Choice: Vaccinate or Murder

It really is that simple. Vaccinate yourself, and your children, or you could murder someone.

Bad Astronomer and President of the JREF, Dr. Phil Plait, has a post up on his blog about a recent Australian News story. A 4 week old girl died of Whooping cough in a region of Australia where only 1 in 3 children are vaccinated. The girl, who would normally be protected by herd immunity until she could receive the vaccination herself, was 1 of 3 children in a month with such severe whooping cough that she had to be air lifted to another hospital- she was the only one of the three who died.

Whooping Cough isn't Ebola, it doesn't kill every person who gets it; it's not even Marburg. But Whooping Cough can kill, and those deaths are entirely preventable. The anti-vaxxers- those people opposed to all or some vaccinations- are killing children with ignorance, stupidity, and fear mongering. Notice, in the video below, how the anti-vaxxer Meryl Dorey claims that whooping cough and measles don't kill people, and cause Autism. Except the whole thing is about how whooping cough killed that poor baby, and as the Doctor points out there are absolutely no links between vaccination and autism. (Measles can kill)(Autism rates have spiked due to an expanded understanding and definition of Autism; and better, more intensive, efforts to identify people with it.) (And let's not even get started on how horri-bad Polio is!)

Read the original article, by the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, at his blog Bad Astronomy, and/or watch the video below. Then share this story with anyone you know who thinks vaccinations are optional.



For further, informed, reading about Vaccinations, I recommend the Science Based Medicine Blog. It's written by doctors, and contains this funny little concept I like to call: science. This link takes you to all their posts on Vaccines.


-or-

Displayed to EVERYONE...

Hidden, except for interested readers.
Read More...

Satellite Collisions COULD KILL US ALL!

We've all heard about the satellite wreck, the other day. Well, Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer and President of the JREF, did some math. And failed. So he did some MOAR math and was full of win- deadly, megaton, kilo-rifle-shot, win:

Remember, I’m trying to be very rough here; I don’t care if I’m off in my numbers by a factor or two or not; I just want an approximation.

The kinetic energy of an object is equal to 1/2 x its mass x its velocity^2. Again, because I’m being really rough here, it doesn’t matter which satellite hits the other. We can assume they have about the same mass, so the kinetic energy (in ergs, which I’ll explain in a second) is

KE = 0.5 x 700,000 grams x (800,000 cm/sec)^2 =
2 x 10^17 ergs

An erg is a small unit of energy, but 200,000,000,000,000,000 is a lot of them. Blowing up a ton of TNT releases about 4 x 10^16 ergs, so this collision was roughly the equivalent of lobbing 5 tons of TNT at the satellites.

but that's not all...

Read More...*

That’s why there’s a large cloud of expanding debris; each piece of shattered satellite carried away a piece of that violent energy release. The energy of collision changed the orbits of all those shards, so they are now orbiting the Earth on new paths that take them higher or lower over the surface, right into the traffic lanes of other satellites.

So eventually, some may once again find an object in their way. And because of the high velocity, the kinetic energy of impact even from a low-mass piece can be pretty fierce. A rifle bullet does a huge amount of damage when it hits something, and it has a mass of about 10 grams and moves at a paltry 1 km/sec. Now think of the damage inflicted by a small satellite chunk that masses about 1 kg (100 times as much as the bullet) and moving 8 times faster… the energy of impact is 6400 times that of the bullet. Imagine getting hit by six thousand rifle bullets, and you start to get an idea of why satellite collisions are not just catastrophic for the two birds involved, but also a danger to other objects in orbit as well.

So, maybe we all won't die- but the Earth just got a little bit more like RIFTS, in which we're all dead.

*Something stupid happened with the code I'm using to mash blogger into acting like a legitimate blog, and hiding the lengthy bits of my rambling posts. (Much like that sentence). So, I had to rig the rigged code into working, and the "Read More..." link is a permanent part of this post. Hopefully, this issue won't carry over into other posts.
Read More...

Anti-Vax Fakery Discovered

Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy is discussing the news from the UK based Sunday Times, that the original study finding a link between vaccinations and negative health effects in children was faked.

If these allegations are true, then it means that Wakefield out-and-out lied in his original work. He has denied this, according to the Sunday Times, but won’t make further comments.

This may cause a firestorm in the antivax community, but there are two things I will guarantee: the first is that in the end antivaxxers will stick to their beliefs that vaccines cause health problems like autism, because this is not and never has been, for them, about the facts and evidence. It’s a belief system, and like most other belief systems, it is impenetrable to evidence. If you have any doubts, I suggest you read the comments to the post I made the other day about measles being on the rise in the UK. One commenter on that post is saying all manners of outrageous things, and ignores the evidence that I (and a pediatrician) have left in the comments to him.

find the whole thing: here.
Read More...