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Adam Elbourne

@drelbourne.bsky.social
82 followers 62 following 462 posts
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 1h
I'm very pleased to announce that at the end of the week, the level of the breakfast vodka is the same as when we arrived.
Vodka on offer as part of the breakfast buffet in our hotel. The level is the same as it was at the start of the week when we arrived.
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Guardian US @us.theguardian.com · 18h
"Many people prefer to believe the brutes and the sadists are responsible, largely because they are not like 'us,'" writes @omerbartov.bsky.social. "But modern genocide is the product of the technocrats, bureaucrats and cold planners of extermination, who don’t get their hands dirty."
theguardian.com
How do human beings explain taking part in genocide? NAZA provides a chilling look | Omer Bartov
It’s easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable
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Ryan Hisner @ryanhisner.bsky.social · 22h
Large upload from Ontario yesterday, providing some striking revelations about the evolution of PJ.2.1. First, there is yet another strikingly divergent branch of PJ.2.1. This isn't one variant: it's four. More and more, this resembles the emergence of BA.1/2/3. What is happening? 1/
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pmamtraveller.bsky.social @pmamtraveller.bsky.social · 16h
Saul Steinberg, Self Portrait, 1949
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Sathnam Sanghera @sathnam.bsky.social · 18h
Dear tv and radio producers. Thankyou for the invitation. But, no, I do not want to appear on your show to defend the idea that I am English, after 50 years of living and working here, because the increasingly feral right want to turn this into a "debate" and you cannot see how you're being played
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 17h
It's almost 17:00 and we're still eating the breakfast the hotel delivered to the room this morning... and then we've still got the cheese selection to have later...
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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Kemi Badenoch wants to exempt the family home from inheritance tax. But that creates a perverse incentive for elderly people to *upsize* to save IHT. That could double the cost of the policy, and push £100bn+ from savings into housing. A 🧵 on bad tax cuts.
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
New @science.org A breakthrough in understanding why do we get fever and an inflammation response to vaccines. The gut microbiome chronic production of flagellin Paves the way to potentially prevent these acute phase side-effects in the future www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
The human gut microbiome primes fever after vaccination
Fever is a common adverse reaction to vaccination, contributing to vaccine hesitancy and reduced uptake. To understand variation in fever risk, we longitudinally profiled fecal microbiota, oral temper...
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Jim Pickard @pickardje.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I'm sorry if this is obvious but the Tory proposal to exempt family homes completely from IHT will lead to 1] pensioners buying the biggest houses they possibly can 2] pensioners refusing to downsize which can only be bad news for younger families trying to buy family homes
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Ik zie nu dat sinds 1 oktober 2024, de pcr tests zijn gedaan op een steekproef van alle infectieradar deelnemers met klachten, niet alleen de zelftest negatieven. Dus ik denk dat wij dit en de zelftest getal niet moeten optellen.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Maybe I should have read the paper more carefully. 🤔 It does indeed look like only 7% of negatives were false negatives.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
However, I think it reinforces the message in your blog - that even though the average person has had 3.5-4 infections, there doesn't appear to be any slowdown in the declining number of infections. That's more surprising to me than if it was only 2.5 infections on average.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
... sample from the people with negative selftests or who didn't test. Since then it's been a sample from all participants. They never update the positive selftest number with information from the pcr tests.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I'm just eyeballing the figure. However, if you follow the infectieradar data every week, the headline number is positive selftests in the preceding week, but they also announce how many from a random selection of the tests from 2 weeks ago had which viruses. Up to 1 October 2024 this was a ...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Dit is ook een heel nuttig relativering. bsky.app/profile/kgan...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
... Dus, ongeveer 80% van de symptomatische besmetting waren negatief op een zelftest. Maar 20% waren opgepikt door de zelftesten. Interessant als dit zo blijft doorgaan.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Erm... De week daarvoor hadden 5,7% klachten van een luchtweginfectie en 0,1% waren positief voor covid op een zelftest. Van de zelftest negatieven (5,6% van de infectieradar steekproef) waren 7,25% toch besmet met covid. Dat is 0,4% (0,0725×5,6) van de infectieradar steekproef. ...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
As the population ages, healthcare are pension spending will go up because there's more old people. If they want to keep the tax take constant at 1980s levels it means progressively worse healthcare, welfare, education, defence per person or using government debt to smooth it out over generations.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The proportion of false negatives is shown in figure 5 of this paper: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
journals.plos.org
Flexible and scalable participatory syndromic and virological surveillance for respiratory infections: Our experiences in The Netherlands
Background During the COVID-19 pandemic participatory digital surveillance of symptoms (syndromic surveillance) re-established itself as a worthy addition to the surveillance pyramid, as they are scal...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The symptomatic but negative cases are tracked each week because a sample of the people who report a negative selftest send a sample for pcr testing. It adds about 1/3 to self test positives, if I remember correctly. So cumulative infections are infectieradar + false negatives + asymptomatic ≈ 3.5.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
If I remember correctly, the infectieradar in the Netherlands measures how many people 1) have symptoms and then 2) test positive for covid on a selftest. As such, it's a biased measure of cumulative infections because it doesn't include 1) asymptomatic or 2) symptomatic but negative test cases. ...
