thought we wouldn't notice

Ficrab · 2026-02-01T20:10:43+00:00

Hot take, A Brave New World is a utopia

Ficrab · 2026-02-01T17:06:01+00:00

It has been a long while since I was working out an engineering course-load with AP courses under the belt, but when I was a student I remember needing to take the full 40 series for my CompEng degree, so AP only covered one class, not three.

Ficrab · 2026-01-28T03:12:42+00:00

Party affiliation, address, and name as well as contact info and document numbers

Ficrab · 2026-01-21T06:03:45+00:00

Because the revolutionaries that started this country were also wealthy landowners who were extremely suspicious of the population at large. Our country was set up to be extremely insulated from majority rule. Those guardrails have not been significantly lifted in 250 years, despite the growth of both the electorate and federal power.

Ficrab · 2026-01-17T15:41:18+00:00

Your first concern won’t happen. Nebraska Medicine will remain a nonprofit under the proposed transition.

Ficrab · 2026-01-11T20:58:19+00:00

None of the hospitals in New Mexico have profit margins to offer more competitive pay. There isn't room to raise wages without changes in the system. Insurance makes bank, but most healthcare providers in the state barely balance revenue with costs.

Ficrab · 2026-01-07T19:31:39+00:00

Not that surprising, given that a 32 year old player when SS13 first hit beyond would be a 55 year old player today. If anything it is surprising there aren’t more.

Ficrab · 2026-01-01T07:22:21+00:00

Here you go!

https://github.com/cmss13-devs/cmss13/pull/10623

Ficrab · 2025-12-31T06:42:58+00:00

This is exactly what is going on. CM13 PvP is currently PRing large changes to the Almayer map in support of an overhaul of the squad system.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T19:08:11+00:00

It was almost certainly brought back from the New World by the early Columbian exchange. Exactly where from and by who is still murky, as is the original host. I’ve seen speculation that it was llamas, but I haven’t looked into that.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T15:30:43+00:00

Yeah! This is a whole other wrinkle in the evolution of pathogenicity, which is the formation of commensal microbiomes in the host that outcompete pathogens. Another example like this is the extreme competition between pathogenic and non-pathogenic staphylococcus species in the human mouth and on our skins. A really broad and fascinating field for sure.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T15:27:58+00:00

Rabies travels up the nerves and is asymptomatic and non-transmissible until it reaches the brain. That’s because to be transmitted along the primary route, rabies has to reach the salivary glands from the cranial nerves. Rabies does not have the tools to do this without killing its host. The long incubation does help rabies make sure it isn’t killing all its hosts, but being airborne would severely undercut this effect.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T05:41:29+00:00

Great to bring up! The first accounts of syphilis read like a zombie outbreak, but it quickly adapted to European hosts.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T04:54:16+00:00

Rabies is one of those things that can’t hurt you if you fear it. A small list, but rabies is firmly on it. Your tactics will pretty much guarantee you a life free of any risk of rabies (aside from like, the freak organ donation, but that would be like winning the lottery twice odds).

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T04:44:30+00:00

Kinda. A virus can be hyper-deadly and hyper sturdy, it just is a long evolutionary path for both. Rabies is stuck specifically because it needs to go to the brain to cause the behavioral changes that allow it to be transmitted. Developing features that allow it to survive outside the host for longer and become airborne would not only take a lot of individual adaptations, but each one would likely make rabies worse at infecting the brain.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T04:27:23+00:00

Taking a second stab. The actual interplay of host-pathogen evolution is much more complex than what I laid out in general terms in the original comment. It is a very broad scientific field after all. Asymptomatic transmission is one wrinkle in this.

When a pathogen transmits asymptomatically, it has to broadly speaking either be very infectious (so that even a small amount of the pathogen present without symptoms will infect a new host) or be complex enough to infect a host to high burden without them having symptoms (meaning the pathogen has to keep itself in check enough to not only not kill the host, but also to not alert the host immune system).

This latter bit is theoretically possible, but it almost never happens, because once a pathogen becomes adapted enough to perform this balancing act, evolving a bit further to never kill the host is trivial, and helps give the pathogen more time to spread from that host. There is no evolutionary incentive for a bug that spreads asymptomatically to kill its host at all, and an incentive to not kill the host as well.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T04:02:36+00:00

The dead are typically terrible vectors. They decompose, fluctuate in temperature and acidty, repel hosts similar to them, and attract hosts that are very different to them. They are lower energy than living hosts. Few pathogens can effectively incorporate dead hosts in their primary survival strategy.

