The vaccine antigen technology, developed by the University of Cambridge and spin-out DIOSynVax in early 2020, provided protection against all known variants of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – as well as other major coronaviruses, including those that caused the first SARS epidemic in 2002.

The studies in mice, rabbits and guinea pigs [...] found that the vaccine candidate provided a strong immune response against a range of coronaviruses by targeting the parts of the virus that are required for replication.

Professor Jonathan Heeney from Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, who led the research, [said] “We wanted to come up with a vaccine that wouldn’t only protect against SARS-CoV-2, but all its relatives.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1002345

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-023-01094-2

So I just finished Mission Impossible, latest movie, in the theater. I tend to avoid Mr. Cruise because of him personally, but darn it if he's not a decent actor and usually has a top notch crew. Also, Simon Pegg filters some of the evil. I give it a B+. What's relevant to my tale is that the movie features an evil, possibly sentient, very pervasive AI that is very accurate in its predictions.

After the movie ended, I brought forth my iphone to look at while the credits rolled to a post-credits scene that never came. I glanced at a newsletter, which had "Pickleball" in the subject line. Now, I happen to think that pickleball is a sign of the apocalypse, and that the 1000 years of satan's rule will look a lot like Wall-E (who is obviously Christ). I was mulling posting a quip about that, and thought further that the quippiest way to do that was to talk about life on the ship in Wall-E. So I tapped the search bar and started typing "what is the name of the ship . . ." and, this where it gets freaky, before I could continue to tap out "in Wall-E" Siri suggested the fandom page for Wall-E.

Bzzz-wut? I checked my histories, I have not mentioned Wall-E or pickleball anywhere, to my recollection, I have never even mentioned it to anyone (I have probably complained abut pickleball in a general sense). As far as I know, the concept has only ever lived in my mind.

Now, I don't, as I sit here in this moment, believe that Siri can detect my thoughts. But it is a downright Fortean confluence of seemingly unconnected mental activity and external reality. I found (in my very short search) only one other mention, at hipinions.com of pickleball being related to Wall-e. If it is not merely coincidence, and not AI reading my mind, it is very peculiar and particularly well timed and specific predictive association by the AI, and one which I am certainly not entirely comfortable with, perhaps the first time I have ever had such a hmmm moment with technology.

It might be interesting what happens next, now that I have entered this datum into the AI's processing materials. Watch this space for further developments.

P.S. the ship in Wall-E is named "Axiom."

The New Yorker has a provocative article asking the question "Can We Talk To Whales?" It boils down to utilizing language learning models to process a dataset of sperm whale clicks, their codas, and crossing one's fingers to see if "ClickGPT" can produce actual sperm whale language.

Which makes me wonder if a language learning model been given a library of Chinese sounds and ideograms, without context, then communicated in workable Chinese?

Using a language learning model to learn to speak to whales is an interesting idea, but I'm thinking any LLM assigned the task will wind up chunking out a word salad or something akin to Prisencolinensinainciusol. I'd like to learn more.

I live in a townhouse (built in 2002, if it matters for context)

it has ethernet cables in the walls, that have apparently never been hooked up (yay futureproofing)

they’re cat 5e cables (I checked on the cable sleeve, because I wanted to make sure it would support gigabit ethernet and not just 100mbit)

behind each wall plate, the ethernet cable is just coiled there, not terminated in a connector and not connected to anything (along with coax cable and telephone wires which are hooked up to the wall plate, but which I’m not currently using at all)

the cables run to a wiring box in one of the bedroom closets. here they are also just hanging around, unterminated and unconnected to anything.

I have a rough idea of how to DIY this, but I've never done it before - the extent of my networking knowledge is layer 2 and above. so I'm looking for any protips of the sort that you figure out after doing it several times but that aren't obvious the first time you do it.

right now, my shopping list is:

• a patch panel (I’m eyeing this one) which will terminate the cables in the wiring box
• a punch down tool (maybe like this one) for…umm…punching the wires, it seems like?
• a gigabit switch (I have a spare 8 port one that I’ll use, there's only 6 runs of cable total) to go in the wiring box
• a wall plate (like this) for each of the 6 endpoints

I really only care about 2 of the 6 - the motivation behind this project is that my modem & router are downstairs, my home office is upstairs, and currently I run powerline ethernet between them. powerline ethernet isn't great, but it sucks especially hard when something like a portable AC unit is running on the same circuit, and that's currently making the internet speeds in my home office suffer. but the 6 cable ends in the wiring box are unlabeled, and so it seems easier to just wire them all up rather than play guessing games to figure out which of them are the 2 I care about.

the main thing I'm unsure about is the termination of the cables with the punch-down tool. I've crimped ethernet cables, years ago, and hated it, due to having clumsy hands and large, ungainly fingers. this doesn't seem quite as bad, but I'm still cautious about having to do all this in the fairly cramped closet space, and with limited ability for "do-overs" due to the finite amount of cable installed in the walls. I'm thinking I may buy a cheap ethernet cable and sacrifice it for some test runs of the punch-down tool.

Hello fellow creatives (not me though, I'm asking on behalf of my wife), would you be able to pass on some knowledge and sage advice?

Right now my wife is running an Etsy shop and personal site selling mostly Heat Transfer Vinyl based tees, teddies, bags, etc. She's making all of this using a Cricut Explore 3 as it was very hobbyist, along with a half decent heat press with electromagnetic pressure.

It's time to grow up a bit. We're going to be building a 5m X 5m building for her to work out of rather than a small office space in the house (she has a lot of stock) and with this, maybe it's time to upgrade the equipment.

She's not been fond of sublimation, although we have an A3 Epson for that. She's not keen on polyester. So the question is: does she upgrade from using a small Epson EcoTank and Cricut to something like a Roland BN20 or BN20D or simply go for a larger format cutter since she buys it buy the roll anyway? DTG seems very expensive and DTF is so new that you need to printer daily to stop the heads dying. I think she likes Vinyl and she also likes a little print and cut, but not so much of the latter as the combo she has is pretty shite.

Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? I'm trying to look at a budget of sub £10k for hardware. Happy to second hand if it's recommended.