September 10 2020, 02:36

Today at 2 p.m. Moscow time, I have a webinar “SAP Commerce Developer (aka Hybris). A View from Java, Technologies, and Career Perspectives”.

I arrived in Moscow tonight. I discovered that I didn’t bring an adapter for American plugs. I started making one myself, using electrical tape and an old plug. While I was doing this, Nadia turned on a hairdryer, and it blew the fuses. An inspection showed that the fuses were not to blame. You can’t call an electrician at three in the morning, so I had to wait till morning. In the morning, they shut off the water in the entire district. The electrician nearly fixed everything, there’s still no water, but I just managed to cobble together an adapter out of crap and sticks and it even works.

Register if you’re interested. Registration is still open.

(Shares & likes are also very welcome)

https://events.epam.com/events/sap-commerce-webinar?utm_source=rauf_facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=sap_webinar_ru_10sep20

https://events.epam.com/events/sap-commerce-webinar?utm_source=rauf_facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=sap_webinar_ru_10sep20Разработчик

September 09 2020, 13:29

Just now, news passed that the trials (phase three) of the vaccine from AstraZeneca (in collaboration with Oxford) have been suspended due to a serious side effect in one of the volunteers. I will remind that it is made based on an adenovirus from monkeys, because half of us already have immunity to human adenoviruses. More about the platforms can be found in a good article (attachment).

With vaccines based on adenoviruses (of any kind), there is also a problem that they will become quite ineffective in a few years in relation to those who received them earlier (irrelevant whether it was COVID-19 or not). After the first vaccination, the body develops immunity against the vaccine itself, so if it worked the first time, it is unlikely to work the second time because the body will kill the vaccine before it can start to work. RNA vaccines (like the one Moderna is making) do not have this disadvantage, but they have another problem: their drawbacks are yet to be seen in the first human trials.

https://prof-afv.livejournal.com/34647.html

September 07 2020, 19:58

Started reading Carl Zimmer’s “A Planet of Viruses,” and right in the first chapter, I notice an inconsistency. The author is supposedly renowned, but disappoints: the story of the discovery of viruses does not mention Dimitri Ivanovsky, who is traditionally considered the founding father of virology.

According to Zimmer, after Adolf Mayer’s studies on diseased tobacco in 1876, follow Martin Beijerinck’s work in 1898, followed by a series of second-wave scientists and discoveries.

This is not quite accurate: traditionally, Ivanovsky follows Mayer (1892), who hypothesized that the contagion was either a toxin or a microbacterium, and then six years later, Beijerinck appears, who merely repeated Ivanovsky’s experiment with Chamberland filters, and “properly presented” it to the scientific community.

This is such a well-known fact that I could even omit the proof link, but still – attached are an article from the Journal of Virology and an excerpt from the book “A Planet of Viruses”.

So much for reading Zimmer after this! Everywhere deception 🙂