses?

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#158

Post by f6v »

nomel wrote: post #148
f6v wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last thing we should do is to be laid back about this or next viruses. If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed.

> If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed. I don't think we can use the luck we had with this vaccine to justify risky releases in the future.

The 5-10 year drug development cycle isn’t something that should stay that way forever. It’s incredibly slow and we should change that.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#159

Post by autokad »

realiswhatyoufe wrote: post #36
justapassenger wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agenda of science - how dare they talk about vaccines or viruses jumping between spices. I read on Facebook while I was pooping, that vaccines are evil and don't work, and viruses only exists in our world, because people are engineering them! That's the truth, that has no agenda behind it! /s

Geez. Taking the parent post in horrible faith, really unfortunate to see on this platform. All the parent did was point out a few comments from the piece which certainly add a tinge of bias - stating with certainty that Covid was not lab-made for one.

"No voices should have been silenced, no ideas should have been left off the table. Open Data. Open Science. Open honest scientific communication was the way, not censorship. There are a lot of bad ideas that are wrong, bad, or dangerous. But the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas they are is the moment we lose our ability to find the truth, to find solutions, the very things that make science beautiful and powerful." - Lex Fridman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rszIyPnBvYc

We live in the ultimate year of censorship. So many have taken part of or defended it. All who have done that have made humanity a little worse, made living in this world for everyone, a little worse. Shame on you.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#160

Post by Karsteski »

f6v wrote: post #156
hatware wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until everyone learns See, that's the problem. You can't force anything, but you present it as a "must be done at all costs" proposition. That's very disingenuous. Regardless, I think you missed my point. Some of us are just sick and tired of every crusade that dominates the news cycle with severe lack of pragmatism. There are plenty of more important issues than coronavirus and it sounds like you're suffering from…

> You can't force anything Sounds like you don’t have the right perspective.

Sounds like you enjoy legislating us into police states, to be honest.
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