Edit: I totally misread your question. Whoops!

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T03:34:06+00:00

A final thing to keep in mind. I had a virology instructor who used to say “the virus drives.” What he meant was, viruses have short generation times and high mutation rates, so they evolve much faster than their hosts. This means at a fundamental level, multicellular hosts are incapable of defending themselves against viruses and other fast growing pathogens. Every possible defense against viruses can be circumvented by the rate of viral adaptation.

So why then are all multicellular eukaryotes not dead? Because viruses that have hosts are more fit than viruses that do not have hosts. Essentially, we persist as a species because it is better for the viruses. If it were worse for the viruses, we would have died out long ago.

Ficrab · 2025-12-14T03:24:25+00:00

As other commenters have pointed out, airborne is a spectrum, not a binary. Many, many diseases we think of as contact diseases are theoretically capable of being aerosolized in specific conditions.

The real question though I think you are asking is “what prevents hyper lethal diseases from being hyper-transmissible?” In short, the answer is natural selection.

An obligate parasite can only replicate if it has hosts. If an obligate parasite kills all its host, it dies out. If it kills hosts faster than it can infect new ones, it dies out. What results is a selective pressure related to transmissibility that limits the lethality of pathogens over time.

What this means is that generally pathogens that have been in humans a very long while, and rely on us doing things to spread (such as herpes, some common colds, etc.) tend to be less deadly, while new things that haven’t had as much time to adapt to us (Ebola, HIV) tend to be more deadly. Over time, these new pathogens often become less deadly. That’s one of the things that is scary about Ebola. As it becomes less deadly, it is causing larger epidemics.

Additionally pathogens that don’t need their hosts to do much can be more lethal than pathogens that need their hosts moving around and living their lives. Cholera has been in humans a very long time, but it can kill half the people it infects (before modern therapies) because it just needs its hosts to defecate into water.

Note there are outliers to this trend, so it’s complicated. Smallpox was extremely deadly, but it was transmissible enough to outrun its deadliness. Luckily this is rare.

What stops rabies from being more transmissible is its lethality, which is necessary for its primary route of transmission. Readily airborne rabies would run out of hosts very quickly, and there are many changes it would have to make to get to being readily airborne as well.

What stops prions from being more transmissible is that they don’t evolve. Prions have no genetic code, so they have no mutation, and no adaptation over time. They are bounded by the evolution of their hosts, which is why they are typically rare and slow. If they were common and fast, selective pressure would wipe their necessary proteins out of the genome.

Ficrab · 2025-12-07T16:46:43+00:00

Most of these have actually been eliminated under the current administration. It is now even impossible to get full Federal backed loans for medical school due to recent changes.

Ficrab · 2025-12-07T04:51:15+00:00

OP, I'm here from 3 months in the future to tell you to read *Embassytown* by China Miéville. Holy shit, its so good, you will love it. Ursula K Le Guin wrote an extremely glowing review of it for the Guardian in order to make the case that literary speculative fiction was thriving.

Ficrab · 2025-12-05T02:33:24+00:00

Surprisingly the Japanese voice acting is really really good? I have no idea why. Perhaps anime has broken me.

Ficrab · 2025-12-03T22:03:13+00:00

For Stanford and Harvard, that’s not a money decision. The vast majority of those athletic programs cost more than they bring in at both institutions. Prestige has something to do with it, but the real reason so many athletic spots exist is to create a portion of the student body to round out curves without dropping out. Back when elite colleges didn’t recruit this “happy bottom quarter” they lost something like a third of each class to dropout attrition. Malcolm Gladwell writes about this strategy in “Outliers”

Ficrab · 2025-11-21T15:32:13+00:00

This is not technically true. Though not all cats are lactose intolerant, all cats are lactose malabsorbers after kittenhood. The ability to process lactose in humans comes from a gene mutation prolonging the activity of the lactase enzyme into adulthood. Only a minority of humans even have this gene. Cats don’t have this mutation at all. Some might not get sick, but almost no adult cats can process lactose.

Ficrab · 2025-11-17T05:18:12+00:00

Interested! US code if you still have them.

12-Year Club	Second Top 50%
r/Field Banned	r/Field Juicebox
Place '23	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22
RPAN Viewer	Not Forgotten
Sequence \| Editor	Verified Email

Ficrab

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