Something very important that I didn't mention in my post - the virus mutates very quickly and each of the major variants seems to evade the vaccine of the last major variant.
Here in Australia I will be going to get my 4th shot in a few weeks. I only get one 'flu shot a year though in comparison, and I got MMR decades ago.
People pushing extreme and divisive politics and religious beliefs are more likely to get votes when people are frightened and under stress. Unfortunate but true.
Gain of function research is very important in that you get to see how a pathogen behaves. From this you can formulate a plan/vaccines/treatment etc. It is too difficult to infer from what is already known. You just gotta be careful.
That COVID-19 is new in humans, is incredibly fast spreading, evades both vaccines and tests worries me. Now it just needs to pick up some genes that can cause it to be more deadly and we are in a lot more trouble.
Did a postgrad degree in Mol Bio a while back, and I cannot think of any reason why this virus has/will not pick up genes that would increase its pathogenicity.
"However, there’s a version of GNAT released by AdaCore called “GNAT Community Edition” which is similar to FSF GNAT but does not provide the runtime exception."
Ok, so if I download the GNAT Community Edition from Adacore, how I do switch GPS to use the FSF GNAT tool chain? How about the static analysis tools? Windows and Linux?
Everytime I look at Ada, I want to start doing a project with it. What a wonderful tool.
That is what exactly I think the Wuhan labs was studying, given that SARS did jump from another animal to human very recently. What would happen if these things mutate naturally and infect humans? They add gain-of-function genes to a near relative, study how it infect cells and come up with a plan to treat it. Except someone dropped some stuff on their shoe and went out shopping to the wet market.
I did plenty of these gain-of-function experiments in my postgrad studies. Mice tumours cells given genes to super-express certain cell adhesion molecules. Without this kind of approach, it is difficult to impossible to study these reactions. You just gotta be careful.
Brexit in general. I have been following what looks like an absolute clusterfuck: From the exporters at the border who didn't know they had to have the right paperwork to the Northern Ireland protocol. It looks too awful to be true.
This Brexit thing - it's almost as if the British people didn't know anything at all when they voted for it. So many of them are genuinely surprised at what is happening.
We already have something that serves the purpose. It is called a test suite. Unit and functional tests usually. Keep them updated and run them for every build.
Pharo Smalltalk. For web apps there is Seaside and small restful stuff like Teapot. But I use plain Zinc. Anyways, the famous Smalltalk interactive development makes for the fastest and intuitive experience ever (for me at least). Dolphin Smalltalk for Windows-centric desktop development. And always with SQLite3 at the backend.
Second would be Lua. For web it would be Lua Lapis, which runs in OpenResty. I have also been looking at Lua Tarantool for generic servers.
Windows Terminal with PowerShell.
With Terminal I run git, psql, hg, vim, sqlite.
With PS I slice and dice text, csv, xml, mock up web services and clients, curl, ssh, write helper scripts, etc. Better than any unix shell I have ever used.