🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

How is this even constitutional?

#USPol

@djsumdog

Deadlier viruses burning out faster is a myth and I debunked that when you mentioned it a month ago or however long.

I can understand why it might seem that way though since deadliest viruses tend to be viruses not present in the general population and are novel.. novel viruses do tend to be easier to contain and dont have very insidious transmission routes.

@icedquinn @giantbug

@djsumdog

regardless to any of that, we knew vbefore this all started that excessive lockdowns dont fix viruses in the wild. They help in short bursts when you have a local excessive outbreak, rolling lockdowns.. but not the way we are doing it.. Even polio didnt have continual lockdowns across the board.

@icedquinn @giantbug

@icedquinn

Yea its all preliminary and at best they have hints of data at most any of this.. they have blown it so out of perportion they are basically just guessing and throwing whatever nonsense at it.

Dont get me wrong COVID is real and all, but fear has dominated the handling of it to such an extent that it is wreckless. Largely because what we know to be good practice in this situation is the opposite of what the general public perceives as good practice, so you get this sort of situation where fear breeds a worse environment to a rather extreme extent.

@djsumdog @giantbug

@icedquinn

They are already going on about shit with a new strain that they think the vaccine wont cover... exactly what I said stood a good chance of happening. Several times I pointed out due to the nature of the virus vaccines arent likely to solve it and at best will help for a short period. Seems thats how its playing out (though too early to really say for sure).

@djsumdog @giantbug

@tripu centrist libertarian, but not too libertarian.. I call that the sweet spot!

@zleap

So im all for open source and before i go on my thoughts let me just say I agree and would prefer it to be opensource under public domain just because I think most things should be, not because its public money.

With that said thinking about the argument of public money therefore open source, in truth no money is public in a world-wide sense. If its tax money then its really just public within the scope of that particular country.

So if we really wanted to apply that logic in the most objective way possible I think you'd have to argue that anything paid for with tax money should be open-source but only for members of the country that paid for it. So members of the country can integrate the code into their own products and then sell it as closed source to the rest of the world.

This would probably create a competitive edge and countries would do more open-source in their own self interest and I think you might see this encourages more countries to hop on the bandwagon.

@fsfe

@M33

Lovely! I just did!

@Science @rpibot

@Science

I was asked to explain the space-weather ticker I posted earlier (attached). This was my reply.

## ionosphere

First off the are two categories of radio operation that is relevant and effected in opposite ways..

1. space to earth
2. earth-to-earth.

Number 2 breaks down in two ways as well that is

2a. line of sight operation, vs
2b. skywave operation.

Skywave operation is really the most relevant here, line of sight might be effected somewhat by noise floor effects from sun but that is only relevant some of the time.

### Reflection Layers

There are two main factors from the sun that affect operation. One is radio interference, this would be caused by flares and ejections directed at earth. In extreme cases it can cause an EMP but thats very rare.

The other is ionizing radiation in the form of UV (a much shorter wavelength version of UV than what reaches the earth), ionized particles, solar wind and similar. This ionizes the ionosphere in a specific way that causes radio waves to be blocked and/or reflected. Basically there are two regions in the ionosphere both in whats called the F-region.. These are F1 which is at 200 km above sea level, and F2 which is at 300 km. The higher F2 layer allows for radio signals at a particular angle to be reflected, this allows radio operators to bounce their signals off this part of the sky and reach distant receivers. Since F2 is much closer to the ground this particular region actually blocks long range communication and thus significantly reduces the distance a radio signal can reach to mostly line of sight.

Usually, when the radiation is high enough, we see the F2 layer ionize first in the morning (basically when the sun is just coming up for people who live near your horizon), which makes the morning the best time to transmit. By afternoon the F1 layer is ionized by sun radiation and thus the signal is blocked again.. the reverse happens in the evening. So early and late day propagation is best. This is called gray-line propagation.

There is also E layer propagation which operates at much lower frequencies and at steeper angles. This is what is used for very short distance transmissions within the 100's of km. This is called NVIS (Near Vertical Incidents Skywave).

## Reading the screencap

Now with this said, it only works when the radiation from the sun is just right. Basically there needs to be enough radiation from the sun to actually fully ionize the layers.

### SFI

SFI on the chart stands for "solar flux index" this is a measure of the quantity of ionized particles and solar wind measured. This is usually in the range of 0 - 400 with 0 - 100 being poor for propagation, 0 - 200 being marginal, and 200+ being ideal/good.

### SN

SN stands for sunspot numbers, these effect different layers selectively. sunspots reflect the intensity of the sun's magnetic field. It ranges from about 0 to 400 as well.

Lower values here show a preference to ionize lower levels of our ionosphere. 0 to about 150 will preferentially ionize the E-region and be ideal for low frequency propagation (160m wavelength to 80M) in the NVIS configuration, so very short distance (100's of km) propagation only which is all these low frequencies can ever do.

