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Showing posts from October, 2020

Good Afternoon

Have you ever finished eating lunch, cause let's rest this afternoon and we'll have some fun again.

Classical Elements: Overview & History

Originally written in October 21, 2020. Overview Classical elements typically refer to the concepts of earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Greece, Persia, Babylonia, Japan, Tibet, and India had all similar lists, sometimes referring in local languages to "air" as "wind" and the fifth element as "void". The Chinese Wu Xing system lists Wood (木 mù), Fire (火 huǒ), Earth (土 tǔ), Metal (金 jīn), and Water (水 shuǐ), though these are described more as energies or transitions rather than as types of material. These different cultures and even individual philosophers had widely varying explanations concerning their attributes and how they related to observable phenomena as well as cosmology. Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities. Some of these interpretations included atomism (the idea of ver...

When will the COVID-19 pandemic end?

In 1920, a world wearied by the First World War and sickened by the 1918 flu pandemic desperately sought to move past the struggles and tragedies and start to rebuild lives. People were in search of a “return to normalcy,” as Warren G. Harding put it. Today, nearly every country finds itself in a similar position. More than eight months and 900,000 deaths into the COVID-19 pandemic,1 people around the world are longing for an end. In our view, there are two important definitions of “end,” each with a separate timeline: 1. An epidemiological end point when herd immunity is achieved. One end point will occur when the proportion of society immune to COVID-19 is sufficient to prevent widespread, ongoing transmission. Many countries are hoping that a vaccine will do the bulk of the work needed to achieve herd immunity. When this end point is reached, the public-health-emergency interventions deployed in 2020 will no longer be needed. While regular revaccinations may be needed, perhaps simil...