Lead Gas Lowered Americans’ IQ

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I wish NBC News had linked to the study-and that I had time to read it even if had. It sounds interesting, and at the same time, incredible that they are able to make such an estimate.

Story

The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on people born before 1996 — the year the U.S. banned gas containing lead.

Exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the population of the United States, a new study estimates.

Overall, the researchers from Florida State University and Duke University found, childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million points, or 2.6 points per person on average. 

Polsko, dlaczego tu jesteś?

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I really don’t understand all my Polish visitors. The top referring source looks like a hacked site.

If you have any insights for me drop a comment or find me on social media to let me know.

It’s also possible I get a different website from a North American IP than I would from a European IP, but I don’t readily have a way to test.

Poland Visitors, This Is Not The Site You Are Looking For

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Since 16 Feb 2024 the vast majority of visitors are from Poland, and they are all referrals.

If you don’t know how you got here, you probably don’t actually want to be here.

This image contains two data visualizations related to website visitors from Poland. On the left, there is a line graph showing a sharp increase in the number of visitors over time, starting from February 8th and peaking around February 18th. On the right, there is a donut chart displaying the percentage of visitors by country, with Poland accounting for 72.8% of the traffic, which is the largest share. The chart indicates that there are 289 users from Poland, marking a 100% increase. Other countries represented in smaller percentages are the United States, France, China, and a category labeled as Others. The colors corresponding to each country are indicated at the bottom: Poland is yellow, United States is blue, France is purple, China is green, and Others is gray. The chart segments are also labeled with their respective percentages.

The referring site is news.grets.store, which redirects to another site, td.redl-sot.net

And that site has an invalid TLS cert, and is blocked by my firewall as a phishing site.

Bar chart showing 'Top First user source by Users' for the week of February 13-19, 2024. The highest referrer is 'news.grets.store' with 305 users, highlighted in blue on the chart.
Browser security warning indicating the connection to the site 'td.redl-sot.net' is not secure, advising not to enter sensitive information as it could be stolen by attackers. Options for certificate choices, site permissions, automatic downloads, cookies, and tracking prevention are shown. Tracking prevention is set to 'Balanced' with zero trackers blocked.

All of which is pretty odd, unless my site is serving up malware, which would be unexpected. Not because WordPress is great at security, but I use FlyWheel and CloudFlare, both of which I’d expect to catch any malware on the site.

Google also isn’t flagging this site as malicious, which it is typically quick to do.

Alabama: IVF Embryos are Children

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Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, with the right to life. This case came to the court after some embryros were accidentally broken/;

The Alabama case focused on whether a patient who mistakenly dropped and destroyed other couples’ frozen embryos could be held liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit. The court ruled the patient could, writing that it had long held that “unborn children are ‘children’” and that that was also true for frozen embryos, affording the fertilized eggs the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

This post isn’t an essay, but here are some initial thoughts:

  1. This is consistent with the belief that life begins at conception. You don’t have to like the decision, or even many in the pro-life movement, but it is a consistent belief.
  2. It isn’t new. While I’m sure this is a new viewpoint to many, there are already embryro donation centers, where couples can donate embryos created with IVF but not “use.” Other couples can “adopt” these embryros. My wife and I financially support The National Embryo Donation Center, a non-profit in Knoxville that handles embryro donations and adoption.

Cynically, I view anything in the pro/anti-abortion arena as part of the cultural wars, issues meant to further someone’s power, not about the issue itself. This isn’t to say that there are no true believers on the pro-life side, but most of the news seems to be about life/abortion as a wedge issue.

But the poltiical implications here are not clear to me: leftover embryros from IVF is a super niche issues, even in the pro-life crowd. Personally, I identify as pro-life but not with the pro-life movement (more on that someday). It doesn’t seem like a political win for any side, and probably only a minor loss for the pro-abortion side. The case advances legal and intellectual arguments, but assigning the status of children to (frozen) embryos doesn’t directly affect abortion, or the right to choose.

There is a lot more that could be discussed about the case (is accidental death an appropriate charge? Is it OK for the chief justice to use theology in his opinion? Will it affect IVF more broadly?) but that is all beyond the scope of today’s post.

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