Higher values, above 200 means the F-regions are preferentially ionized. That means low frequencies like 160m and 80m will not propagate at all and only work line of sight (10's of km), but higher frequencies ~20m and higher in frequency will propagate via skywave. These frequencies now can propagate 1000's of km around the world in these conditions (assuming SFI and other factors are good).

### K index

The next line is K-index just labeled K. This one is rather complicated.. it basically looks at the horizontal component of the earth's magnetic field and how it is disturbed (which is an indirect way of measuring the solar winds and its interaction of the earth).

This doesn't effect the ionosphere itself so much as the other measures since its only partly effected by solar winds. This is used as a measure of expected band noise and thus how high the noise floor will be. the max value is 9 and indicates significant noise. 5 is about the cutoff where geomagnetic storms are present.

The K-index is not linear and is calculated from the a-index (lowercase a, different from A-index below).

### A-index

is really just another way of measuring K-index. Or to be more precise both A-index and K-index are calculated from the underlying a-index (a-index is different from A-index). The A-index is the average of the last 8 a-index, and thus has a much simpler interpretation.

Think of A-index as a long-term rolling average of the K-index in a different scale.

Generally A-index is even less linear than K-index with 0-50 being low noise and 100 - 400 being high noise.. lower is better.

### 304A

304A stands for "304 Angstroms" which is the wavelength of UV light measures. Basically its the strength of UV radiation from the sun as measured from space (different than earth UV levels). the "@ SEM" part refers to the instrument on the satellite used to record it, called SEM, SOHO and EVE are other possible instruments used to get this measurement and it changes depending on the instrument available at the time.

In this case higher is better as it means more of that F-layer ionization I mentioned.below 80 is poor, 150 and up is good, 250 and up is amazing.

### Ptn/Elec Flux

This is Proton and Electron flux. These have a similar effect as UV except they ionize the E-layer more so than the F-layer. So they harm long distance short wavelength propagation but improve short distance long wave-length propagation.

### Aurora

This is just the predicted chance of aurora. Not directly relevant for radio.

### Aur Lat

This tells us the largest lattitude likely to see the aurora.

### Bz and SW

This is the interplanetary (in space) magnetic field vector (B-field means magnetic field). This is the magnetic field that is incoming and striking the earth from space.

The Bz part is the intensity, the SW part is the direction in degrees. When it lines up with the earths magnetic field it strengthens it, when it doesnt it weakens it. Positive values strengthen it, negative weaken it.

### other values

Everything else is self explanatory I suspect. "solar flare prob" is the percentage change of a solar flare, which we dont tend to know until just a few minutes before their ejections strike.

"MUF" stands for "Maximum Usable Frequency". It indicates the highest frequency (shortest wavelength) that is likely to be capable of bouncing off the ionosphere (f-layer or e-layer) and therefore the highest frequency capable of skywave propagation.

#radio #rf #science #space #spaceweather #ham #hamradio #QOTOJournal

@mur2501 if you find a text book that actually laid out each of the fields on the screencap one by one and explained them, sure... I dont know of one.

@mur2501 Nah, its all from memory. I look at this data often enough.

@moth_ball Those were monthly prices.. for comparison in the netherlands I was paying 200 euro a month.. european prices are certainly a bit cheaper, but not by the huge margins people usually claim.

Keep in mind there are other limitations in european healthcare.. you dont have access to certain medications (like adderall), and you do not have the guaranteed privacies you would in the USA (for example in most universal healthcare countries if you have a prescription for controlled substances it is tracked on a public list).

@trinsec I spent some time looking for public data on it.. while I have plenty of private data to pull from public seems lacking. I literally provided the only 2 public sources I could find that compares USA to europe. If you have better sources that show specialist and elective wait times please feel free to share.

@moth_ball Well average is a bit misleading.. Many people who get insurance in the USA get it to cover elective treatments too which foreign insurance doesnt cover and would need supplemental insurance to get.

But on average our insurance is 425$... what is more telling is the **minimal** cost for insurance. In other words, whats the cost for insurance that covers only medical necessities and none of the nice optional stuff. for that its int he range of 200$ - 300$ for middle class families with decent income.. the poorer you are the cheaper it can be as there are programs the subsidize insurance cost for low-income families. Below a certain income level it becomes free.

It is funny because this is 100% fact.

@Clovis@mstdn.fr

I'd partly agree, lack of free market and cost reducing policies is probably a factor that reduces the number of nurses per capita and thus availability of care.

@Zach777

@Clovis@mstdn.fr

Whatever the reason the result is you wait less and thus the deaths and permanent injuries that often occur from not getting prompt treatment is reduced.

@Zach777