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Prof. Michael Fuhrer @michaelsfuhrer.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Is Covid-19 endemic yet? Surprisingly, I think the answer is “No”! medium.com/@michael.fuh...
medium.com
Is Covid-19 endemic yet?
Surprisingly, I think the answer is “No”!
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I've seen champagne and wine for breakfast in a hotel before, but our current hotel offering vodka is a first. Buenos días indeed. Come to think of it, you must be going through a tough patch in your life to even contemplate vodka for breakfast, so maybe buenos días is aspirational... 🤔
A bottle ofvodka at the breakfast buffet.
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Prof. Michael Fuhrer @michaelsfuhrer.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I don't why I never plotted this before. In the last year in the US, Covid-19 (red) was detected in clinical & public health labs fewer times than influenza (blue), RSV (green), or *rhinoviruses* (orange). Despite similar test volumes for flu/RSV, and about 1/3 the test volume for rhinoviruses!
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Andrew Rait @andrewrait.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
But I enjoyed the current Govts comms dept response 😂
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Apparently this year marks the 100th birthday of Michelin stars for restaurants. I say apparently because this article inteviews a former Michelin inspector who used to eat in restaurants 250 times per year, which apparently works out at twice per day. 🤔 nos.nl/artikel/2633...
nos.nl
100 jaar Michelinsterren: wat maakt een restaurant Michelinwaardig - en wie bepaalt dat?
Morgen worden de Michelinsterren uitgereikt. Een concept dat inmiddels 100 jaar bestaat.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Fair enough. 😀
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
WD-40 is not a lubricant. It's a water displacer - hence the WD.
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Quite apart from anything else, I am obsessed with the sub-genre of marketing intended to reassure men about using toiletries. Half the moisturisers you see are called MAN CAVE or BRO SMEAR. It's all so hysterically insecure.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The last 15 years of economic research has produced a lot of evidence that the opposite is true. Recessions typically leave permanent scars and lower future incomes in their wake. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
aeaweb.org
Hysteresis and Business Cycles
(March 2023) - Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as "hysteres...
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Aurel Wünsch @aurel.indoorco2map.com · 03/10/2026
So I never used Instagram before, but I guess advocating for clean indoor air in a larger pond than here is enough of a reason to start doing it. I'll of course keep posting here, some posts might identical, some more technical just here, some basics only there. www.instagram.com/p/DeCuRYNjam...
Overview of the images posted on instagram (where ALT-text for each is available).
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Pre-hispanic Canarians had good teeth.
Photo of a skull with almost perfect teeth.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
To put that in perspective, that's about 1% of UK GDP - the total income of everyone in the UK in a year. Perhaps more relevant: it's about 15% of Abu Dhabi GDP. I can't see them paying that sort of money, so that probably leaves expulsion as the only alternative.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
... monitoring. So the probability of getting caught is small. Let's say 10%, although it could be much less. Putting these numbers together means that, in order to discourage other clubs from doing what Man City have been found guilty of, the fine needs to be £3.5bn/0.1 = £35bn.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Let's take the that as a rough estimate of the social cost. To get the optimal fine we need to divide this by the probability of being caught. Man City were only caught because Rui Pinto illegally hacked their computer systems. The premier league wouldn't have caught them with their standard ...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
...it's less interesting if you think some clubs might be cheating. Am I really cheering the champions? Is team X really getting relegated? Who knows? Hence, I don't think it's unrealistic to say the Man City case might knock 10% of the value of tv rights for the next 10 years. That's £3.5bn. ...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
... forward looking person/firm will choose not to commit crimes because the expected costs to them outweigh the benefits. For the Man City case we can put some rough numbers to get an idea of the scale of the punishment. The premier league gets about £3.5bn in tv money per season. As a viewer, ...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
In 1968, Gary Becker published an economic analysis of crime and punishment. The basic insight: the optimum fine needed to make potential criminals choose to behave is the social cost of the crime divided by the probability of being caught. Setting the fine that high means a rational, ...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
If I do a rough economics based calculation of the punishment Man City should get, I end up with a huge number. The idea is that you need a punishment big enough to discourage other clubs doing the same in future, since it undermines the integrity and value of the competition.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I remember after my big bike crash 12 years ago looking up broken bone statistics. I think the one that shocked me most was how many men who break their pelvis are dead within a year... even in men under 80 it's nearly 10%. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Isolated Pubic Ramus Fractures Are Serious Adverse Events for Elderly Persons: An Observational Study on 138 Patients with Fragility Fractures of the Pelvis Type I (FFP Type I)
Background: Fractures of the pubic ramus without involvement of the posterior pelvic ring represent a minority of fragility fractures of the pelvis (FFP). The natural history of patients suffering thi...
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Interesting article about fall prevention training. What it doesn't say is that your balance already starts deteriorating when you are in your 30s and one of the most effective ways to improve your balance is standing on one leg - for example when cleaning your teeth. Easy. nos.nl/artikel/2633...
nos.nl
Niet vallen kun je trainen: 'Valpreventie draait om langer zelfstandig blijven'
Valpreventietrainingen hebben niet zo'n goed imago, maar zijn juist gericht op langer onafhankelijk blijven.
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Otto English @ottoenglish.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Wow
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Nice article. Not so nice reading if you live in the Netherlands...
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Prof. Michael Fuhrer @michaelsfuhrer.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Your periodic reminder that the airborne-AIDS and turbo-cancer apocalypses failed to eventuate. The actuaries find no excess mortality: "In the UK and the U.S., mortality rates look to be returning to pre-COVID-19 pandemic expectations." www.rgare.com/knowledge-ce...
rgare.com
Predicting Post-Pandemic Mortality: Are we any closer to an answer?
Recent mortality experience increasingly supports a return to pre-pandemic expectations, though assumption risk remains material.
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Ryan Hisner @ryanhisner.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
"Fur farming...allows for rapid spread of viruses with pandemic potential—& for virus adaptation to animals that would be unlikely to occur in nature.... Mink, more so than any other farmed species, pose a risk for the emergence of future disease outbreaks & the evolution of future pandemics." 3/4
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Ryan Hisner @ryanhisner.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Mink farming is a massive pandemic risk. It's insane that they are allowed to exist. Now we have an active H5N1 outbreak on a mink farm, & "state officials have no clear plan to rein it in." Imagine if uncontrolled H5N1 transmission in mink were allowed in a research lab...
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Prof. Michael Fuhrer @michaelsfuhrer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This is 100% correct and it is a lesson that we should have learned from the last pandemic but didn't.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Yeah, this year has been by far the lowest and I'd put it at roughly 25% infected at least once.
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
... much lower in GBR than NLD. I'd be really interested to know what data this is based on. And I don't imagine other countries counted either, so where does their data come from?
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Adam Elbourne @drelbourne.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Quick look: Figure 3.1 already throws up some puzzles. In NLD we basically never measured how many people had long-covid, we just took the UK long-covid survey and divided by 4 to compensate for the smaller population. But figure 3.1 has the % of the population with long-covid...
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